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Nov. 17 – tue– fri, closed thanksgiving week Inner Lives is about intimacy. It is an
exploration of the relationship
between the body and its visual and verbal representations. In a tripartite
collection of artistic studies called Fleshmap (www.fleshmap.com),
artists Martin
Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas
consider the shape of human desire expressed though touching, looking and
listening. Touch investigates the collective perception of erogenous zones. Hundreds of people were asked to rate how good it would feel to touch or be touched by a lover on different points of the body. Working with Brendan O'Connor at Dolores Labs to gather data via Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk site, tens of thousands of individual ratings were gathered and transformed into images that reveal a map of sensual desire with multiple focal points and islands of excitement. Look explores individuality and the hidden surprises that each body reveals when bared. Through a process of abstraction, the piece reveals the multiplicity of formal possibilities contained in a single body part. Contours from different individuals are presented in collections that expose both familiar and oft-overlooked patterns, confronting prototypical notions of ourselves. Listen investigates the relationship between language and the body. This study asks questions such as: Which parts of the anatomy appear most frequently in song lyrics? What would a poem look like, reduced only to its references to the flesh? To find the answers, verbal manifestations of human physicality in music, poetry, and religion are distilled into their basic elements. Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. He is the
founding manager Wattenberg holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley. He may be reached at www.bewitched.com. Fernanda B. Viégas is a research scientist and computational
designer at Viégas holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the Media Lab at MIT. She may be reached at fernandaviegas.com. |
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