UF professor's art exhibit explores concepts of control, surveillance

July 17, 2014

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University Galleries is featuring a new exhibit open through July 25 in the University of Florida’s University Gallery as part of UF’s Creative B summer activities. CNTRL-SPACE, by UF alumnus and professor Patrick Pagano, is an interactive digital projection environment exhibit that explores the illusion of control in a technocratic society.

CNTRL-SPACE enables visitors to affect images that are projected onto the walls in University Gallery. The exhibit allows visitors to use their smartphones to input "magic phrases" into a system that will search the Internet and produce an instant, full-screen collage. Using web APIs that are freely available online for a variety of image sourcing sites, the experience is immediately connective and is an illusion of control. In addition, the images are visually mapped onto projected 3D surfaces that visitors may move via touch-sensitive devices in the gallery. This makes for an indulgent, participatory art-making experience.

CNTRL-SPACE also addresses the idea of surveillance based upon current technologies provided by Microsoft using their messianic gesture device, the Kinect. Visitors are watched as they watch, marked as they are marked and recorded as they record the experience. This data is secretly applied then input into the CNTRL-SPACE system to adjust the placement of a final snapshot – how the environment will appear upon the visitor’s exit from CNTRL-SPACE. This is the image that will greet the next visitor upon entrance into CNTRL-SPACE.

“CNTRL-SPACE is an aggregation of different elements of interactive projection design environments I have been working on since 2005,” Pagano said. “Inspired by one of my visual art gurus, Marian Zazeela, I began to construct abstract sound and light environments for visitors to interact with via touch-sensitive midi controllers, smartphones and tablets. The installation culminates about 10 years of projection design work, and I present it with great joy for Creative B.”

The exhibit is free and open to the public Mondays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.