FRAME SWITCH is an interactive documentary VR experience that transforms users into citizen journalists as they observe and document real-world moments of conflict. Users begin by choosing one of two 360 scenes: live combat with Iraqi soldiers fighting ISIS (produced by the New York Times) or a one-on-one encounter with a female rebel soldier in Congo (produced by independent journalist Julia Leeb.) In each scene the user-as-journalist captures video footage that they experience as most significant in that moment with a virtual smartphone. Ultimately it is a personal experience that illustrates the high stakes of wielding a camera during critical events as they happen.
FRAME SWITCH Production Team: Eric Espig (Creative Lead), Chaz Evans (Director), Derrick Fields (Lead Artist), Jonathan Kinkley (Producer), Julia Leeb (Documentarian), and Brice Puls (Developer)
FRAME SWITCH is a collaboration between VGA Gallery (Chicago) and the Media Majlis (Doha) and is supported by a MacArthur Foundation International Connections Grant.
For more information, media, and updates on this project check the VGA Gallery website or the VGA itch.io page.
2019-
Escape From the Bonaventure: 4th Floor Mezzanine, Restroom
A single-button video game made in Unity. This is the second in a series of video game vignettes that create transcendent experiences out of the most pedestrian parts of the Westin Bonaventure hotel: a notable example of postmodern space as described by Fredric Jameson. In this episode, the viewer is hailed by the handdryer of the the 4th floor mezzanine restroom.
This game is available by email request.
2016-
Escape From the Bonaventure: 30th Floor
A single-button video game made in Unity. This is the first in a series of video game vignettes that create transcendent experiences out of the most pedestrian parts of the Westin Bonaventure hotel: a notable example of postmodern space as described by Fredric Jameson. In this episode, the viewer waits for the 30th floor elevator.
This game is available by email request.
2015-
Unending Credits (Lifestyle)
This is a one minute video capture of custom software (written in Processing) generating a video in real-time by selecting television clips, job titles, and names from a database. The result is a cable television lifestyle program that is always ending but never ends as long as the software is running.
Collaboration with Maureen Ryan
2015
CA-PAN (Convergence Art Public Affairs Network) In the model of C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network that documents and broadcasts the goings on of governmental spaces for public edification, CA-PAN documents and broadcasts the goings on of museums, galleries, and other spaces of art exhibition and display. With the same mandate as any public affairs network, events documented are not paired with commercial interruption, musical underscores, or superfluous editing in order to deliver undifferentiated information to the art public. Events covered by CA-PAN are as formal as panel discussions, banal as a single camera recording a single static artwork in a gallery for hours, or as informal as a raucous dance party.
This video is an excerpt from a longer web browser broadcast in a series of long web browser broadcasts.
Luxury Permission
Announcing the 2011 fall line of luxury applications produced by Schlesinger's Best. Courtesy of generous support from the Greyfriar's Ladies Auxilliary Board. Follow the link below and you yourself can be the proud owner of mobile software featuring luxury permissions made exclusively for products made by Schlesinger's Best.
The fall line features:
Gold
Marat Vs. Ken: deadfight
The App of Deep Contemplation
Mr. Slim Goodbody Without Organs
Nanoborg
All apps by Schlesinger's Best are available on the Android Market.
Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt
Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt is an interactive software, video and performance installation which offers a viewer a selection of 35 dances performed to the tune of John Baldessari's 35 song versions of Sol Lewitt's 35 Sentences on Conceptual Art, originally heard in Baldessari's 1972 video Baldessari Sings Lewitt.
In his video Baldessari endeavored to relate the tradition of concept art into the emerging practices of video art. Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt endeavors to converge the critiques and traditions both praised and satirized by Baldessari, into the now emerging practice of software art.
The piece is controllable by gallery patrons via a wireless mouse and a scrolling menu built into the image. The video featured here is only a non-interactive demo of a few dances from the full selection of 35. A fully interactive online version is in the works
Featured in viz. blog.
The Naked Internet
The Naked Internet is an interactice psychogeographical map of personal web experience. Based on Guy Debord's "Theory of the Derive" and psychogeographical maps of Paris, the piece is meant to transpose Situationist technique of urban critique to the realm of internet space and experience. Using data derived from subjective behavioral and emotional responses to web experience, the map is meant to suggest a feeling of locality to web space, and a critical attitude toward it. The nodes seen on the map all behave according to a particlar psychogeographical tag taken from an open psychogeographical markup langauage standard initiated by artist group Social Fiction. The visualization is built in processing and makes use of the Traer Physics Library.
Melon Death
Melon Death is an interactive absurdist data visualization which aims to intentionally force a fallacious causality between two sets of data which have no logical connection. Also built in processing.