Community Profiles: Limbic Media

Next time you’re in Sunset Room you might get a chance to play with our new interactive laser wall!  For us, this is a pretty big deal and an awfully fun new toy.  For our friends at Limbic Media who installed this new system for us, it’s child’s play.  No pun intended.  I had a chance to catch up with Limbic Media co-founder Justin Love recently, and peppered him with some questions so we could know him – and his ridiculous tech wizardry – a little better.
 

 

So first, tell us Justin – what exactly IS Limbic Media, and who is on your local team?

Limbic Media is a company that specializes in real-time interactive multimedia control technologies…thats a mouthful I know. What it means is that we create interfaces and devices that allow people to interact with and control audio, visuals, lights, and machines using natural user interfaces (e.g. body movements, facial expressions, eye movements), alternative interfaces (e.g. smart phones, wearable sensors, modified paintbrush) and biometrics (e.g. brainwave activity, heart rate, breathing).

We’ve recently transformed our 12′ window-front into G++ – Victoria’s first interactive media gallery. The gallery received a BC Film/BC Arts Council grant to produce the “Interactive Media Series at G++” that pairs five media artists with the team of interaction designers and engineers at Limbic Media to produce five interactive window-front multimedia installations. Each installation will have an interactive component that will enable the public to directly manipulate multimedia content through a variety of interactive mechanisms including: gesture, voice, physical interfaces, mobile devices, and the web.

We have an amazing team at Limbic and everyone that works here is an artist as well as an engineer. Manj Benning is an electrical engineer and musician in two popular local bands – Microbongo Sound System (Live Electro-Brazilian Dance ) and NikTex (Folk/Jazz/World) , Paul Reimer is an electrical engineer who VJs under the handle “PiXeLTHieF”, Nat Green is a mechanical engineering technician, electronics hacker, and installation artist. I have combined degrees in both Computer Science and Visual Art and have presented my work in galleries and international events in Canada, USA, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, and China.
 

I’m sure people are wondering what exactly is the pathway to being a self-employed professional digital wizard. How did you find yourself here?

I think a combination of hard work, luck, and being in the right place at the right time. During the last summer of my undergrad I was hired to work with Will Bauer – an artist-engineer with 20 years of experience creating interactive art and its underlying enabling technologies. At the end of the summer he asked me if I wanted to start a company with him after I graduated. Although Will is no longer with the company he taught us many valuable skills such as how to apply for arts and science grants – a skill that kept us going for our first few years. Recently, our skill set has gotten us some contracts in the industrial sensing industry. Our knowledge of a wide variety of sensor technologies, electronics, and computer vision can apparently be used for more than making art! Getting contracts like this will help to guarantee we get to keep working on the stuff we really love like developing new ways to interact with art and technology.

Are there other businesses like yours in Victoria, or BC?

Not as far as I know – there are some other organizations that work with interactive multimedia but most are related to web design or advertising. We actually have an intern coming to work with us from an interactive design program in Germany – she said we were the only company she could find in Victoria that did this kind of work.
 

It seems like your technology & interests bridge between a handful of different industries, disciplines & communities. Does technology play a role in bridging between these different worlds, and if so what is the nature of that role?

Technology plays a role in bridging these different worlds but it is a two way bridge – what I mean by this is that art influences the science and technology we create as much as technology influences the art work we make. There is a quote from the Dutch kinetic artist Theo Jansen that I like, he said that “The walls between art and engineering are only in our mind.”.  Our projects tend to incorporate multiple scientific and artistic disciplines and involve multi-disciplinary collaboration and we have worked with musicians, dancers, sculptors, video artists, painters, and poets.
 

We have seen that many of your projects are based around biofeedback or human/tech interfaces – what is it that interests you about this particular realm? Is this all for fun & play, or do you foresee or intend a deeper application of these designs?

There is certainly a playful side to these new types of natural and human interfaces in part because they are novel and people get really excited to just interact with things in new ways. But we take interaction very seriously at Limbic Media. We look at “interaction” as an aesthetic quality in its own right. Like any other aesthetic quality interaction needs to have its own specific aesthetic vocabulary and theoretical basis.

There is definitely a lot of potential for deeper applications of these types of technologies. Although I think that the most important questions in life won’t be answered by science and technology, I think they can be useful tools to enhance the exploration and experience of the human condition.
 

What can you tell us about your upcoming projects – what are you most excited about right now?

Over the summer we’ll have 4 more interactive installations at the G++ gallery: an interactive robot shadow puppet play, a biometric installation that uses multiple heart beats to generate light, sound and video, an eye-tracking based swarm painting installation, and an interactive stop motion animation installation. In the Fall we’ll be doing a public performance and architectural intervention with aboriginal artist Peter Morin titled “Button Blanket Dance, a projected river, and a courthouse” as part of the Victoria 150 celebrations. We’ve also been been short-listed to create a permanent public art installation for Victoria 150 – we’ll find out if we proceed to the final round in April.
 

So what does the evolution of Limbic Media look like? What’s the long-term vision?

We’d love to grow into a company like Moment Factory from Montreal – they do projects like us except on a scale around 100x larger! I think they’ve been around for over 10 years so it cool to see what a company like ours could potentially evolve into.  At the end of the day we all just want to keep working on projects we love – is there anything better than that?
 

Anything else you want our community to know?

You can sign up to receive emails about upcoming gallery events at http://www.limbicmedia.ca/gplusplus/.

Atagamaton from Cassie ONeil on Vimeo.