The IEA welcomed Chris Kaczmarek of New York, NY for an artist residency over the week of April 18th. Receiving his MFA in Sculpture and New Media from SUNY Purchase, where he now teaches, Chris approaches his work as an opportunity to “provide seeds of thought and discourse.” His recent work draws from his knowledge of how materials communicate and explores the interactions of people with their physical and cerebral environments. Through a combination of video, sound, and interactive elements that both derive their source material from and react to visitors experiencing the work, Chris seeks to create conditions where others question the internal and external structure of their worlds.

During his residency, Chris worked on a project, Re://Route, that would ultimately culminate in a small opening for the piece. Chris assembles two Max patches for the installation. One would select videos at random from a bank supplied by visitors who were asked to record a video of their journey to the piece by whatever means they had available on hand. These were processed in Max live and projected onto three of the walls in the room. Simultaneously a separate patch was set to randomly sample audio from the space to generate a bank of ever-refreshing short recordings that were then processed and broadcast, also randomly, back into the space from one of five speakers. Visitors to the work provided the content by coming to and merely being in the space as Chris’s software took everything in and sent it back out in a distorted, yet still recognizable form.

Below are some images of taken during Chris’s residency: