The Physiognomic Scrutinizer is an installation the scans a person as s/he walks through a doorway and matches his/her face to that a face of a person who is famous for controversial reason. The author of the blog post said that the project was very influential and he went back several times. It doesn’t sound seem like having your face matched to someone else’s would have that dramatic of an effect, but perhaps it would make you think about the lives of these people and have some sort of sympathy for them. I think this piece might be better if it stressed the random sympathy that can be induced in one’s brain.

Joshua Kirsch – Concentricity, Interactive Light Sculpture 2011

In this installation the user interacts with  a handle in the middle of the piece to turn the inner structure around. The turns create changes in the lights around the inner structure. I don’t really understand what this is supposed to represent from the artist’s description, I think he is trying to link to light to the strength of the magnetic field. This is not a clear relationship to me, I think it would be more interesting if you made something move in an unexpected way as you turn the handle

concentricity

The Bloom Music Visualization

This project maps your music library to a virtual “solar system” that you can travel through to shuffle between artists. I like the idea of creating a new dimension/reality to your music library, but I’m not sure if I understand why it is a solar system. I think a globe that actually maps where the artists are coming from or where the music was made. The solar system suggests that the music was created throughout different stars, I guess drawing from the idea that artists are all “stars”.