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"Sunspots" by Jeff Snyder and Drew Wallace

By Julia Buntaine, Editor in Chief

Have you ever wanted to go beyond, and into, the surface of a painting? Sunspots is a virtual installation which plunges you into the middle of four different and ever changing aesthetic worlds. Inspired by the forces that govern the dark patches which temporarily appear in our actual Sun, the visuals and sounds in Sunspots are entirely generative, based on the user's behavior. In the true form of interactive art, the piece is inert until you enter. Ironically, once you're there you are totally immobile, only able to rotate your point of view as a floating head immersed in these psychedelic, evocative, and illusory environments. Created by Jeff Snyder and Drew Wallace, this installation went live January 26th, 2018, in tandem with Snyder's eponymous electronic music album.

Visit and explore Sunspots HERE

​About the making of Sunspots:

"This collaboration came about while I was co-teaching a class at Princeton titled "Transformations in Arts and Engineering." At the same time that I was teaching that class, I was working on editing the sounds for the Sunspots album. To demonstrate a the concept of thread bias in sewing, Aatish Bhatia, one of my fellow instructors in the course, created an in-browser cloth simulation using virtual spring connections in javascript. I found the demonstration tool aesthetically fascinating, and started adapting the code for purely visual reasons, combining it with the sounds from the Sunspots album I was working on to create some videos. That summer I had a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and I decided to devote some time to learning WebGL and THREE.js so that I could do more effective graphics programming. I created a few "virtual installations" as part of this residency, building off of Aatish's code to create visual worlds around the sonic worlds I was refining for the Sunspots album. I had never been happy with the idea of restricting the Sunspots release to be just a fixed-media stereo recording that plays from beginning to end, since I had originally conceived of the material as being endlessly generative, so I saw this as a way to make that dream achievable. I worked more on the website installations over the next year, but I also realized the limitations of my WebGL skills - there was something about them that still held unfortunate connotations of 3D demos and FPS video games. I called on Drew Wallace, who had been a student in that fateful "Transformations in Arts and Engineering" course, to join me in fleshing them out more and pushing them a bit further. Drew is an experimental game designer, and has a truly adventurous aesthetic sense, along with serious graphics code chops. I thought he could help move the visual element of the work past those connotations into more unusual territory. We decided that we wanted to create a disorienting landscape in each piece, where the 3D rendering doesn't behave exactly as the viewer expects. Objects are sometimes invisible from one side but visible from the other, or they flicker in and out of existence, and there is no simple presentation of a horizon for the viewer. The viewer/listener can't interact, but can only observe, orbiting rotationally around the space. We were hoping this would evoke a dreamlike, otherworldly state."

- Jeff Snyder

Photo credit Kim Indresano. 

Photo credit Eric Li.

Jeff Snyder (left) is a composer, improviser and instrument-designer living in Princeton, New Jersey, and active in the New York City area. As founder and lead designer of Snyderphonics, Jeff designs and builds unusual electronic musical instruments. Jeff is a member of experimental electronic duo exclusiveOr, avant jazz group The Federico Ughi Quartet, improvisatory noise trio The Mizries, laptop ensemble Sideband, fronts electro-country band Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves and composes alternate-reality Early Music for an ensemble of his invented instruments. In 2009, Jeff co-founded an experimental music record label, Carrier Records, which continues to release strange and exciting experimental music. In 2011, he received a doctorate with distinction in Music Composition from Columbia University. He currently is the Director of Electronic Music at Princeton University, and the Director of PLOrk, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.

Drew Wallace (right) is a game designer, artist, and mystery man based in Los Angeles. His virtual environments reinterpret and repurpose classical computer graphics techniques, unseating the viewer's pre-notions of digital spaces, objects, and interactions. Past work from Drew includes imaginary game gallery Around the Bend, physics-based fighting game Sword Bros, suggestive technical illustration series The Printjob Manual, and soft-glitch vignette pentology A Show of Hands. In 2018, Drew joined game studio Giant Squid as a gameplay programmer.

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