The Air Around US (2022)
Recycled Glass, Recycled Metal, LED lights, and real-time air quality data, custom electronics, networked sculpture
Funded by ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, The Air Around Us (TAAU) is an arts and engineering initiative, which aspires to increase the visibility of poor air quality conditions across the Phoenix metropolitan area. In addition to real-time visualizations of present conditions, we hope to contribute to the data narrative which illustrates the disproportionate impact poor air quality has on marginalized and vulnerable populations, while creating opportunity for change, and actionable response to poor conditions. Installations located at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the i.d.e.a Museum, and the Sagrado Galleria. In addition to the sculptures, we also developed a visualization using predicitve modeling tools for each of our 3 sites. This data was then used to drive point-cloud scans of artifacts which represented each institution. These 360 videos can be viewed on the project website.
Ghost Lab (2022)
Developed in collaboration with Lance Gharavi, William Kirkham, Brunella Providente, and ASU’s Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming. this experimental testbed was developed as both research lab and art installation. This collaboration sought to create an immersive experience, which could challenge robots as visual and sonic landscapes alter the landscapes around them. For this project I designed, and composed a custom 6. 1 spatialized sonic environment, which is responsive to real-time data being transmitted from both the robots and the opti-track system in the testbed.
More information available @ https://research.asu.edu/chart-ing-future-space-exploration
Dead Girl Vampire Cats (2018)
An exploded version of Cindy Kleine’s film Dead Girl Vampire Cats, this is a sensory immersion into a fantastical dream world that unfolds on 6 screens and 8 audio channels surrounding each viewer separately inside a constructed house. The viewer lies alone on a bed on the floor for 20 minutes to experience the multiple channels of film, video and sound unfolding around them. The piece employs film, video, audio, sculpture, architecture, and theatre, each incarnation in a unique space. So far it has been installed in a barn in MA for a week long run in 2017 and at The Wrecktory in Brooklyn for a two week run in 2018.
Cindy Kleine: Director/Producer/Cinematographer
Max Bernstein: Installation Designer, Media Designer, Projection design and mapping
Bruce Odland: Composer/Sound Designer
Eugene Lee: Set Construction
Stealing From the Albright Knox (2012)
Architectural Projection mapped installation
Mapped to the side of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, this work explores spectacle and absurdity as criticism. This work was presented as a response to underrepresentation of the history of media arts practitioners in the city of Buffalo, NY, in the wake of investment into corporate design firms as strategy for beatification of our city.
Presented at the Albright Knox art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Networked Psychopathology; from New York to Colorado (documentation) (2012)
Designed, and performed by Max Bernstein
Network technologies, deflated air mattress, projection mapping, speakers
Presented at the Velvet Ranch in Evergreen, Colorado, this work was an attempt to create a space of vulnerability, trust, and intimacy, despite a great geographical distance. I was a performer live from New York, beaming my face onto a projection-mapped, deflating air mattress. In this work I held real-time sessions and conversations with complete strangers across the country, and found that even despite great distance, mediation, and network latency, it was in fact possible to connect.
Red, and Blue, and Their Daughter, Purple (2011)
Written, directed, designed, performed, and programmed by Max Bernstein
4 channel projection, Mixed Media Video Installation
40-Minute Loop
Exhibited at the CU Boulder Art Museum
Red and Blue and Their Daughter Purple is a multi-channel, mixed media, video installation, which investigates the possibilities and constructs of a postmodern cinema space. This work sheds the formal and paradigmatic structures of cinema from the anticipated experience of a spectator and its subject. I am interested in freeing both the viewer and the images from their respective roles in order to encourage a new kind of cinematic captivation through immersion, and the blurring of screen space and viewer space. Borrowing from notions of theatrical liveness, Red and Blue and Their Daughter Purple utilizes both the form of the long take as well as consciousness of scale to give the impression of live projected bodies. Utilizing a combination of objects and projections, this piece seeks to activate the viewer’s consciousness through physical engagement with animated objects. I am interested in exploring the representational limitations of sculpture and cinema by using images to re-insert auras back into objects as well as objects to re-insert an auras back into images. Highly influenced by Samuel Beckett, and other authors of the theater of the absurd, Red and Blue and Their Daughter Purple’s narrative depicts an entirely self reflexive and self reflective moment. The work meanders through a conscious ontology, subjective notions of being, existential satire, and a contemporary representation of Japanese Benshi tradition from early film history. All characters in this work were written and performed by Max Bernstein.
Screen Memories, Part 2 (installation documentation) 2010
3-channel video installation, picture frames, super sassy performers…
Still Life with Television Sets, Satantango for Gallery (2010)
Installation shown at the 2010 Brakhage symposium
Hunting For One, Two: An Opera (2009)(installation documentation)
2-channel, projection mapped installation, interactive projection machine sculpture, written, directed, produced and edited by Max Bernstein