This is a new procedural audio game that I am working on for the iPad. The idea is to try to combine a game mechanic with music creation, to create a sort of meditative game-like experience. Not sure where it is heading, but I like the feeling it has so far.
Denver Theater District Commission
I was commissioned to create a new work by the Denver Theater District for the new Denver Digerati collection. This collection of films will be premiered on September 20th on the Denver Theater District’s LED screens located in downtown Denver.
Do You See What I See?
Visual Instrument is my installation shown at the La Napoule Art Foundation’s Do You See What I See? exhibition at the Freight Building in Denver. The exhibition included artwork by Lawrence Argent, Faith Ringgold, Sandy Skoglund, Will Clift, Kate Doyle/Andrew Binkley/Brad Gordon, Ali Hossaini, Sarah Hutt, Michael Gadlin, Phoebe Knapp, Jen Lewin, M12 Collective and Willem Volkersz.
La Napoule Art Foundation Clews Center for the Arts in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France is a well known international residency program established in 1951. Alumni include Nobel Laureates Gao Xingjian and Derek Walcott. The La Napoule Art Foundation is dedicated to:
“preserving the legacy of Henry and Marie Clews and promoting art that serves the greater good, La Napoule Art Foundation seeks to nurture and inspire artistic talent, while fostering the creative process as a means of advancing international understanding.”
For the exhibition I developed Visual Instrument – an installation using the Kinect for motion tracking and accompanied with an Android application running on a tablet in the gallery. Both applications allowed the user to knock around virtual balls that emit a note when struck, magically creating a melody through random interactions. For this project, I collaborated with UCD music Professor Paul Musso who supplied the audio samples and explained how melodies could be achieved through specific note combinations while I did the programming and visual elements.
The catalog described the exhibition as:
“Sponsored by La Napoule Art Foundation, Do You See What I See? is an exhibition and community outreach program that offers children and their families a dynamic and immersive arts experience through exposure, education, and experiential art-making.
The exhibition celebrates artwork by renowned local and national artists that is engaging, interactive, and inspiring for children. Featured work meets the standards of fine art and explores the many perspectives that inform our experience of art, asking children and adults alike “Do You See What I See?”
Uncategorized
In April of 2011 I had a solo show, Uncategorized, open at Ironton Gallery in Denver. Ironton is well known in the Denver area for presenting experimental work and this installation was chosen by a jury of Ironton Studio artists as one of only 5 non-member artists invited to show in their space each year. Art critic Kyle MacMillan had this to say about the show in the the Denver Post:
“In his tech-driven, boundary-blurring art, Bryan Leister creates hermetic, contemplative worlds which draw inspiration from nature yet, ironically, are manufactured and artificial.
In “Uncategorized,” an exhibition at the Ironton Gallery, 3636 Chestnut Place, the highly accomplished illustrator- turned-artist explores a range of imaging technologies.
In the most attention-grabbing of the seven offerings, “intervention [0],” he uses video- game technology to create an interactive work in which a pair of pincers, hovering above a kind of petri dish, shift according to the movements of viewers in front of it.”
The artificially natural art of Bryan Leister blurs borders
Denver Post, April 22, 2011
For the exhibition, which consisted of an installation covering the entire gallery I showed a collection of work including in transit, the exolith series of prints and a new interactive work called intervention[0].
New work
I’ve put two new pieces into the Projects area of my site, a Data Visualization that I am working on and a real-time motion piece that I did for a Dance company.
in transit
in transit, an installation at UICA exploring the landscape and representation from June 11 through August 6. Above is a screen shot of the interactive projection that is part of the installation. The work combines single channel projection animation, 5-channel sound, 3D printed sculptures and original drawings. The concept revolves around explorations of the Colorado landscape and interest in depicting layers of representation to the viewer.
Leister.2.0 is finally live!
I’ve been working on a new site design for the last few weeks and would like to announce that it’s finally been launched! Let me know what you think!
For my design friends that are curious, the whole site is done in WordPress, which is a free content management system that you can install on most web sites. It is basically a blog setup, but it is pretty easy to customize it so that it does not look like a blog. There are a ton of cool plug-ins and built-in features that make managing a complex site very easy. For example, for my image pages I can upload all of my images at once and they are automatically formatted into a gallery. I can create a new post, and it will be added to my navigation and menu areas in the appropriate place.
Pinnacle Magazine Cover
This cover was designed for Pinnacle Magazine, published by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Colorado Denver.