Art & Immersive Technology Workshops

ASI and the Arts Council for Wyoming County are excited to co-present a series of free Art & Immersive Technology workshops for artists who are interested in utilizing virtual and augmented reality to create and/or enhance their work. This program is designed to introduce VR and AR platforms and programs to rural and urban artists who are interested in learning more about these tools. Click here to learn more about our Art & Immersive Technology Intensives.

This project is made possible with funds from the NYSCA in Partnership with Wave Farm: Immersive Art & Technology Initiative, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Art & Immersive Technology: Virtual and Augmented Reality Tools for Public Art

Ready to open the world of public art to a whole new reality? Western New York artists and creatives interested in incorporating immersive technology into their work can join media artists Eric Souther and Shasti O’Leary Soudant for a FREE hands-on workshop to learn creative skills for creating public art in an augmented reality. Workshop participants will  learn how to use virtual reality headsets and iPads to create virtual 3D models and how to place those models into the community as AR experiences using  Gravity Sketch VR and Shapr3D Pro. Come with an idea of where you would like to “see” your artwork and how it could be used to engage your community.

Equipment will be provided for shared use during the workshop but anyone who has a Meta Quest Oculus headset or an iPad can bring their own. No prior experience with the equipment or software is necessary, though interest and familiarity with technology is encouraged.

*The Saturday, October 1 workshop originally scheduled to take place at the Kenan Center in Lockport has been rescheduled to Saturday, October 15. Please note the location has also changed to the NACC in Niagara Falls.

Meet the Presenters

Shasti O’Leary Soudant

Shasti O’Leary Soudant attended School of Visual Arts, in New York, NY, received her BFA in Sculpture and Photography from Purchase College and completed her MFA in Visual Studies at The State University of New York at Buffalo, where she is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Design.

The artist’s recent work is mostly situated in public space, including “Kaleidoscope Grove” for the City of Erie, Pennsylvania, “LIFESIGNS” for the City of Buffalo, and “Do Not Mistake Our Softness for Weakness” that sits outside the entrance to the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Previous works include “Weeping Wall” for the Savarino Companies at 500 Seneca, “Wish Field” at Roswell Park Clinical Sciences Center, “Gut Flora” in the NFTA’s Allen/Medical Campus Station, commissioned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Public Art Initiative, and “Jaxoscope,” an interactive kaleidoscopic sculpture for the City of Jacksonville. She is currently at work on an Augmented Reality sculpture installation for The Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY.

Soudant’s public art practice began with Nuit Blanche in Toronto in 2014. For the artist’s talk she delivered at Hallwalls in 2017, curator John Massier wrote, “As part of the 2014 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, she produced Performance Anxiety: Halflife, a conceptual art work in which she, and a group of 100 actors used invisible ink to mark the skin of attendees throughout the city of Toronto. By the end of the night, the performers had spread the “infection” to 10,000 participants. Halflife contained many of the impulses that are integral to Shasti O’Leary-Soudant’s artistic practice: the use of light and electric colors, the outward currents of impact as a project travels from its nexus into a wider community of people, the self-imposed structure that dictates repetitive and systematic actions, and the intimacy of individual interactions that produce a larger collective experience.”

Her work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Savarino Companies’ 500 Seneca project, The Albright-Knox Public Art Initiative in partnership with the NFTA, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, the City of Jacksonville, Florida, and is an artist fellow for the City of Erie, Pennsylvania.

In addition to being a sculptor, she also designs and/or illustrates book covers for some of the world’s best-selling authors, including James Patterson, Sandra Brown, Caleb Carr, Jeffery Deaver, E.L. Doctorow, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Laura Lippman, Rhys Bowen, Lee Goldberg, Patricia Cornwell, Dan Brown, Nelson DeMille, Jacqueline Mitchard, Walter Mosley, Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, Marisha Pessl, Anna Quindlen, and Gore Vidal.

Eric Souther

Eric Souther is a new media artist who draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, ritual, critical theory, and New Materialism. He develops video instruments that investigate technological & cultural ecologies, agency, and emergence. He looks for new ways of seeing beyond the seductive qualities of an image, and to find unseen connections that help us understand our digital and non-digital existence. His work takes many pathways, which include single-channel video, interactive installation, projection mapping, print, virtual reality, and audiovisual performance.

His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and the Museum of Art, Zhangzhou, China. His work has screened in The Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Beyoglu, Instanbul, Cronosfera Festival, Alessandria, Italy, the Galerija 12 New Media Hub, Belgrade, Serbia, the Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania, and the Festival ECRÃ of Audiovisual Experimentations, Rio de Janeiro.

In 2016, Eric won the Juried Award for Time-Based at the international art competition ArtPrize. He received his B.F.A. in New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009 and his M.F.A. in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State School of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2011. He currently is an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Division of Expanded Media at NYSCC at Alfred University.