Mainframe Resident Artist: Michael Lucenkiw, Jan-Feb 2023
January 13 to February 25, 2023
From our first residency slot of the Mainframe project, say hello to upcoming artist Michael Lucenkiw!
About Michael:
Michael is an interdisciplinary designer, artist and researcher primarily investigating ways in which citizen science, tinkering, hacking and critical making can be used to create stronger relationships with our environment. He works with a variety of mediums, including software coding, hardware design, and installations. Through these means, he advocates for action toward connecting people with less empowered stakeholders in the environment, such as plants and water. This work challenges western- normative scientific investigation methods and is a call to action that brings visibility to under-represented entities, living and nonliving.
About Michael’s Residency:
During this residency, I would like to explore the capacity of augmented reality as an interactive, location-specific storytelling format. Taking advantage of the ability of augmented reality to access a phone’s GPS and spatial orientation, I want to experiment with mobile exhibits around the city. I also want to explore how environmental data, GIS mapping, and data visualization intersects with this technology. My most recent work in progress is focused around our relationship with water in our environment. Eastern Edge Gallery, being located so close to the Atlantic Ocean, is an amazing opportunity to interact with the Atlantic Ocean as a focus and a source of water data.
My goal is to become familiar with some industry-standard augmented reality tools and learn how to create an environmental awareness narrative with them. I will explore how live data might feed into the augmented world using a device like Arduino and related environmental sensors. I want to investigate how GIS mapping software can interact with augmented reality software to help generate digital landscapes. As a final output, I plan to culminate the learnings from these explorations to create an augmented reality installation outside of the gallery.
To view more of Michael’s work, visit his page here!