Interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works with non-academic publics. Beatriz is a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble and a co-founder of Preemptive Media, an arts activism and technology group. Beatriz is an Assistant Professor of Arts, Computation, Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
One project known as PigeonBlog uses carrier pigeons equipped with tiny high-tech backpacks that have sensors collecting data on toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, as the birds fly about city skies. Information collected is sent to a central computer, which automatically posts a map of the pollutants' concentration on the Internet.
Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen's Listening Post
Ben Rubin, Artist and Mark Hansen, Associate Professor of Statistics created the Listening Post to catch anonymous unrestricted chat room, bulletin boards text fragments and phrases in real time and turn them into synthesized voices and flickering words that are displayed across suspended columns of electronic screens. The voices take the viewer into a cyberspace that seems to mirror medieval liturgies while they cycle through six movements of “visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic”.