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>>Leo Villareal: I soon realized it was another form of art.
I became acquainted with Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, minimal artwork, and realized that
art could really be tripped down to much less. Another inspiration for me is the art of James
Turrell, who is working on a project about 150 miles north of here called "Roden Crater."
He's an amazing artist who is carving this crater creating tunnels and apertures in which
you can view the sky. Turrell is trying to create this effect of
the vaulting of heaven where he can bring the sky down for a viewer to observe.
My other passion, along with art, has been technology. I went to the interactive telecommunications
program at NYU in 1992. At NYU, I studied interactive television. I was remixing television
signals to create abstract art, treating television as a big clip art bin that I could remix at
will. I was also interested in surgical simulators.
I was experimenting with virtual reality, playing with sensors, navigation.
That led me, in the summer of '94, out to Interval Research in Palo Alto. Michael Naimark,
who you see here, created a stereoscopic camera rig that he drove around in Banff, Canada,
capturing stereoscopic stills. We spent the summer dimensionalizing Michael's data into
this video you see. We extracted 3-D information from the stereo pairs and started to put the
camera in places that the camera never was. So we started to abstract this information,
and in '94 it was a pretty exciting thing to be doing.
But for me, it really -- I started to look at data and find it interesting that at one
-- from one perspective, it's coherent, but from another it's abstract.