Daniel Shanken: Interdisciplinary Art

Interdisciplinary art is a combination of arts that use an interdisciplinary approach involving more than one artistic discipline. Being an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, Mr Daniel Shanken creates installations, video, sculpture, sound, and media. His research focuses on the ways in which meaning and perception are generated and altered through interactions with technology and external stimuli. His practice investigates information systems and how they are embedded within cognitive processes, attempting to render and engage them in ways that reimagine their outputs and modes of production.

Recently, Mr Shanken has been working on a couple projects, one of which is titled Machine Visions (click here for the trailer). Coming to a forthcoming exhibition in Hong Kong in 2022, it is a video installation that stems from the use of a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm that attempts to reproduce a given dataset. The GAN was trained on over 2,500 tools and technologies from Palaeolithic stone implements to contemporary gadgets, such as cell phones, creating in its output strange renditions of familiar objects. Some of the generated models are recognisable as human-made tools for an unspecified or imaginary use, while others are abstractions that are remnants or ruins of the algorithm’s training process.

Another of Dr Shanken’s projects, Source (click here for the trailer), is a hand-carved granite slab with a built-in custom computer. The computer reads a Geiger counter which measures radioactive particles emitted from the granite and the surrounding environment in real-time. The decaying material manipulates a moving image platform, influencing how content is drawn from a database and live scraped from the internet, building animated sequences that fluctuate and feedback, along with the sound of the clicking Geiger counter.

HKBU’s Artistic Work Environment

The Augmented Creativity Lab has created a collaborative environment which brings people from different disciplines together to create exciting project across media.

Mr Daniel Shanken

Academy of Visual Arts

On the subject of working at HKBU, Dr Shanken, as a lab member, is very supportive of the way the Augmented Creativity Lab has created a “collaborative environment which brings people from different disciplines together to create exciting project across media.” He is also very happy with the newly established Meta Creativity Lab, which provides a physical space for the researchers and their students to meet to work on these projects.

At present, Dr Shanken is working with researchers of various fields including visual art, music and computer science at HKBU on an exciting collaborative project that combines contemporary art and generative game. The University looks forward to its outcome and that of other ongoing interdisciplinary art projects putting HKBU on the artistic map.

VIDEO

Machine Visions (Trailer)