“Hand Record” is an immersive site-specific multimedia piece that will be shown in the Kanvas venue, part of ISEA 2026 in Dubai. It’s roughly 9 minutes long, organized into 6 movements, and depicts a machine entity trying to understand human visual art and music. The composition was designed for the space, which is a 4-screen multimedia room, roughly 20×20 feet in diameter, where one of the displays is the floor itself. I often used the floor to depict the “brain” of this machine entity, showing computer vision algorithms as it dissects the scenes and learns to understand them.
In order to show machine recreation of graffiti tags, I ended up training a model that learned to decompose a target artwork into its composite strokes. This allows us to play back the performance of the painting in real time, which is featured prominently throughout the work. Scenes were turned into 3D gaussian splats which allows the virtual camera to pan and zoom in on different parts of the scene as needed.
Special thanks to Dr. Rincon, Dr. Kim, Dr. Kuchera-Morin, Jack Idaho, and everyone else involved in special exhibition.
Music