Nervous      Media

A MOTION SIGNATURE for an INNOVATIVE COMMUNITY

Julie Harrison, one of the original members of Colab in New York and a professor of new media at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, invited Ebon Fisher to help her develop a new program for the Institute combining art, technology and science. Ebon designed a green screen video studio for the Program in Art & Technology and taught courses in 3D animation, transmedia performance and biophilia. Other interdisciplinary artists who taught or lectured at the program included Joseph Nechvatal, Nancy Manter, Mariam Ghani, Diana Bush, Daniel Durning, Ellen Cornfield and Caterina Verde. In an attempt to celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of the program, Fisher created a digital 3D "motion signature" of student movement through the central hall and nearby studios. This nervelike flow pattern acted as the program's "source code" to be expressed on the web, video, T-shirts, and a 3D print. Below are some of the ways this bionic talisman was expressed.

Below: Samples of Ebon Fisher's website for the Art & Technology program, 

Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ.

CULTIVATING A SOCIAL NERVE: The digital 3D file was output to videos (above and right), a pendant produced with a 3D printer (below) and a website (above). The red motion signature, along with the community's consciousness of the same, constituted a bionic memeplex integrating 

both digital and biological memory.

"Ebon Fisher is one of contemporary culture's supreme soothsayers. His writhing, postdigital forms convey truths that linger just

outside the mind's reach."

 – Carl Goodman, Executive Director 

    American Museum of the Moving Image