This was Adafruit’s second year visiting Art Basel Miami, an explosion of art that happens every year all over Miami. Art Basel started in Basel, Switzerland in 1970 and has grown every year since, expanding to Miami in 2000 and Hong Kong in 2010. This year I visited Art Basel proper and several satellite shows, including Fair., Untitled ART, Basel House Mural Festival and humanKind at Wynwood Walls.
Fair contained Jillian Meyar‘s Measurements (From Impressions).
Her work explores how technology affects our identities, lives, and experiences. Measurements is a perfect example of low tech facial recognition software. Jilian measures and documents her face every year to see how it changes.
In the same vein but a little more high-tech is Data Masks at the False Flag Gallery. The artist Sterling Chrispin explains Data Masks as “face masks which were created by reverse engineering facial recognition and detection algorithms. These algorithms were used to guide an evolving system toward the production of human-like faces. These evolved faces were then 3D printed as masks, shadows of human beings as seen by the minds-eye of the machine-organism. This exposes the way the machine, and the surveillance state, view human identity and this makes aspects of these invisible power structures visible.”
That’s me in the amazing Hawaiian shirt in the background. Sterling Chrispin showed facial recognition software a static TV screen. The software desperate to find a face in the chaos slowly found this image. Sterling Chrispin 3d printed the image and attached it to a mirror. Check out this interview with Sterling. He explains it all.
Sterling Chrispin also made this piece N.A.N.O., B.I.O., I.N.F.O., C.O.G.N.O. He used several Adafruit products to build these. (Cat 6 Ethernet Cables, Laser Cut Acrylic, Raspberry Pi MicroComputer and Keyboard) We talked for a while and he’s a big Adafruit fan.
Raspberry Pis update the value of the stock 100 Shares of Publicly Traded Companies specific to each piece and are contained in each piece.
For example B.I.O. contains 100 shares of Hemispherx Biopharma, Inc. a biopharmaceutical company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You gain ownership of these shares when you purchase one of the pieces.
The final twist on this already complex artwork is a comment on what’s of real value and what humans really need to survive. N.A.N.O. , B.I.O. , I.N.F.O. , C.O.G.N.O all include Emergency Food Rations, Lifesaver Jerry Can with 2 Year Nanoscale Water Filter in case the stock market crashes.
Troposphere from Daniel Canogar at bitforms gallery. The Troposphere is the part of the atmosphere we live in, from earth’s surface to about 4 miles up. Daniel Canogar’s piece Troposphere is made of flexible LED tiles. The LEDs change color based on real-time air quality data in the city where it’s installed. Have a look at Miami Beach’s air quality on December 9th, 2017 2:21 pm.
We ended the night in Wynwood with a little graffiti made with light.
That’s all folks. See you next Basel.
