Jore Park and Wylci Fables have been artistic collaborators for over 40 years. Their collaboration and artistic journey has included work and shows in New York, San Francisco. Tokyo, Sendai, and Maui. Park | Fables corpus of work spans media, dance, theater, sculpture, data visualization, complex adaptive systems, cultural modeling, visual languages and specialized software tools for artists. Park | Fables are serial entrepreneurs and software designers who have been working at the intersection of art and technology to develop tools for creating meaningful empathy. They hold six related software patents.
2020
Splinters and Shards is a 2020 remake of the artists’ 1985 video art work that uses the original audio track of their poem, as recorded live by Park | Fables with pause button technique on a 4-track tape deck while living in Tokyo. This version of the video portion was newly created using SeaSeer AI tools for artists.
2019
Park | Fables created the -Bubble Net-, a multifaceted screen for multiple projections celebrating the songs and sights of humpback whales. Premier showing at the opening of The Library, a San Francisco event space.
Humpback whales collaborate to corral fish using bubbles. Park | Fables work often seeks to merge multiple realities in an harmonious manner. The solution to transitioning to a sustainable world will require this sort of cooperation despite our diverse cultures.
2017
SeaSeer Inc. logo illustrates data flowing through the production pipeline as Humans-in-the-Loop interact with AI and analysis tools. The artists built a true data flow processing language called the Logic Web based on their core technology patent: autonomous data handlers. The system worked so well a complex adaptive system modeling many cultures produced analysis and visualization from contrasting POVs looking at the same situations.
October 2017, the artists founded SeaSeer, a Benefit Corporation, to consolidate their work under the mission: Re-contextualizing global media and data as a personal user experience for the betterment of the planet. Artists’ voices are needed most to reflect the diversity of the human experience in times of great change. That is now! New technology tools that use machine learning and video analysis will help democratize video production.
2015
2015 Video prototypes are created in a deconstruction/reconstruction style. The intention is to build a more informed and compassionate world using bits from the current reality. The AI is used to analyze the small clips from artistic perspectives in order to be able to reassemble them in a way that can elicit emotional reaction from the viewer. The idea is to develop tools that use collaboration on a massive scale to reflect real world complexity. The first level of sophistication for the reconstruction is to form an abstract narrative. As the tools get better, more sophisticated experiences can be created.
2012 - 2010
Park | Fables licensed their patent for Systems and Methods for Visual Messaging to a startup called Vizlingo. Vizlingo used a Type-and-See interface to translate mobile text messages into video automatically with user controlled cultural adaptation. Vizlingo exploited the visual nature of this process to support teachers of English as a second language with different visualizations for different definitions of each word.
Park | Fables software company, IndaSea Inc. developed the backend software for Vizlingo, accomplishing real-time video messaging.
2009
Park | Fables completely modularize the million line code base of the IndaSea’s Cultural Simulation Modeler (CSM) software. Several versions of the Content Creation Engine, were built to create media from the CSM as a semi-automated video production platform. SeaSeer is the latest incarnation of this general system design, now incorporating modular, context specific machine learning, working towards a production AI that includes perceptual awareness and audience adaptation.
Park | Fables used the first iteration of the CCE to create a set of video episodes, incorporating several versions of the video metadata as part of the display. The clip tag map shows relationship and conceptual overlap with other clips in the network, and a poetic abstract reduction reflecting the clips new context in the reconstructed format. The full map is shown at the end of the video.
2008 - 2002
A key event in the Park | Fables development path occurred when we adjusted our orientation from live theater and dance performance to the intimacy of the video camera. The scale changed; the angles changed. The meaning of our gestures changed. The considerations the performer uses to include the perception of the live audience is noticeably different from that of a camera. We took that opportunity to explore the cognitive experience of perception and compare the mapping of the projected live experience to the more composed digital experience of camera and screen. This led us to build a 4000sqft Theater for the Camera with the architect Bart Prince. This space in Maui, Hi was used to build the perception based interface; which ended up providing the the data structure for the complex adaptive system that would later be used for modeling culture and AI assisted video production.
Stand for a moment, close your eyes and sweep your arm across the space and you will notice a certain pattern of thoughts arise. Repeat with your eyes a bit lower and sweep your arm just a little bit closer. The thoughts shift from the future and distant thoughts to more of a table of things in front of you along with the more immediate current events a table of thoughts offers. Carried to the extreme, we were able to map complex and subtle sensations as spatial paths around us. The tilts of the paths and distance from the eye became significant so we placed markers in space. At first these markers were isolated; as the room filled out the markers hooked together naturally as spectrums and emergent realization reflecting the creative blend from the subconscious to real world actions. The result was a cognitive model that matured with the creation of the perception based interface below.
