Regretfully, we have had to cancel this week’s lecture, “Creating Large Scale Participatory Public Installations,” by Clark alums Lorne Covington and Bill Saiff on Thursday, October 23 at 7:30pm. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to see you at future events sponsored by our Interactive Arts Collaborative. More to come soon!
How do you create public art and experiences that respond to people—not just one person, but many, all at once? Artists, technologists, and Clark University alumni Lorne Covington ’81 and Bill Saiff ’81 of NOIRFLUX will share how they design large-scale interactive environments where curious—but non-specialist—audiences become participants. Their work blends readily available technologies with their own custom-built tools to create installations that can sense, respond to, and engage any number of people in real time.
In this talk, Covington and Saiff will describe how they use design methods that focus on the participants’ experiences to make intuitive, engaging, and rewarding installations. They will show examples across art, education, research, and entertainment, and will invite the audience to join in and interact with some of their work firsthand.
Covington and Saiff’s creative journey began in the late 1970s, experimenting with Clark’s PDP-11/70 computer in the Goddard Library basement. By the early 1980s they were already designing some of the world’s first interactive video systems and applications. While their professional careers took them down separate paths—Lorne as a filmmaker, technologist, and creative innovator, and Bill as a leader in user experience research and design—they remained collaborators, continually refining their shared vision of how people engage with technology. Since founding NOIRFLUX in 2011, they have combined Lorne’s expertise in interactive media and sensing technologies with Bill’s decades of UX leadership to create installations that transform spectators into collective participants through interaction, exploration, and play.
Admission is free and open to the public. This event is sponsored by the Interactive Arts Collaborative through the Arts + Technology Program and is hosted by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities, the Becker School of Design and Technology, and the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Clark University.
