About the Exhibition

San Francisco-based Ryan Wolfe describes himself as a “device artist and interaction designer” whose works explore spatial and kinetic patterns. Wolfe’s Field of Grass, which spreads across the stairway wall up to the 21c spa, distills and recreates the feel of a windswept, grassy expanse. The movement of the blades is activated by wind data; viewers can watch as a gust of air moves across the entire installation. “I try to isolate and extract the defining elements of an experience,” says the artist. “While we all experience the world with analog-based sensory and cognitive systems, there is a digital-like granularity to how we analyze and store experiences. We don’t remember every single point in time as a discreet instant—rather our memories are aggregations of a number of instances we have grouped based on some consciously or subconsciously perceived similarity. The categorization and subsequent retrieval of these memories often centers on a singular experiential element: the quality of light on a cold fall day, the hive-like dance of people and machines at a crowded downtown intersection; the visible rise and fall of a summer breeze as experienced by a field of grass.”

About the artist
Ryan Wolfe earned a B.A. in Interaction Design from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His interactive installations, objects, and designs have been featured in museums and galleries throughout the US and Europe.