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Artist Talk with Walter Kim on Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces, May 2

***Note new date and location for Artist Talk with Walter Kim.***

Join us for lunch and conversation with artist Walter Kim at the Berkeley Institute of Design. Kim’s new work Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces is currently on display in the BCNM Commons.

Modeling the interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces will be presented in two phases, using the screen as a platform for both research and presentation. During the first month, a half hour compilation of tracking shots will be screened as a precursor to Walter Kim’s work. Expect to see clips from films such as ‘Touch of Evil’, ‘Boogie Nights’, ‘La Haine’ and ‘Nostalghia’, mixed in with many others. On February 3, these clips will make space for the premiere of Kim’s latest video, a new work produced specifically for the BCNM Commons video art program. Using a Cornell Box, this work tricks the viewers’ perception and resides on the edge of the virtual and the real. With a series of complex camera moves performed by a robotic arm, Kim delivers scenes that act as 3D renderings, when in fact they are not.

Walter Kim is an artist/engineer based in San Francisco. Walter comes from a background of theoretical mathematics but in recent years has been working in the field of robotics and digital media. He has worked in the creative media industry as a design engineer and technical director working on both software and industrial design projects involving human-computer interaction (HCI) for robotics and digital cinema. Walter has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at Université Paris 13 and on faculty in the math department at the University of California, Irvine. Walter has also taught geometry in the architecture department at the California College of the Arts. Walter currently works at Ayasdi, a data visualization startup that originated out of the computational topology research group in Stanford University’s mathematics department.