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January 05, 2005

Fools Paradise

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An Island Floating in a Sea of Stars

Fools Paradise is a VR installation and performance created by artist Paul Hertz and composer Stephen Dembski, based on the "Proverbs of Hell" by visionary poet and artist William Blake. It is also an intermedia work, where different sensory modalities share underlying structures. The artists developed musical structure and visual structure in collaboration. Dembski scored forty-eight proverbs for soprano, cello, and flute. Hertz created a landscape of colorful gems embedded in a tableland on an island floating in a sea of stars. Seen from afar, the island resembles a tongue, the tableland a book. With a clamor of children's voices, a stream of words runs down the central crease of the tableland and cascades over a cliff onto the tip of the tongue and into the sea. The VR performer visits each gem, triggering a song and a mask as she goes. The current mask floats in front of her, and also replaces the gem, until the island is filled with masks, all facing the VR performer. [via Rhizome]

Paul Hertz (paul-hertz @ northwestern.edu) makes art in both digital and traditional media. He has worked in various positions at Northwestern University. In 2003—04 he was Co-Director of the Center for Art and Technology. As a Visiting Artist in 2001 and 2002, he taught the university’s first course in virtual reality for artists. He also developed and taught a course in Interactive Multimedia from 1999–2003. A grant from Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts helped him to develop VR performance artworks and software. With the support of the journal Leonardo, Hertz is curating an exhibition of pioneering computer graphics for the Block Museum at Northwestern University, for April 2006. He supports his art habit with a day job designing networked multimedia applications for the Collaboratory Project at Northwestern University, where he is currently working with a terabyte astronomical database in a project funded by the National Science Foundation.

Hertz spent many years in Spain producing paintings, music, and intermedia performance works. He earned an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began to create digital intermedia art as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Art and Technology. See http://www.northwestern.edu/people/paul-hertz for links to Hertz's portfolio and other materials.

Posted by jo at January 5, 2005 09:02 AM

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