benfry.com
fathom.info

The presentation was by Ben Fry. He’s an expert in data visualization and part of Fathom which is a design and software consultancy in Boston. He also codeveloped Processing which is an open source programming language and IDE. He received his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab and was also the chair of design for Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design.

Some things I noticed about his presentation was that he used a lot of useful infographs that attract the attention of the audience. He starts off very basic and also uses a little bit of information shock value to grasp the audience’s attention. Afterwards he goes into a little more detail about his actual project. I think I can take a lot away from this presentation, however, there were some things I wasn’t a fan of either. Some slides were a little too packed with information and it wasn’t possible to internalize all the information.

The main project that Ben is working on is to take their clients data, and create patterns and narratives that the audiences can relate to. Allowing better understanding of topics like global gender gaps to gas turbine rhythms. Essentially trying to make more sense of the world.

 

Hyphae Crispata in Growing Objects

Kinematics Dress

Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jess Louis-Rosenberg are the co-founders of Nervous System in 2007, a design studio that applies cutting-edge technologies in design through scientific research and computational graphics. Jessica graduated from MIT with degrees in architecture and biology, while Jesse also attended MIT majoring in mathematics, and he previously worked as consultant in building modeling and design automation.

What’s fascinating about their works is the degree that they employ the computational design and digital fabrication in products that can be manufactured. A lot of their projects such as the Growing Objects draw inspirations from the forms and biological pattern of plants. During their presentation, they illustrated the process of abstracting essential forms and adding complexity and details through algorithm. Different experimentations and simulations had been done to produce the dynamic and interactive system that generates one of a kind for each product.

The 3D printed textile for the Kinematic project is also interesting because of the 2D flatness of each module in contrast to the degree of customization, variation in three dimensions that conform body curve, and the flexibility of movement in the final dress.

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

Mimi Son

Mimi Son studied at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design for Interaction Design, and got her MA in Interaction Design from the Landsdown Centre of Middlesex University in London. She is both a teacher, of Interactive Storytelling at Kaywon School of Art and Design, and an art director at her own studio, Kimchi and Chips.
I really admire Son for her work. As a woman excelling in the fields of both art and technology, she’s created some incredible works and has gained recognition for it. I really admire her tenacity to gain such a breadth of education in such a specialized topic, teach it, and create her own studio.
Son has a natural charisma when she presents. She makes jokes, is charmingly self-deprecating, and creates a good relationship between her and her audience. I think I can really learn from her techniques, and work to cultivate a atmosphere of interest and humor in my presentations.

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.