Unicorn in the Garden is a mesmerizing 3D-animated dreamscape that interweaves ancient mythological symbols with contemporary elements. Inspired by the iconic medieval Unicorn Tapestries, the artwork reimagines the tapestries as a hypnotic collage that invites the viewer to explore and decode the layers of symbolism and meaning embedded within. The piece’s intricate attention to detail and the seamless interplay between the historical and the modern create a dynamic and immersive experience that challenges our perception of time and history while exploring the rich visual language of myth and storytelling.

Chicago is, was, will be… by NYC based artist Kenny Schachter is an immersive video installation created with Artificial Intelligence and commissioned by 150 Media Stream. The work features a hypothetical vision of Chicago as it might have appeared in prehistoric times, collaged with manipulated depictions of the city at present, and theoretical depictions of its appearance in the future. The images will be commingled with ChatGPT machine learning-generated text based upon the lyrics from the 1964 song, My Kind of Town (Chicago is). The looping video will combine text and images to create a forward-looking remix that covers a wide spectrum of history and popular culture, put through the blender of artificial intelligence, which will define much human activity in the digital renaissance we are living through.

This project was part of 2023 Chicago Expo Art Week
Project assistant: Caspar Gabriela

“Full-quieting” by James Adamson & Ingrid Wasmer (under the mentorship of Tim Stedman) explores the evolution of artmaking within mass visual culture, with a combination of paint-on-glass animation, claymation, and video elements. The animated sequences’ fervent viscerality underscores the physicality of an intuitive artmaking process, while the video elements document this process, depicting various stages of creation. James Adamson and Ingrid Wasmer’s self-recorded videos simulate the aestheticized self-documentations of artistic processes commonly seen in social media. Full-quieting explores the dysmorphic effects of such performative documentation on the artist and viewer with the repetition, saturation, and distortion of the piece’s video elements. Ultimately, Adamson and Wasmer’s work acts as both an intimate reflection on the relationship of an artist to their practice as well as a critical musing on the evolving nature of this relationship in a culture of digital consumption. The project was selected as the winning proposal for the 150 Media Stream Contest for Digital Art in Chicago, in partnership with Associated Colleges of Illinois.

To learn more about the project and 150 Media Stream’s educational initiative, read Knox College’s article here.

Everyone’s Time Has Equal Value is a stop motion animation by Swiss/American artist Selina Trepp that shows a stream of colorful, abstract objects inhabiting and moving through a hand-made architectural space.

“As with all of my work, the stop motion was made following my concept of I work with what I have. Since 2012 I have limited myself to only use materials already present in my studio to create my artworks. This mode of working forces me to be very creative in my use of materials, as everything is finite. I try to pull the most out of the least, and succeed by investing time, love and effort.” —Selina Trepp

For the animation, Trepp built a large set of kinetic sculptures, set up her camera, took a picture, moved everything very slightly, took another picture, and so on. The work was shot at 13 frames per second and is composed of over 2,000 pictures over the course of its cycle. The artist also used mirrors to expand the illusion of space and double up the motions—this allowed her to connect the objects in unexpected ways and create a visual puzzle.

Performance artists JaNae Contag and Ryan Black present Temporal Biomes, an original experimental soundscape project commissioned by the 150 Media Stream. Their performance transforms the personal and shared architecture that defines corporate office spaces through imaginative, evolving sound. Temporal Biomes invites viewers to slow down in their day-to-day lives, and spend time immersed in a sonic journey that navigates through imagined forests, deserts, coral reefs, outer space, and beyond.

We Are All Made of Light by Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) presents a visual deconstruction of the artists’ bodies, movements, and identities into floating video fragments. As a way to probe the fragility of our perceptions of ourselves and others, the artists on screen appear to alternate between gestures of reaching out to the viewer and contracting inward. The work combines original analog and digital video footage inserted into an infinitely generative 3D environment composed live and programmed by the duo. Sweeten and Gwilliam’s figures are filled with shifting color spectrums and often move as if battling or shielding themselves from floating 3D objects. They repeatedly appear distorted by video feedback before dissolving into countless particles of moving light.

The work uses as its starting point analog video developed during a residency at Experimental Television Center, interwoven with new video material shot by the artists focusing on choreographed human gestures that are passed through video colorizers. The human figures are then abstracted within the generative virtual 3D space developed by the artists’ custom WebGL application. The video content is fragmented across fields of animated geometries that function as pixels as they spread out into space, suggesting a limitation as to how we are seen as well as how we see ourselves.

As the work slowly transitions from an integrated image to a pixelated array of geometries, details of the artists’ bodies and original video material are brought to the foreground. These geometries act as a microscopic view of a larger organism, each with its own compositional parameters and internal “rules.” The video blades of 150 Media Stream extend this fragmentation by further breaking down the visual material, forcing the eye to make sense of implied perspective across a broken field of vision.