After Pittsburgh, I spent a night in Milwaukee with UWM professor and ISEA2012 featured artist Nathaniel Stern and his lovely family. Nathaniel’s project Tweets in Space will premiere at the ISEA2012 gala at the Albuquerque Balloon Museum. As you can see on the link, this project has gotten some great press lately, even featured in National Geographic.

Nathaniel’s colleague at UWM is another ISEA2012 featured artist, Colleen Ludwig, and I got a sneak preview of her piece, Elemental Bodies: Shiver (shown above) as installed at the UWM studio building. I didn’t realize the rigorous research that went into this amazing work including:

Sensor array on the ceiling tracking visitor movements

Custom fabric walls that are extremely light weight, made for marine use so extremely sturdy in water-based situations, and given a surface treatment used in hospitals to resist bacteria and fungus. I was fascinated to learn that the elegant curving patterns created by the water against the walls was a major part of the aesthetic development. Colleen wanted the water to evoke the way water streams against human skin, and experimented with a variety of different surface treatments to create that effect. Despite the high-tech material used for the walls, they appear to be normal gallery white walls. I have great admiration for the way in which Colleen’s work is a simple and elegant expression while also being an impressive feat of engineering.

Colleen demonstrates how visitors might touch the water streams

Incredibly, instead of a bulky berm, Colleen simply collects the water in a split PVC pipe and pumps it back up to the ceiling using a mining pump.