Artist Lecture

I attended a great artist lecture last night at USF and heard a talk by Siebren Versteeg. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is here for the semester working on a community arts project in the Sulfur Springs area, a project for Graphic Studio, and several other projects. I was really interested in the interactive pieces he created with a never repeating stream of images. One was called Triptych which consisted of three LCD screens that were hooked up to a computer continually searching for triptych images. Then there was New York Windows which is a piece that is always regenerating itself. The viewer is able to interact and search around the piece by use of a touch screen as it is constantly regenerating itself. Versteeg enjoyed the chaos in the streets of NY when he first moved there and this piece was created to keep the chaos alive.

Another great piece was CC2003. Versteeg took short loops of newscasters that had a closed captioned-like type beneath them to make it appear as if they are saying things like 'Okay, here is where I get all cool' and 'I guess I have a lot to say.' He was able to do this by having an inter net connected computer program that had an output to a wall mounted television. The TV displayed the newscaster loops with the real time diary feeds on the bottom which resulted in a closed caption looking television screen. There are video installations of them on his website.

Check him out! He had a great sense of humor and I would definitely go hear him talk again!

www.siebrenversteeg.com