New Frontier at the Yard
by Karen Pecota

It's hands on! It's innovative! These words describe the ever present New Frontier Installations exhibition during the Sundance Film Festival. The specialized exhibits are open to the public the entire duration of The Sundance Film Festival housed in Park City, Utah, held in the dead of winter. Without a doubt, the New Frontier Installations are a highlight event for festival attendees. Oh! Did I mention that it is free?

The development of this venue has been a work in progress since its conception in 2006. The installations bring together the moving picture and artwork from some of the most talented and innovative artists in the world. Every year the artists chosen try to achieve in their projects a unique creative bent to where film and artwork happily collide to tell a story. The venue is called the New Frontier because it is a showcase for innovative storytelling projects that were first ideas and then experiments by artists who dare to take the moving narrative to the next level and go to where "no man has gone before."

The New Frontier, directed by its curator, Sheri Frilot (also a Sundance Film Festival senior programmer), is under the institutional umbrella of the Sundance Institute. Their focus is to pave a way for storytelling using different types of art form because they believe it the wave of the future. Frilot and her team showcased another year of impressive pure class acts of art in motion for storytelling--seven exhibits total.

Here is the list of exhibitors and their installation.

Coral: Rekindling Venus
Australian artist Lynette Wallworth is intrigued with the latest technologies. Her installations reflect beauty, revelation and wonder with a primary goal to connect people and the natural world. She uses photography, film and interactive technologies. Her touch-based interfaces will allow the viewer to engage in her films for an intuitive experience. Lynette likes to work with one theme at a time and then builds a series of installations featuring the theme. Coral: Rekindling Venus uses the coral reef as the subject and presents a purposefully measured pace for patient observation. Lynette explains, “It’s an extraordinary journey into a mysterious realm of fluorescent coral reefs, bioluminescent sea creatures and rare marine life, revealing a complex community living in the oceans most threatened by climate change.” One needs to see this disply on Lynette’s website. Black and white stills do not do this miraculous colorful presentation justice. For your viewing pleasure visit the website for Lynette Wallworth under coralrekindlingvenus.com

North of South, West of East
Artist and filmmaker Meredith Danluck uses four screens to shape a square format wrapping around a room. Each screen showcases a narrative short film. To view this installation one must sit in the middle of the room in a chair with wheels. Only twenty chairs are allowed at one time during the showing.

Cityscape 2095
AntiVJ (Yannick Jacquet, Mandril, Thomas Vaquie) artists blend music, sound design, painting with light projection to transform a city and its relationship to architecture.

Eyjafjallajokull
Joanie Lemercier, an AntiVJ artist experimenting with three-dimensional optical illusion visuals: a mapping order that uses painting, audiovisuals and light projection to show what might have happened during the 2010 Icelandic volcanic eruption in Europe.

Augmented Real
A Cal Arts graduate, Yung Jake, releases his first rap video, "Max Moyer" on YouTube. His creativity is geared to the internet. Screened from a laptop on to a large screen.

What's He Building There?
Klip Collective designed a 3-D projection-mapped parable, inspired by the Tom Waits song. This installation is to be viewed on the outdoor walls of the New Frontier Venue sipping a hot drink in the outdoor lounge. The walls will transform a story about a man on a mission inside a building. Yes! It\'s art colliding with movement Pur.

Pulse Index from creative artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is the installation I choose to feature for this article but all of the seven installations present an equally powerful exhibit of storytelling.

My thumbprint on display! A crazy thought, right? Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, earned a B.Sc. degree in Physical chemistry and is classified as an Electronic artist whose soul interest it to create a variety of platforms for public participation. His work can been seen in at least seven countries since 2010.

The project called "Pulse Index" is a biometric installation that records participants\' fingerprints at the same time as their heart rates. The display is capable of holding data from the last 10,952 participants.

Here is how it works: the most recent image is as tall as the room while the older ones gradually decrease in size until they are life-sized. This creates a Fibonacci spiral of skin (see images). The tools used are projectors, computers, digital microscope, industrial camera, metal enclosure, custom software. To participate, one must put their finger into a custom-made sensor equipped with a 220x digital microscope and a pulsimeter; the fingerprint appears on the largest cell of the display, pulsating to their heart beat. The more people try the piece one\'s own recording travels sideways and is reduced in size until it disappears altogether. The whole display is projected on three walls of the same room.

Wow! My thumbprint as a display of art. Pretty cool! For more information: http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/pulse_index.php