Drift

This is Brian Knep's work showed in our floor. It is named "Drift".

If you can understand what it means, please tell me.



Drift, by Brian Knep

Organic shapes grow, shrink, split and join across five projected panels, drifting slowly from right to left and traveling from one panel to the next. When a shape drifts off the left-edge of the leftmost panel, it reenters into the rightmost panel. The system is a closed loop, and the shapes nevel repeat.

Each panel imposes a different set of rules governing movement and growthm and as a shape corsses a panel boundary, its look and behavior change. Although the panels look very different, the growth on each is based on the same set of chemical models, with single changes to the paramenters of these models causing large changes in behavior.

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Brian Knep's art is situated at the intersection of artistic imagination, technological savvy and scientific inquiry. For example, in his recent interactive piece Healing, a video projection responds to the shadow of a person in its field and translates this information into an evolving organic pattern on the projection surface. The changing image is the result of a computer program that uses an algorithm based on the FitzHugh-Nagumo chemical reaction-diffusion equations (originally developed to describe the propagation of an action potential along the axon of a nerve cell).

Healing vividly demonstrates many of the concepts that are central to systems biology. The equations may be simple; however, the behavior of the evolving pattern in this artwork is complex and unpredictable, like life. The patterns grow, respond to visitors, and retain a memory of past interactions. The piece changes in response to its environment, but overall retains the same look-just as a living organism may change depending on its environment, but still be recognizable as a particular species.

At the same time that it illumines scientific concepts, Knep's visual representation of the complex interactions between viewer and environment-or viewer and stranger-offers a powerful aesthetic experience and personal journey. Knep poses the question: "Can our interactions with these [high-tech] objects satisfy us as deeply as our interactions with each other and our environment?" Through his artworks, he seeks the "soul" in technology. And through the invisible workings of computer-aided directives, he evokes the organic relationships of the natural world that have inspired artists for millennia-albeit seldom examined so precisely and at the level of basic life structures.

The essential elements of our spiritual and physical experience of life-growth, change, contact, and response-are at the core of Knep's art. In an arts world that is increasingly entwined with technology as both medium and subject, his exploration of the profound depths in our rapport with high tech is fresh and provocative. Moreover, the inherently interactive nature of his work extends public art's objective of engaging the viewer in a new experience of his/her environment.