6-11pm in MEANING MACHINE
“Big Fly Big Fish” is a collection of art assemblages by artist and angler Kevin Byrd, based in San Francisco. The body of work explores traditional fly tying techniques at an exaggerated scale by using large fish hooks and household items — zip ties,USB cords, ethernet cables, speaker wires, plastic broom bristles — repurposed and reimagined into artistic lures.
“I was raised to always seek guidance and comfort from our shamans, curanderos, and our Saints. As a culture, we are encouraged from making any references towards our spiritual practice to protect us. As a queer, this became extremely difficult for me to accept given that it is the main inspiration for my life and practice as a creator. I feel an enormous responsibility to utilize my talent, voice, and experience through my artwork as I strive to express positivity while refusing to keep any part of my identity closeted. Shamans are the mediators between the spiritual and the physical realms or portals. They are the chosen few that are selected to be a direct link to guide us and I believe that artists also create between worlds. We tap into creative energy that we viscerally feel and then imbue our work with that energy. Artists imagine or see what we are meant to create and are gifted enough to materialize that idea. Making us both, Artist and Shaman. I became fixated in creating realms where the shaman taps into spiritual energy to help us heal internally from our conflict. I obsessed over our body’s healing and transitioning as our curanderos heal us. What does this look like internally as our body heals and evolves from this energy? I aim to make these installations an accessible representation of this world where the shaman resides as they heal us.”
medusai is an AI driven robotic sculpture that responds to and interacts with humans through sound, light, touch, and movement. Inspired by the Greek myth of Medusa, the sculpture features seven robotic arms in the form of snake hair installed on room-scale facial structure. Movement and tactile interaction with and around medusai are sensed and analyzed, leading the sculpture to follow visitors, pluck strings, and respond with electronic sound and light sequences.
The project is inspired by the Ancient Greek myth of Medusa, who was born as a mortal maiden known for her beauty and good nature. After being raped and abused, Medusa was cursed to become a snake haired monster who turns those who looks at her to stone. The project builds on this myth as a metaphor for the transformational effect of AI on culture and society. It reflects on the original good intentions and promises of AI as well as on its risks and mortal threats. The eerie and uncanny notion of AI-driven robotic snakes following and threatening humans is countered by the sculpture’s potential to inspire visitors to push the boundaries of their creativity and expression by interacting with medusai’s AI driven creative behaviors.
As it relates to AI ethics, the project takes a Deceleration Position, encouraging visitors to approach the sculpture with caution. Inspired by the mythical Perseus, who avoided Medusa’s petrifying eyes by slowly advancing towards her from behind with a mirror, visitors who avoid sudden and accelerated motions could enjoy the sculpture’s musical and artistic responses. Fast and abrupt movements in front of medusai’s eyes will trigger the sculpture’s petrifying behaviors including alarming sounds and threatening robotic motions.
medusai is a creation by Dr. Gil Weinberg, Professor and founding Director of Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology who will also speak at the 9:15PM discussion How can we promote AI and a digital world in service of shared creativity and human diversity?.
This experience will begin by a tour of Gyun Hur’s exhibition at 6PM by the Executive Director of Flux projects Anne Archer Dennington and artist and activist Nicole Kang Ahn.
Flux Projects presents Our mothers, our water, our peace. Created by Korean American artist Gyun Hur, this art installation reflects upon the Atlanta Asian community’s resilience and love. Created in response to the escalation of Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, followed by the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, Hur’s project explores grief by inviting communities to reflect on their immigrant experience and offering a way for them to heal.
A music score by Hahn Rowe accompanies the installation.
Last year, Hur began installing glass vessels within public and private spaces amongst Asian American communities. Holding local river or creek water, a total of 100 dispersed glass sculptures have served to seed conversations around intergenerational work and healing. Hur will recollect these vessels to create a communal site of reflection, gathering, and connection at Goat Farm. In the spirit of remembrance, lamentation, and celebration, “Our mothers, our water, our peace” will remain on view for two weeks and offer performances, workshops, and artist talks – all free to the public.
Our mothers, our waters, our peace, Gyun Hur’s immersive installation of more than 125 handblown, tear-shaped glass vessels, opens at the Goat Farm on Saturday, March 15 and showing until Sunday, March 30.
6-11pm in PEGASUS
PULSE is an interactive meditative video that responds in real-time to visitors’ heartbeats and oxygen levels. Created as part of Orchid Dreams exhibition during the Gilbert Price Library art residency at Georgia Institute of Technology, the work transforms biometric data into fluid digital brushstrokes, ebbing and flowing like living paint in response to the body’s rhythms. The background video is tuned to the frequencies of deep breathing, the psychology of color, and soundscapes designed to induce relaxation, alongside visuals that evoke a sense of wonder and the production of serotonin. By harmonizing technology with the rhythms of the body, PULSE offers an immersive space for presence and renewal. The exhibition posed essential questions: What if technology could soothe rather than overwhelm? What if the digital and organic could merge into spaces of renewal rather than detachment? At the intersection of biotechnology, psychology, body and digital art, Orchid Dreams explores the evolving relationship between human well-being, materiality, and the technological sublime, advocating for a future where healthcare is a fundamental human right.
PULSE is a creation of Bojana Ginn, interdisciplinary artist, former Medical Doctor and scientist, curator, writer, and public speaker.
6-11pm in BEAUTIFUL STRANGER
In Sensory Site by artist Marie Munk, delicate hair strands are given a monumental presence. Ten identical silver strands, each rising 9 feet from the ground, form a precise grid. Their metallic sheen suggests both the organic and the artificial – like traces of aging, yet eerily synthetic, as if belonging to a body beyond the human. Set against a desaturated gravel landscape, they seem to exist in an in-between space: neither fully biological nor fully machine, neither past nor future, but something liminal. The installation explores the body’s largest sensory organ – the skin – as our primary interface with the world. Through touch, we experience the physicality of existence. Yet in an increasingly digital era, our engagement with the world is mediated through screens, reducing physical contact to mere fingertips. What happens when the body’s largest organ is left unstimulated? What becomes of our sensory experience in a post-biological future? Walking through the installation, the viewer is momentarily made small, like an insect traversing the skin of a larger organism. This shift in scale reminds us of our fragility within vast systems – both biological and technological. Sensory Site is a meditation on the evolving relationship between the human body and its environment. It is both a call to reconnect with our sensory capacities and a glimpse into a world where sensing, and perhaps even being, takes on new, unfamiliar forms.
At 6pm and 10pm in GOODSON
Sound Clouds is inspired by the Sound Happening exhibit, which is an experimental testbed for exploring simple, playful interactions with beach balls and music generation. Three colorful beach balls are placed in an empty floor space. A computer connected to webcams on the ceiling detects the positions of the balls and generates musical sounds depending on their positions & movement in space. The proposed work, called Sound Clouds, is to scale the ideas behind Sound Happening up to transform a spectacularly large indoor space into a kinetic, participatory musical instrument. A series of webcams will be used to detect enormous colorful weather balloons that are filled with a helium / compressed air mix so they are hovering near the ground in the barn space. Fans will be blowing from the corners of the barn to encourage slow, gentle movements from the balloons, generating a slowly evolving, ambient soundscape from surrounding speakers. Visitors will be allowed to freely walk around the space and interact with the balloons, which will consequently change the generated sound by pitch, texture, or rhythm–depending on the position and movement of the balloon in space.
Sound Clouds is a creation of Dr. Brian Magerko, Regents Professor of Digital Media, Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media & Head of the Expressive Machinery Lab at Georgia Tech. During Night of Ideas, it will be shown at 6PM and 10PM at Goat Farm in GOODSON.