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In addition to entering public space with my hug models, I am constructing private spaces for viewers to play with them. Again turning to VR, I am constructing a series of environments using a game engine to give players access to these models via the ultimate empathy machine. In my desert-like virtual landscape, rubberized hugs … More HugWorld

Searching for new indexical means to record moments and movements, I have begun to trace motion using VR controllers, staging hugs and other greeting gestures. The audiences of these gestures are Oculus Rift sensors. The participants’ self-awareness is heightened beyond my previous photographic staging; controllers and cables make the whole enterprise more cumbersome and staged. … More Virtual Gesture

To learn about a hug one must actually experience a hug. Without wrapping your arms around a body, descriptions, visualizations, and models fall short. In parallel with plastic scale models, I am rendering body-scale models for viewers to interact with physically. The initial iteration of these huggable data is a mobile AR application. A small … More Modeled Behavior (part II)

I have been investigating virtual intimacy: To create a prototype of virtual intimacy, I needed to locate bodies in virtual networks and render them visible. I also had to take the networks themselves into account. I began with my social media network, asking my Facebook friends to physically gather and hug one another. I photographed … More Modeled Behavior (part I)

Virtual reality has a cultural connection to the supernatural; if the virtual is immaterial, then the supernatural might thus be virtual. Ghosts and specters are tangible insofar as they move from an immaterial origin to reside in physical space. The crux of gothic drama is the paranormal’s visibility or tangibility in our space. While there, … More Ghost Bodies