Okunseinde’s Afronaut on the street

Salome Asega & Ayodamola Okunseinde

http://ayo.io/about.html

video presentation

http://www.salome.zone/about/

Salome Asega and Ayodamola Okunseinde are two artists who have collaborated together over many projects including workshops, their museum The Iyapo Repository and many outreach projects that involve going into the streets of Brooklyn and collaborating with passerbys. Their works all address the lack of representation of black people in projections of the future. Salome Asega is a Brooklyn based artist who specializes in interactivity and installation art. Salome studied Design and Technology at Parsons as well as Social Practice at New York University. Okunseide is based in New York and also specializes in interactivity as well as wearable technology. Okunseide also studied Design and Technology at the New School in New York.

I admire both of these artist’s work because they are both highly dependent on participation and interaction of viewers. Asega’s personal work involves creating a collaborative pirate radio station and Okunseinde’s involves him dressing up as an “Afronaut” and walking the streets of New York and interacting with passerbys. I enjoy how heavily exterior variables have the potential to affect these artist’s works. In their presentation they both presented their personal work first and then moved on to their collaborative work. I enjoyed this because it was interesting to see how certain aspects of their personal work still arose in their collaborative work. They also started the presentation with a brief discussion on the discrimination of black people throughout history.

James George, is a artist that utilizes vision and tracking technologies to redefine what a photograph looks like. By applying the formats associated with feature films, interactive installations, and software products to advance the art of the moving image. He is a computer scientist and uses his skills to enhance the artwork. By exploring tools like microsoft’s kinect to figure out how to create virtual spaces.

I really admire that his work consist of collaborating with other researchers and artist, and taking photos and inserting them into digital spaces. I think projects like Clouds and Exquisite City are really fascinating because they make three dimensional spaces that one can venture through virtually. Clouds is my favorite because it collaborates with various artist and allows people to see the world through the lens of the artist. I think this has a very unique perspective to how to approach artwork, since we can see what the outcomes of the artist’s efforts can be.

Because his artwork is so collaborative, his presentation style is very unique as it brings in many other artist’s perspectives. He describes his work as a small portion of a new space within art forms. I think he effectively describes the medium of his work, since they are very technical. He describes the capabilities and limitations of said medium as well. When sharing my work, I think talking about my influencers, limitations and advantages are all good practices.

Eyeo 2015 – James George from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

I watch the Dear Data lecture from Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec. Both Giorgia and Stefanie are information designers but work and live on either side of the Atlantic. After meeting at EYEO, they decided to collaborate on a personalized data visualization project. They decided to take advantage of the distance and every week they chose a data point to track. They would independently choose a way to track that point and how to represent that point, leading in drastically different but sometimes surprisingly similar. All the letters were hand crafted and drawn, consuming much more time, but resulting in a much more personalized data visualization that ultimately lead to the two getting to know each other quite intimately despite only meeting in person on four occasions.

This project is absolutely fantastic. Data visualization is so strong on its own and I wouldn’t expect an analog approach to be beneficial. However, the exchange they had was surprisingly compelling. I admire the amount of effort to track data, compile it, and keep up for a year. The parallel methods they used were fairly interesting, especially when they diverged drastically.

One thing that I am curious about is how they were able to generate data points accurately and how to come up with topics each week. This is mainly because I am just surprised by how they were able to pull off such an impressive project. And the imperfection of this data visualization exchange is really what makes this such a compelling project.

James George & Jonathan Minard 

James George is an artist using code to discover creative potential in emerging technology, and he is based in Brooklyn, New York. .  He has been using computational photography to display an interactive storytelling.  He has worked with Microsoft Research, Grank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry at CMU, and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Japan.

Jonathan Minard  is a new-media documentarian who approaches technological through an anthropological lens.  He is also based in Brooklyn, New York.  He has worked at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute as a filmmaker competing in the Google Lunar X Prize to send a robot to the Moon. (His website has expired)

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What I found interesting about James and Jonathan’s work on Clouds was their perspective on using code to make an interactive documentary of 40 + influential coders.    I admire the way that they merge both code hybrid and dynamic 3D graphics  to visualize their ideas and the connections among them.  Both of them mentioned that they enjoy storytelling and I was fascinated by the way that users could parse through a documentary film by using their mouse to click on different parts of the screen.

During their presentation they actually went through the interactive documentary on the spot.  I could see that their would be many different ways a viewer could navigate the story.  I like how they connect the act of storytelling and interactiveness to the film.  The presentation was very natural and informative, and their pacing of information telling was also good.

Eyeo 2014

source

James George and Jonathan Minard talk about computational documentary exploring art and code.

 

 

 

Artist: Patricio Gonzalez Vivo
Title: Point Cloud City

Patricio started his professional career as a pyschologist in Brazil. He specialized in what he called ‘expressive art therapy’ – using art as a medium to express a person’s ‘interior landscape’. He then trained as programmer in Argentina.  He now works in New York with Mapzen – a company that develops open source tools to visualize data. He describes his work as using code and light to animate data. He credits ‘shaders’ for the effectiveness of his work.

Patricio combines engineering and art – an difficult mix in my opinion. He combines engineering’s cold, hard data with the artist’s organic expressiveness. He makes data aesthetically appealing by bridging ‘science’ and ‘art’.  Among his most interesting projects is Point Cloud City (shown above) where he takes depth data from Google Street View images and recreates an animation of the scenes in point clouds with light.

