Matthew Weinstein

By Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano

For Matthew Weinstein’s The Living End (2017) [2], for example, the artist wanted an animation that would respond to the audience without viewers necessarily being aware they were influencing it. The work needed to feel ambient, reactive, almost alive, but not like a video game waiting for input. To this end, Weinstein’s collaborators Brandon Plaster and Alap Parikh experimented with different systems before eventually settling on the game engine Unreal and a set of Kinect sensors to collect data from the room, such as the number of viewers present, the location of a randomly selected viewer, a viewer’s breathing rate, etc. The sensors needed to be positioned very close to one another, as they were calibrated relative to each other.

They also needed to remain attached to the Kinect camera. It was a finicky technical problem with no off-the-shelf solution. Plaster ended up fabricating a 3D-printed contraption to hold everything in place, a small but essential piece of custom hardware born out of necessity. The anecdote is minor, but it illustrates the texture of these collaborations: a solution emerging through conversations and improvisation rather than specification. For the Cornell fellows, moreover, this was also a window into different ways of producing creative outcomes.