Brendan Wypich exhibits “Greenhouse” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010. Greenhouse will be exhibited at Great Northern Way Campus (577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver) as part of the Eco-Art series, co-presented with the Canadian Film Centre.

Greenhouse is a telematic artwork that creates a symbiotic relationship between a fully-automated greenhouse and single orchid flower housed within it. Using the Internet, real-time data is collected from a weather station in the orchid’s native habitat. This weather information is then used by a control system to create a simulation of these natural environmental conditions within the greenhouse. Within this system, the roles traditionally associated to nature and machines are reversed. The plant is reduced to an industrial element defined by its production and consumption of various resources, while the machine is trusted with the role of caregiver to the life form housed within it. The calm and meditative state present within the greenhouse juxtaposes with the complex and dynamic interactions captured by the sensors and interpreted by the control system.

Artist Biography:

Brendan Wypich is an artist and interaction designer who currently lives in San Francisco. His art practice explores interpersonal and human/machine relationships through the use of telematics, control systems, and multimedia. He is from Toronto, Canada, and holds an MFA in Product Design from Stanford University, a BFA from Ryerson University’s New Media program, and a BComm from Queen’s University. Since graduating from Stanford, he has continued on as a Researcher at Stanford’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center developing strategies that introduce energy efficient behaviors into the home.

Visit Greenhouse.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.