Casey Reas
c@groupC.net
http://www.groupC.net/rpm
Since September 2001, Casey has been an Associate Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy. From June 1999 Ð August 2001 he worked and studied in the Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG) at the MIT Media Laboratory, led by Professor John Maeda. He has recently exhibited his work at the American Museum of Moving Image, the Ars Electronica Center, the Cooper Union, the New York Digital Salon, the Museum of Modern Art, Sega Joypolis, and Siggraph and his work has been published in a number of international books and magazines. Before joining the ACG, he worked as a Design Director at I/O 360 Digital Design in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.
RPM
RPM is a dynamic system for analyzing and experiencing the relationships between time and space. Manipulating the location, phase, and transparency of multiple instances of the same moving object creates new kinematic forms. RPM is inspired by past technological developments used to augment vision. After the development of the camera in the mid 19th century, men such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey began using its potential to stop time and analyze details of movement that had never before been visible to the human eye. In the 1930s, Harold Edgerton pioneered the process of stroboscopic photography which enabled capturing the successive movements of an object with a still camera. Utilizing this technique, the photographs of Herbert Matter and L. Moholy-Nagy began to reveal a new vision, a sight unbound from time. The medium of computation has provided a medium for further extending our vision. RPM combines concepts from old and new technology into a system for constructing a new vision. It augments the early experiments in time and motion by providing the tools for analysis made possible through computation.
Casey Reas: Software, Electronics
Edoardo Brambilla: Mechanisms
Thank you to John Maeda, Ben Fry, Brygg Ullmer, Jason Short, Jeff Michael
The RPM software was developed at the MIT Media Laboratory.
The physical design was realized at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.