Tech x Art: Robin Vuchnich

The relationship between art and technology has existed since the dawn of human history. From the earliest known cave paintings in Maltravieso to Leonardo da Vinci's imaginative flying machines and Nam Jun Paik's mesmerizing TV Buddha, art and technology have been working in tandem to propel humanity forward.

In contemporary times, we continue to celebrate this longstanding partnership by featuring local Raleigh New Media artist, Robin Vuchnich, in collaboration with our sponsor, Lenovo. Vuchnich's work employs technology and art to tackle public science and social change. Her recent public art installations address important issues such as climate change, pandemic isolation, and racial justice, creating chance encounters with art in public and natural spaces. By utilizing projection mapped light, spatial augmented reality, generative art, and animation at a monumental scale, Vuchnich's works transform buildings, museum facades, the shoreline of the NC coast, and even the NC State Capitol building into canvases.

Lenovo and Artsplosure joined forces to collaborate with Robin on the 15th annual New Year's Eve celebration for First Night Raleigh. The installation, located in the plaza of the PNC building, offered a fully immersive experience where visitors could participate in the audio/visual spectacle. By manipulating the color, motion, and trajectory of the bubbles and blobs using their bodies, viewers were able to fully engage with the artwork.

“The tools, tech and affordances of the new media landscape continually evolve ways of making art and our experience with perceiving it. I'm excited by how many possibilities technology provides to create serendipitous encounters with art where we might not expect it — outside of museum walls — from our public spaces to our personal devices and all of the augmented zones in between (the virtual and real). The motion tracking interactive wall created for First Night was one of those experiences. Each visitor could manipulate the art using their movements — becoming both a co-creator, subject, and performer for onlookers, while simultaneously experiencing it themselves, in an immersive space. That's the kind of engagement, play, and interactivity that new media art experiences can create for people and the ever-evolving technology that supports this work is endlessly exciting to me.”

Robin has several large-scale architectural projection mapping projects in the works for special events in Raleigh over the coming year, as well as an ongoing immersive exhibit, "In Search of Thoreau's Flowers," on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History through November 2022.