Hye Yeon Nam & Brendan Harmon

Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist and HCI designer exploring how technology can improve our interactions with other agents – humans, robots, or nature. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. Hye Yeon has participated in exhibitions, festivals, and showcases at ARS Electronica Center, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Asia Society Texas Center, Japanese American National Museum, Times Square, Eyebeam, Conflux festival, D.U.M.B.O. Festival, the Lab in San Francisco, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica (FILE), SIGGRAPH, CHI (Computer-Human Interaction), Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI), International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Creativity & Cognition (C&C), and several festivals in China, Istanbul,Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. Her work has been broadcast on the Discovery Channel and LIVE TV show Good Day Sacramento, published in Leonardo Journal and featured in Wired, We Make Money Not Art, Makezine, Business Insider, Slashdot, Engadget among other publications. She is currently an associate professor of digital art at Louisiana State University.

Brendan Harmon is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at LSU’s Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture. Brendan’s work aims to ground design in spatial science by seamlessly integrating geospatial modeling into the creative design process through technologies such as tangible interaction, digital fabrication, and virtual reality. He co-designed Tangible Landscape, a tangible interface for geospatial modeling. His publications include a book, book chapters, and papers on tangible interaction, geospatial modeling, and digital design. He has given conference talks, workshops, and demos at venues such as ACM’s Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference, Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference, the Royal Geographical Society, and the World Bank.

Particle Forest
Interactive Installation

This installation is a set of ancient trees of significant historical, cultural, and ecological importance. We have developed 3D printed heritage trees and digital simulations from laser-scanned point clouds. With terrestrial laser scanning data, ancient trees can be recorded in immersive detail. These irreplaceable specimens can be archived as point clouds that record their morphology and aesthetic character. Participants can interact with the digital simulations using body movements to explore interspecies connections and entanglement.

Website: https://hynam.org/