About

Cory Barr’s multidisciplinary work challenges the objectivity of human perception, our interpersonal interactions, and the nature of creativity. His pieces extend the traditions of Light and Space art, Participatory art, and Conceptual process art. Contemporary and emerging technologies are used to push our technological inheritance into areas not strictly driven by commercial or government goals. Mediums include programmable lights, cameras, prints, and custom computer software.

Most works take an aspect of universal human perception as the starting point, bypassing representational symbols and their shifting meanings. These works accentuate the subjectivity of our fundamental methods of perception. For example, by altering the light, we change the ways our eyes work as static art pieces begin to alter their form and animate. These visual changes exist only in our perception, not the physical world.

Viewer participation is essential to the form and content of many pieces. Viewers co-author the piece by interacting with it. This interaction can be alone or with others, creating moments of exchange between friends, strangers, and the space itself. Cameras, motion sensors, and other common tools of technological surveillance and exclusion are co-opted from their typical “keep-out” roles to create a collaborative, responsive piece.

Cory investigates the nature of creativity by setting up a collaboration between the artist and art-making technologies. These pieces explore how creative choices are consciously explorational or just learned motions of technique. In particular, he creates systems that mix traditional artistic marks with marks created by machine, handing off learned habits to automation while allowing more creative focus on new creative territory.