It has been a while, huh?

Lots of changes for me. Wrapped up four-and-one-half years of teaching in the Visual Effects department at Savannah College of Art and Design last May and then packed my bags for Singapore, where I am working as an in-house technical trainer for Lucasfilm. I am planning to be here for at least another year…

On the artwork front, momentum has built up on a very long-term project, Strange Attractions. Things are progressing nicely, but more on that soon…

Kenneth A. Huff; Strange Attractions series; 2012; final medium to be determined.

I have been doing some traveling…

Hong Kong…

India…

Thailand…

So far…

Ellipsis-ly yours…

…Ken

P.S. I snuck in some posts, earlier in the month (before the online version of this blog actually was functional and visible), regarding brain kibble and the use of quotations in this here blog, here. Sneaky, huh?

The first, based on 2009.2, was installed in four windows of the offices of the Arts and Humanities Commission, on the second floor, east side of the Smoky Hill Museum, 211 West Iron Avenue.

The four synchronized, proportionally-spaced panels were extracted from a larger image, especially for the site.

The second piece, based on 2007.5, was installed at 107-1/2 Santa Fe Avenue.

In the wee hours of the morning, on my last day there, I temporarily installed a test of a new work that I started developing while in Salina.

My thanks go out to the staff of the Arts and Humanities Commission for their kind helpfulness and hospitality. Special thanks to Karla Prickett and Josh Morris. Funding for “Street Sites” was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The projections will continue to be shown for the next few weeks, starting at around 8 p.m.

A wonderful way to end my spring break…a Sunday afternoon performance of a movement from Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25.

Held in the Palm Beach home of one of my collectors (that is 2007.3 showing behind the musicians), the concert was hosted and accompanied by Christopher O’Riley, of public broadcasting’s From the Top. The young musician are Alexandra Switala (violin), John-Henry Crawford (cello) and Robert Switala (viola).

So, I have decided that 2007.3 goes very well with strings…

(That’s Mr. Sean watching from the front row.)

An exhibition of my prints, Kenneth A. Huff: Organic Constructions, is on display at the Telfair Museum of Art’s Jepson Center through 22 February 2010, in Savannah, Georgia. Nine prints from 2000–2005 are being exhibited. Shown above is 2001.1, part of an ongoing series of works based on mathematical knot theory.

A time-based work, 2007.3, shown during the Ars Electronica 2009. The performance-specific, time-based, projection work was created by Kenneth A. Huff at the invitation of the curatorial panel of the festival’s Vom Streben nach ungehörter Musik Große Konzertnacht (Pursuit of the Unheard, The Big Concert Evening). Dennis Russell Davies conducted the Bruckner Orchester Linz in a performance of Alan Havhaness’ Lousadzak (Coming of Light) for piano and strings, Op. 48. Maki Namekawa was the piano soloist. The evening performance took place in the Brucknerhaus, along the Daube River in Linz, Austria on 6 September 2009.

More information on Ken’s participation in the festival can be found in a previous post.

Symphony performance

For this year’s festival, I was invited to create time-based work to accompany a symphonic performance of the piano concerto, Lousadzak (Coming of Light), op. 48 by Alan Hovhaness. Dennis Russell Davis will be conducting the Bruckner Orchester Linz with Maki Namekawa on piano. The performance will take place at the Brucknerhaus on Sunday, 6 September.

Exhibition

2000.16b at Ars Electronica Center. Originally uploaded to flickr by magrolino.

Since 2 January 2009, twenty of my still images and two site-specific, time-based works are being shown in the new Ars Electronica Center Deep Space projection gallery. The showing is currently slated to last at least through 2009. The two time-based works were recreated to take full advantage of the 4K cinematic projectors of Deep Space. My work is one of the inaugural artist installations in the space.

This showing of the still images is the first time, outside of my studio, that people are able to interactively explore the full detail of these works, all of which are digital renderings, up to 20,000 by 12,000 pixels. The works are projected to wrap around a 16 by 9 meter wall and similarly-sized area of the floor. Viewers are able to zoom into the full detail of the pieces. The works range from 1999 to 2007 and are a broad overview of many of the themes I explore, from mathematical knots to Truchet tilings to the concentric line patterns of fingerprints.

Symposium presentation

In connection with the Deep Space exhibition and as part of the festival’s Pixelspaces symposium, I will be giving a presentation about my work on 4 September. I will be talking about the inspiration and ideas behind the pieces, with particular emphasis on scale and detail.

The Ars Electronica Festival runs 3 through 8 September at the Ars Electronica Center and throughout Linz, Austria.

The Deep Space exhibition will run at least through the end of 2009.

Links

Ars Electronica Center

Ars Electronica Festival

Symphony performance

Deep Space exhibition

Pixelspaces symposium presentation

There are some additional photographs of the exhibition in this earlier blog post. I hope to have some photographs and images upon my return from the festival in early September.

I am off to New Orleans for SIGGRAPH 2009. I will be presenting my Encoding with prime factors series during a panel discussion, The State of Aesthetic Computing or Info-Aesthetics, on Monday, 3 August at 3:45 p.m.

This will be my twelfth year contributing to the conference.

I especially am looking forward to the Computer Animation Festival’s Stereoscopic program and, before the conference starts, the 7th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering.

Here is one of my photographs from Singapore that was shown during the stereoscopic imaging presentation. We found this wonderful display of waylang golek puppets in a Singapore store, Mata-Hari. I took the photograph as a stereoscopic pair and it is presented here first as one of the original photographs and second as an anaglyph.

I had the opportunity to visit and present my work to a number of schools during my time in Singapore, including Egg Story Digital Arts School, the Temasek Design School at Temasek Polytechnic, the School of Interactive and Digital Media at Nanyang Polytechnic, the School of Digital Media and Infocomm Technology and the School of Design at Singapore Polytechnic, Intense Animation Academy and SAE Institute Singapore.

Lucasfilm Animation also sponsored a public lecture at the studio.

deep space II (aec). Originally uploaded to flickr by magrolino.

There is another photo here of 2005.1.

Here is 2003.1a and a detail from that print work:

2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

Detail from 2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

And here are some still frames from the animated work, 2007.2a (you can see short excerpts from the piece here and here):

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

The lecture will be at 12:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 January 2009 in the Jepson Center Auditorium. I will be presenting my body of work, focusing on the inspiration and ideas behind the work, with particular emphasis on the two series of works represented by the two pieces above.

While the festival ends on 31 January, the museum currently is scheduled to continue showing my print and animation throughout 2009.

[Personal aside: I am particularly excited to see tonight’s performance by Ben Neill and LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Robots).]