His command of the tools of his work and the mesmerizing results make his presentations captivating. The lessons I took are not so much how to present my work as what possibilities there are in using code to visualize data.

He talks about his latest project on how to visualize the effects of sea level rises in San Francisco and New York at Eyeo 2016 ‘What are the chances?’

Deray Mckesson and Daniel Sinyangwe are two activists in the Black Lives Matter Movement. They noted that they became such when they realize how different America is from the country they thought it be; specifically for McKesson, it was when he was in a crowd and got tear gassed during a protest.

I really admire their passion for fighting against police brutality and how earnest they are about it. They go so deeply into researching the issues and not just perpetuating every story they hear, but making sure that the facts are there and that they are truly helping their cause. They create multiple graphs and charts to demonstrate their information clearly and effectively. In particular though I admire the map of police murders of black people because it is so effective and dispels falsely conceived notions about how these are isolated incidents.

I linked to their two websites here and here. One is specifically about mapping the police violence, while the other is about the movement in general. Their video can be seen below.

Eyeo 2015 – Deray Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Kyle McDonald

The artist I will present for this weekly assignment is Kyle McDonald. McDonald works on the intersection between artificial intelligence and art, and creates tools to allow artists to apply machine learning to their work. He is a professor at NYU ITP and a artist in residence at CMU.

What I like about his work is that McDonald focuses on understanding artificial intelligence, and does this by placing it in contrast to human intelligence, asking questions about its meaning, how is it different from human intelligence, and where it might lead to in the future.

Some of the interesting aspects Kyle explores in his work are the biases AI currently has, for example, by asking “who isn’t in the training data?”, as well as looking at patterns of AI and playing around with what various data sets can result in.

McDonald’s work combines exploration of AI – what is it capable of doing and how can you leverage it to create art, along with thoughts on the results, problems and philosophical questions this developing technology creates.

Kyle McDonald talking about AI in his talk “Weird Intelligence”, as part of the Eyeo annual conference. source. 

Eyeo 2015 – Jesse Louis-Rosenburg and Jessica Rosenkrantz from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Nervous System: Jesse Louis-Rosenburg and Jessica Rosenkrantz

Their website: http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/index.php

I watched the video by Jesse Louis-Rosenburg and Jessica Rosenkrantz from the “Nervous System” studio. Jesse has a background in math and computer science, and Jessica has a background in biology and architecture. They both attended MIT for college, and their joint studio is based in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Jesse and Jessica teamed up to create Nervous System, a cross-disciplinary studio that explores how patterns emerge and how to create computer-controlled digital fabrication algorithms based on those patterns. Their body of work is very interesting to me, as an interdisciplinary student myself who is interested in science and art. A lot of their projects explained in the video explored the development of form and pattern in biological processes, such as vein growth in leaves and cellular growth and differentiation. They study these patterns and use digital fabrication to bring their knowledge of these patterns to the general public, in the form of products like jewelry or lamps. I admire their work because, not only are they deeply exploring these scientific topics of biological pattern-making, but they are also making this knowledge accessible to the general public.

Jesse and Jessica’s presentation style was effective. They used visuals to aid their discussion, and they explained each project from start to finish: from idea creation, process/problem solving, and the final product. From their presentation, I can take note of how they motivated each of their projects to the audience, and how they explained each project in a way that anyone in the audience could understand.

Below is a video explanation of “Kinematics”, a project by Nervous System that actually does not replicate biological patterns but rather uses computation to create flowy/foldable 3D-printed “fabrics” or jewelry. As the video shows, they scanned the body of the human model and fit a 3D-model of a dress to the human model. Super cool!

"4D-printed" shape-changing dress and jewellery by Nervous System from Dezeen on Vimeo.

Burak Arikan and Network Mapping

Burak Arikan is an artist who finds his inspiration in two worlds, New York City and Istanbul. Arikan completed his master’s degree at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he explored networked systems that address “the transition from connectivity to collectivity” (eyeo speaker bio) in creative expression. Before his MIT experience, he received a M.A. degree in Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Yildiz Technical University.

Post MIT, Arikan founded Graph Commons Platform, which is dedicated to provide “network intelligence.” In his own words, he describes Graph Commons as a “collaborative network mapping platform and knowledge base of relationships.” Arikan believes that the modern day networks, whether it is social media input or social or economic issues, are rich with information and yet we have no handy tool to tap into such a resource. This is the exact vacuum where Graph Commons fits in, as a machinery which generates maps that render the relationship visible. Like how Arikan intended it to be, Graph Commons is a powerful tool that enables not only face collaboration, but also easy subtraction and isolation of information within a network. For example, this cumulative project timeline-map he presented at Eyeo below. Based on the infrastructure of the dataset, the resulting interactive map could be in various appearances, which are both interesting and informative to look at. A networked piece of information powered by Graph Commons can also shed new light on a discussed issue, by revealing previously overlooked connections.

Network is an unique medium for expression and for action.

Burak Arikan, Eyeo Festival 2014

 

Watch Arikan’s speech at Eyeo 2014 here

Burak Arikan: Eyeo Speaker bio 

Check out Graph Commons here