Karyn Nakamura

Surface Tension, my latest installation is at @showstudio @showstudio_gallery until March 12th ! M-F 10:30-18:00 Sat Sun 11:00-16:00 It has neurons, optical tweezers, a double mirror sculpture, a 7-channel video piece, lasers, 10 precariously balanced c stands, a slide projector turned into microscope, 3 cameras, one CRT, all sequenced and cued live with bits of generative moments and if we’re lucky maybe a drone 😀 It’s been a whole adventure putting this one together! @nick_knight reached out to me over a year ago to offer the beautiful space @showstudio for me to create work in. I’d been sitting on it until I received the support of the Steve Jobs Archive to set myself out on an all-consuming project. It began with the goal of capturing life in image, but instead of the human scale, at the microscopic scale. The installation features a micro-cinema where I used neurons (brain cells) as actors under a microscope by physically nudging them around a glass slide using optical tweezers - a device that can manipulate small matter using the kinetic energy of light. More on the other layers later. Big thank you to @yiiiiiiitong for the neurons 🧠 and all the advice, @sallylab for all the experiments in the very beginning :) and Jatin Abacousnac and David Grier for all the help on the optical tweezers to get to this microscopic animation. Another big thank you to the incredible SHOWStudio team I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know and work with! From the sweetest gallery assistant @holliehunsdale , incredible installation photographer among many other things @larasugarhughes , Denise for beautiful design, @_christinadonoghue for translating into beautiful words, @michaelgossage @kasianotkash , Esme and Nicola for constantly documenting the whole process, @gracehodgsonphoto for c stands, Andy, Brad for putting them in the air, @kalimcmillan and everyone who put up with my two weeks of tech and chaos. And a huge thank you to @nick_knight and Charlotte for trusting me and giving me the space to make whatever I wanted and welcoming the chaos and fragility of it all. It feels sacred every time I get to throw my life out the window and put something together.

noise pile 12/9 (Sat) - 12/17 (Sun) at @domicile.tokyo    《Live Performance》 12/14 (Thu) 19:00-20:00 12/15 (Fri) 19:00-20:00 12/16 (Sat) 19:00-20:00 原宿のコンセプトストアDOMICILE TOKYOにて開催されるNY出身のアーティストのKaryn Nakamura @frog_spit_simulation とエレクトロニックジャズデュオ Human Squared @human.squared によるライブパフォーマンスは残すところあと3回です！まだご覧になられていない方はぜひお越しください！ 録画映像を用いたビデオインスタレーションはお店がオープンしている時間(12:00-20:00)であれば12/17日まで毎日ご覧いただけます⭐️ Thank you to everyone who came out to our first three shows at DOMICILE 🫶 We have three more live shows left! The performance is improvised and each night is completely different. Video installation of a recorded performance is open during the day (12-8pm) until 12/17 ⭐️
 With @gabewarshaw and @mercermakesmusic from @human.squared   Photos by @nagar3n Supported by PROOF, @monopo_tokyo , Shibuya Television, all Kickstarter supporters.

Graffitied a dorm !!! Ft my favorite review ever. Thank you so much to Leah, Andrea, Lydia, everyone at @artsatmit , Yi, Jay from @mitmta , Ken, Joe from MIT news and MIT video, all my strong friends for hauling shit for my weak ass @bol_zan @the_canaanite @sperrybryan @nervalz , the Simmons house team who DID give me permission in multiple emails, @yoshihiro_7 for filming this, and @videodesignernyc for always doing everything to let me do what I want.

25! Didn’t think I’d make it this long love this insane life and all u precious people in it 🫶

Spitballs - a series of simulations in which language is rendered as a fluid organism born from a parasitic virus. The virus causes the spit of their hosts to become embedded with a latent phrase. As it rolls off the tongue, the non-Newtonian sentient blob traverses a field of words in 3D space, binding them into a sentence. The resultant phrases carry fragments of advice discreetly seeded by an alien civilization, using this shadow channel of human communication as a mode of influence. I reproduced Hewitt and Manning’s structural probe paper, then built an environment in Houdini so I could collide particles into various probe-arranged phrases. The simulation repeatedly tests the relationship between the formal structures of language and this organic byproduct of speech thrown at it over and over again, attempting, often imperfectly, to realize those structures. Spent a ton of time in Houdini again mostly suffering and trying to make a fluid system robust enough, also built out this fun web. Detailed interview/write up on the full web out soon (there are 100 of these lol), but mostly just thinking a lot these days about the role of aesthetics in translating systems beyond our logical reasoning capacities into human-sized understandings (and how that is the work that artists do ⭐️).

Organic byproduct of human communication embedded with parasitic bits of wisdom discreetly seeded by an alien civilization using it as a shadow channel for influence type beat. Ok moving on …🏃‍♀️

Wendi Yan & Karyn Nakamura on the Artifice of Knowledge By Wendi Yan @wendiyan & Karyn Nakamura @frog_spit_simulation Yan and Nakamura are artists, technologists—and friends. In the following conversation, a glimpse into their everyday “joint psychoanalysis,” Yan and Nakamura discuss the origins of their practices, which circle the same questions from different angles. They cover the inseparability of image- and knowledge-making, knowledge as an artificial construction, and the tools that make them feel like gods. 🫱 lerandom.art/editorial/wendi-yan-karyn-nakamura-on-the-artifice-of-knowledge *Link in bio Mentions: @jamesprestonelkins @andrewthomashuang @darrenzhu @mit @princeton @xmuseum_official @berggrueninst @cabinetmagazine @monkantony

Spent the last three months making up for all the years I’ve taken the multi view geometric processing system on my face for granted and built an auto calibration pipeline for 34 projectors from first principles. Probably means nothing to most people, but I got totally consumed by this problem bc I love infrastructure :) Grateful to have a much deeper appreciation of images as a tool to measure the world, it is absolutely insane what u can do with 22 eyeballs, corners, and a bunch of math I will never get over it !! ✨✨✨ And grateful for @moonharvey @spectra__studio for throwing me into the deep end and cheering me on 😭 Ok now who wants to do crazy stuff with tracking and cameras and projection???

Testing testing 🫣

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Karyn began by sharing small online experiments—repurposed hardware, strange video systems, and hacked-together software—and in doing so she found a community of artists, engineers, researchers, and curators similarly probing the edges of technological systems. Since then, her practice has unfolded as a series of experiments that peel back layers of technology across interfaces, protocols, and media, exposing the political decisions embedded within them. Moving fluidly between disciplines, she stays fluent in art, research, and industry, using that fluency to question the assumptions and foundations of each. @frog_spit_simulation

Karyn Nakamura @frog_spit_simulation attempts to explain what she does using a diagram. Creative engineer and maker of unadvisable videos, Karyn makes the case that the most enjoyable processes are often found in ventures that defy easy categorization. Join us at our next event - RSVP in the link in bio. Edited by @shai._.guy , AV by @change.is & @tom.seungki #touchdesigner #schizodiagram #artandscience