Eric Corriel Studios

multidisciplinary art studio • immersive and interactive public art • art activism • digital/electronic art • nyc

Enter The Machine 1.0

Algorithmically generated prints with microcontroller, 2016

Multi-colored digital constellation of brightly colored, slightly pixelated, organically shaped digital blobs on a black background
Image courtesy of Eric Corriel Studios

Enter The Machine 1.0 is a series of “file portraits” that effectively turns hard drives inside out, putting their contents on display in raw form Shown in Manhattan (NY), Miami (FL), Poughkeepsie (NY), Queens (NY), Alexandria (VA), Brooklyn (NY)

Enter The Machine : exhibition shot; photo by Brett Wood

Imagine you could shrink yourself down small enough to swim around your hard drive and meet your files face to face—what would you see? Enter The Machine aims to provide a new way of seeing our digital files, one that does justice to their uniqueness, the diversity of the data they contain, and the complexity by which they are structured.

The original solo exhibition at Garis & Hahn in 2016 consisted of nine original 48” x 30” programmatically generated Duratrans prints in handmade light boxes. Each one contains a custom built electronic circuit that allows the light boxes to slowly pulse.

The nine light boxes are listed below.

Enter the Machine 1.0

Enter the Machine 1.0, photo by Brett Wood

Consists of 218 distinct files from taken from the artist’s desktop totaling 1.4GB of data. The dataset contains mostly jpg and png files (orange/red), with occasional mov files (pink), zip files (white), and Microsoft Office files (green and blue).

Enter the Machine 1.0: My Desktop (detail), photo by Brett Wood

Enter the Machine 1.1

Enter the Machine 1.1, photo by Brett Wood

The artist’s Downloads folder consists mostly of open source programming libraries and frameworks, such as OpenFrameworks, which was used to create these works. These coding libraries normally consist of thousands of small text files, which is what forms the very clustered center. Also in the Downloads folder are pdfs, images, movies, and zip files.

Enter the Machine 1.2

Enter the Machine 1.2, photo by Brett Wood

Shown here are 580 emails and their respective attachments, received between September 2014 and December 2014. The purple elements are the text component of each email while attachments are either represented in teal, orange for pdf files, and red for jpgs and pngs.

Enter the Machine 1.2 (detail), photo by Brett Wood

Enter the Machine 1.3

Enter the Machine 1.3, photo by Brett Wood

If you use iTunes, there’s a good chance you have a Compilations folder. This is an excerpt from the artist’s iTunes Compilations folder, artists A–E, which contains 547 mp3 files for a total of 2GB of music.

Enter the Machine 1.3: iTunes Compilations, A–E (detail), photo by Brett Wood

Enter the Machine 1.4

Enter the Machine 1.4, Photo by Brett Wood

A Dropbox folder is often the digital equivalent of a biologically diverse ecosystem, teaming with digital diversity. The artist’s Dropbox folder contains 2.5GB of data spread over 7,152 different files in over 100 different file types.

Enter the Machine 1.4 (detail); photo by Brett Wood

Enter the Machine 1.5

Enter the Machine 1.5, photo by Brett Wood

All 566 of the artist’s passwords are rendered here in plain sight for all to see.

Enter the Machine 1.5: All My Passwords

Enter the Machine 1.6

Enter the Machine 1.6, photo by Brett Wood

Buried in the System folder of Mac OS X v10.10 is a folder called LinguisticData, which contains the files needed to translate the operating system into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. In Mac OS X v10.10 these 16 languages weigh in at 440MB.

Enter the Machine 1.6: Mac OS X 10.10 Linguistic Data (detail)

Enter the Machine 1.7

Enter the Machine 1.7, photo by Brett Wood

The artist works and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and this piece consists of 1.9GB of data created throughout 2015. The glitch effect is a byproduct of the algorithm incorrectly process iff files (used in 3D rendering).

Enter the Machine 1.7 (detail), photo by Brett Wood

Enter the Machine 1.8

Enter the Machine 1.8, photo by Brett Wood

Previously working as a freelance web designer/developer, the artist created lots of websites for friends and family. This piece is his way of paying tribute to that part of his life. This work consists 3,608 files across four different websites resulting in over 418MB of data, mostly in the form of php, html, css, jpg, png, html, css, psd, and javascript files.

Enter the Machine 1.8: Websites I Created for Friends and Family, Namely lustforart.com, mattcorriel.com, reidblackman.com, seancorriel.com

Garis & Hahn Gallery

Enter The Machine at Garis & Hahn, photo by Brett Wood
Enter The Machine at Garis & Hahn, photo by Brett Wood
Enter The Machine at Garis & Hahn, photo by Brett Wood
Enter The Machine at Garis & Hahn, photo by Brett Wood

Enter The Machine was on display at Garis & Hahn in New York City from January 27th to April 17th, 2016.

The installation is accompanied by Digital Matter, a 15 minute looped single channel sound composition by Krista Dragomer. Each light box is handmade made by Chris Miano.

This stack of paper is a complete listing of every file in this exhibition
Enter The Machine at ONS, photo by Brett Wood
Enter The Machine at New York Media Center, photo by Brett Wood
Enter The Machine at New York Media Center, photo by Brett Wood
Enter The Machine at Miami Art Project, 2016; photo by Walker Waugh
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