Late on the afternoon in April, Lisa Park stood in the middle of a cavernous room at Mana Contemporary[1], a factory-turned-gallery in Jersey City, New Jersey, holding hands with her intern. Beneath their feet, three pothole-sized metal plates were nestled into a patch of fake grass with wires running from them to a series of sensors that measure electricity. In front of the women, a 19 by 12-foot, semi-translucent screen stretched across the room shielding the tangle of wires, computers, and lights that hid behind it.
Park, a multimedia artist known for turning brainwaves and heartbeats into performance art, gripped the woman’s hand, and in tandem, they glanced up at the screen where a 3-D rendering of a leafless cherry blossom tree glowed in the dark. “It’s supposed to bloom,” Park said with a hint of frustration. The two women held each other tighter and waited. Nothing happened.
Lisa Park, one of the artists in residence at Nokia Bell Labs.
Beth Holzer for Wired
“You have to take off your shoes,” a voice called from the back of the room.
“Oh, right,” Park said with a laugh.
Bell Labs has teamed up with a group of resident artists to explore the emotional and social elements of machine-human interactions.
Park and her intern let go of each other and removed their boots. Barefooted, they stepped back onto the plates and wrapped each other in a stilted embrace. Within seconds, the computers in the back of the room registered the slight uptick in electrical conductivity between the two women, and light pink flowers began to fill the barren tree branches before falling off and tumbling through the digital air to the ground.
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