Seeing Hansen Island

On March 2, I went to an art lecture at 3pm in Mariposa 1012 for a future potential new media professor, Isla Hansen. She currently lives on NewYork City, and is one out of the six founding women of a collaborative team known as Dadpranks. Her work is based on developing systems and ways to connect technology with the human body; a term she used was technological mediation. She was inspired by the idea of sports photography and how these shots of the athletes made it look like they were "levitating" in mid air. One of her main focuses is developing things that we can use with our bodies, because she believes that technology and our bodies should always be progressing.

She has made a few body-interaction oriented games/installations, in which she said during her lecture that the games used as instrumentations for metaphors. One of the installations she mentioned was called "Monstroscopy" which is an interactive installation for the Children's Museum of Pittsburg where visitors are able to perform an endoscopic-like surgery on a monster. During this, they were able to see their hands inside the beast with the help of monitors, making it seem like they are emulating the surgical process of taking out/ making incisions on certain internal organs.

One awesome thing that I found interesting about Isla's work was that she doesn't just focus entirely on technology, but she adds the physical aspect into her work as well. She has incorporated puppetry to help with a demonstration for a microbiology lecture, and has done other performance pieces as well. Although she has several different focuses as a new media artist, it's not random at all; they all connect in a way that makes everything she does so cohesive.

I definitely see great potential in her as a professor at Sac State. The only thing I am disappointed in is that because this is my last semester here, I won't be able to take a class with her if she gets the position.

Selfie with Isla Hansen