Eric J. Forman

My work combines the open-ended, exploratory, and inconclusive nature of the art experience with the technical framework and rigor of science, design, architecture, and robotics. I develop my own interactive technology to create objects and spaces that are aware of their environment and can dynamically respond to it. Customizing circuits and sensors to respond to physical phenomena of movement, air, light, and sound challenges not only the usual limitations of technology but our usual sense of the art object. The viewers’ body and senses are literally put in play with the art and the artwork itself transforms and evolves.

I have a special interest in using the scientific fields of emergence and self-directed genetic algorithms to hybridize artificial creations with phenomena found in nature. I also work with traditional media, furniture, lighting, and functional design with small twists of innovation to destabilize the tropes of how we relate to our environment. Sometimes the complexity of craft in what I make is transparently revealed as itself worthy of reflection, other times it is hidden to invite the viewer to focus on powerfully simple fundamentals of their own agency and perception.

Most of my work tries to develop modalities of interactivity not found in dominant forms of new media: subtle, slow, thoughtful, perhaps disturbing. My work does not cynically deny us the magical and exhilarating qualities of the new, yet it plays on our uneasy fascination with these overlappings of natural vs artificial, person vs machine, and real vs simulated. In essence, I am investigating not the future, but the uncertain present, of human and technological co-evolution.