Oren Shoham

The Continuous Monument, for Peter Burr, 2021

An infinitely scrolling landscape of construction and collapse, The Continuous Monument depicts a self-generating world of disassembled body parts as a site of spectacle. Tourists mingle, stare, and idle within a landscape of scattered oversized limbs in candy-colored variety. The artwork employs a collection of algorithmic systems in the development of this tableaux including crowd simulation, building assembly, and music generation. What emerges is an endlessly expanding vertical landmark in constant limbo.

Role

I collaborated with Jeremy Rotsztain on the technical direction for The Continuous Monument. We developed a networked simulation in Unity that generates new permutations of an architectural tileset and populates them with AI-controlled crowds in a real-time infinite loop.

Murmurations, for ESI Design, 2021

Murmurations is a 60-foot sculpture installed at Avocet Tower in Bethesda, MD. Through interactive kiosks, Murmurations offers passersby a chance to create transformative art. The sculpture's metal frame is enhanced by interactive lights that ebb and flow throughout the day, inspired by the graceful flight of the building's namesake Avocet bird. Visitors can trigger patterns and animations within the piece through interactive "touch tubes" located below the sculpture.

Role

I programmed a set of generative, volumetric LED animations for the Murmurations sculpture in TouchDesigner, working under the creative direction of Mary Franck and the technical direction of Adam Carlucci.

Life After BOB, for Ian Cheng, 2021

An episodic anime series built in the Unity game engine and presented live in real-time, imagining a future world in which our minds are co-inhabited by AI entities. Bridging the artist’s interest in both open-ended simulation and the capacity of cinematic storytelling to evoke deep psychological truths, Life After BOB asks: How will life lived with AI transform the archetypal scripts that guide our sense of a meaningful existence?

Role

I worked on Life After BOB as a Unity programmer, helping to develop an interactive "World Watching" mode that allows viewers to use their smartphones to pause any scene in the film and investigate its characters and environments. I also worked on a Life After BOB wiki that indexes the characters and artifacts, flora and fauna, and background details seen in the episode.

The Shape of Empty Space, for Peter Burr, 2021

An online artwork that plays with a number of perceptual illusions highlighting uncertainties and gaps in our awareness. Produced during the 2020 COVID pandemic, the work simulates a gallery exhibition entitled RESPONSIVE EYE, staging an allegory of impotence during times of crisis and civil unrest.

Role

I collaborated with Mike Heavers on the technical direction for The Shape of Empty Space. I built a ragdoll physics character animation system in Babylon.js that was used in the interactive section of the exhibition website.

People, for Peter Burr, 2021

A computational artwork that runs for the duration of a workday. In it, a building-sized projection fills a single wall and 2.1-channel generative audio permeates the exhibition interior. The work pictoralizes a vacant landscape slowly filling with a mob of multi-colored avatars. This performance, invoking the legendary behavior of lemmings, grows a speckled stalagmite of digital bodies over the course of its 6 hours.

Role

In order to make People technically feasible, I developed a custom mesh combining system in Unity that allowed the pile of ragdoll bodies to continuously grow without overwhelming available computational resources.

Permanent Visibility, for Nica Ross, 2020

A virtual reality based essay that celebrates the failure of surveillance and nonhuman vision when applied to the human form. The work is the result of capturing gender non-conforming bodies practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Carnegie Mellon's Panoptic Dome - a sensor-free motion capture studio. As the name implies the technology's intention is to fully capture and render the "truth" of a body's performance. Throughout the piece Jeremy Bentham's musings on the perfection of the Panopticon's form are juxtaposed against the Dome's raw data. We see the noisy shadows of bodies moving across the Dome's walls, digital skeletons popping in and out of sight as their movements shift outside of a machine's understanding and we are left with the impression of their contact recorded in millions of point clouds. Bentham's words describe an omnipotent yet focused power harnessed by surveillance while queer bodies jump in and out of understanding in pursuit of joy rather than legibility.

Role

I helped Nica Ross develop Permanent Visibility by writing custom Unity timeline integrations that enabled real-time playback of recorded point cloud sequences and skeletal animations from CMU's Panoptic Dome in VR.

Substrate, 2019

A series of generative monochrome animations created using custom video synthesis software that I wrote in Max/MSP/Jitter.

Dirtscraper, for Peter Burr, 2019

A simulation of an underground structure whose 'smart architecture' is overseen by artificial intelligences -- spatial and social designers that observe, learn, and make changes to the system. Unaware of the control exerted by these entities, residents move through spaces that reflect varied economies and class hierarchies. Periodically this system will interject one of 48 cinematic interludes that reveal different facets of life in this decaying arcology.

Role

I helped prepare single-channel versions of Dirtscraper for exhibition and streaming online. This involved optimizing various aspects of the Unity project and building editor tools for procedural cinematography.

Drop City, for Peter Burr, 2019

A portrait of a computer desktop community. Drop City takes its name from the first rural hippy commune in America, a settlement in southern Colorado that formed in 1965 constructed of discarded junk, salavaged car tops, and other detritus fashioned into inventive living structures. A decade later Drop City was completely abandoned. Nothing is left of it today.

Role

I worked on Drop City as a Unity developer, programming crowd simulation agents and procedural character animations.

Balls, for CultureHub, 2019

On a foggy night in a cemetery, the waves have washed away the land, claiming all the graves except for two. From these graves, two unlikely companions' voices emerge amidst the sounds of the sea, a military march, and a player piano. They battle with their pasts and contend with what looms just beyond.

Paul Foster’s Balls premiered at Café La MaMa, then at 82 2nd Avenue, on November 3, 1964, and went on to Caffe Cino, 31 Cornelia Street, later that month. The action of the original production consisted of two ping pong balls floating and swaying like pendulums in and out of a spotlight.

Re-imagined in 2019 by CultureHub and the Great Jones Repertory Company, audience members are laid to rest in their own geodesic dome as an audio-visual installation washes over them.

Role

I designed the projections for CultureHub's production of Balls. The projections were rendered in real-time via Max/MSP/Jitter to allow for sensor-based audience interactivity.

Analmosh, for Matt Romein, 2018

A generative audiovisual installation for a 3-sided projection stage, incorporating optical flow, feedback chains, and glitch techniques to create colorful, dynamic imagery in real time.

Role

I helped Matt Romein develop a show control system in Max/MSP/Jitter that allowed him to program a 30-minute sequence of animations for a custom modular video synthesizer.

Read To Me, for Maxwell Neely-Cohen, 2018

A performance tool that would visually respond to the live reading of poetry and prose, created with Maxwell Neely-Cohen during his 2018 residency at CultureHub. Exhibited at a public reading with poets Meghann Plunkett, Rhiannon McGavin, Angel Nafis, and playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

Role

For this project, I developed a Unity library that provided real-time speech transcription via Google's Cloud Speech-To-Text API. Game developers Sam Von Ehren, Flan Falacci, Dennis Carr, and Milan Koerner-Safattra used this library to create prototypes for interactive graphics that responded to text in various ways.