The abstraction of the model into the simpler drawing below, pivoted our art career into a multi-year, government funded, tech research effort resulting in a cultural model with variations in perception and interaction, defining culture as the very difference between. Of particular interest for us was the changing relationship to a process as user attention brought it to the foreground. Thinking of an object would bring it into view; while engaging ones intuition energized and moved the process to the center but never really into view. Walking slowly toward the white circle and image plane would literally change the type of POV stimulated by the method. Moving towards the back pushed the viewer into a more philosophical state of mind, while moving forward supported a more active and engaging state.
The end result was a cultural model able to synthesize diverse data and look at that data from multiple POVs in a software system that could provide non-obvious forward looking insight.
An Interesting side effect of this process saw the POVs so accurately embrace bias that we no longer tried to remove it from the system. Instead bias was encouraged to clarify its role and was balanced by including many other POVs each with their own bias. This had a profound change on how we spoke English, requiring that the POV currently speaking was apparent.
About 10,000 Java classes and 6 years later the system was able to provide startling insight to world events. Here is an example of a modular process, a variation in the typical summary tool extracts a narrative foundation from a meta-construct instead of the typical text article.
2001
IndaSea Inc is formed in Hawaii to build on the foundation of the Logic Web as a data flow system (Autonomous Data Handlers patent). The need is for artists to be able to interact more intuitively and humanistically with technology to create and produce their works. Functional modules were able to be sequenced just in time by non technical users proceeding step-by-step with no application needed.
A frame of video created from a flow of structured text. Used as an initial sort when reviewing large amounts of text. Structural components and complexity are revealed as well as formality and subtle styling.
2000-1992
At work in the Maui studio. The translucent image:
1997
Cultural Mapping interface concept design for storytelling, for use as an educational tool for Hawaiian youth to experience the wisdom of the elders mapped to the geography of the Hawaiian islands.
Wildfires on the Island of Hawaii. The 3D visualization in VRML showed 8 datasets concurrently.
1996
Visualization of the Aquifer, island of Lanai. The 3D model was interactive and could be fed different scenarios for water usage, depending on future construction and water use on the island. The model displayed the effects on the aquifer including collapse if too much development was projected.
1991
The Oracles of Distraction was a major art exhibit at the gallery of La Foret in Harajuku, Tokyo, in collaboration with Shuntaro Tanakawa and Chris Mosdell.
77 framed wax and dye images were hung in pods. A poem in English and Japanese accompanied each Oracle. As the gallery visitors moved from pod to pod, a musical piece for each Oracle in pod was heard through an early Sony wireless headphones using infrared. When visitors approached the gallery on New Year’s Day, they were greeted by Taiko drummers and a traditional Japanese Shinto priest to select a bamboo Oracle for the New Year. A limited edition of 1000 volumes of 77 Oracle postcard size prints accompanied by a CD of 77, 1-minute music pieces sold-out at the opening.
1988
Exhibit at the Vorpal Gallery, New York: 12 translucent folding screens, Japanese washi paper, wax, pigment and black lacquer.
1984
“Four Ways to Circumvent Cultural and Language Barriers,” Komai Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 1984, an interactive performance art piece.
1983-1980
Primary Ikons
In the studio at Jerome, Arizona, an isolated high-altitude mountain town development of an ikonic visual language flourished. The three images above, “Nomad,” “Metacara,” and “Black Seven” are Primary Ikons, and as such come to be embodied with a range of emotions and attributes through use as a character. In this iteration, they are executed on translucent Japanese washi paper and are 3m x 4m. The size of the hangings and their light handling capabilities make the works suitable as sets for theater and video.
Ouije
In 1983 a visual music score was produced, using 60’ long and 1‘ high washi paper strip, pulled in front of the video camera lens manually at the rate of 1” per second. When the videotape of the music score was played, 12 musicians and dual conductors emerged a score with iterative improvisations to the moving image. The activity was repeated over the course of several days until the music became defined and then was recorded in a 10 minute piece to a live audience.
1979
During the first year of collaboration, in the course of a summer, this mural in Decatur, Georgia was painted on the highly visible downtown building. Many layers of translucent pigment were used to achieve layers of movement on this 30’ x 60’ wall.