Dear OpenFrameworks Peoples,
When we started Sosolimited, we dove head first into the OpenFrameworks universe and have never looked back. We’ve marveled at the growth of the OF code base and community over the last few years. It’s a staggering body of work and an incredibly powerful tool. We’re slow to the party, but after almost three years of coding with OpenFrameworks, we’re sharing our OpenFrameworks addon, ofxSoso.
For the last two years, we have lovingly toiled on the glass and metal leviathan we call “the ribbon”. We are distilling the beauty of nature’s patterns into 20 x 180 LCD glass pixels that swoop through the four story atrium of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
The sculpture itself is being hung as we speak. Jeff Lieberman and Bill Washabaugh, our collaborators on the piece, are down — I should say up because they are standing in a four-story high cherry picker — in Raleigh with a team of riggers, hanging the glass beast piece by piece. As you might imagine, it took some ingenious mechanical and structural engineering to get 3600 pieces of glass to twist and bend like a scarf in the wind.
As John mentioned in an earlier post, prior to joining Sosolimited in June, I spent the past two years completing an MFA in the Design|Media Arts program at UCLA. During my time there, I created a series of works exploring the potential to use technology to alter social interactions and increase one’s sense of agency within the current network of social relations. The final project in the series was Inneract – a location-based mobile phone application that allows people to imagine and realize alternative interactions in the real world.
Just over two years ago we decided to take Sosolimited to the big time and open up our own art and technology studio. It’s been an amazing experience so far. We’ve been able to work with some incredible clients and we’ve also found the time to develop to our artistic practice.
We’re now a studio of five. Lauren McCarthy joined us full time after finishing her Masters at the UCLA Design and Media Arts program. We’ve known Lauren for years and are really excited to have her on our team. Just this month we brought on board Chen Blume, a talented designer and all-around great person. We continue to work closely with our good friend and trusted advisor Jesse Baer-Kahn. Jesse is involved in a lot of innovative small businesses and you can follow his work on the City Retail blog.
