Month: October 2017

I perused through my peers’ looking outwards to come across this fun web toy, frankenSimulator.

Above: screenshots of compositions I made on the interactive site.

As a designer with an art background, I’ve been toying with the balance of form and function in my work. Often I aim for my work to have a purpose and achieve a particular goal. But other times, I simply want to satisfy myself and make something fun and pretty. It’s delightful to come across a piece that simply seems pretty, but I could also imagine it having functional applications. Such types of work could be used for promotional events, branding a product, film, or company release. It could also be a “hook” for a more serious campaign.

I could see a piece like this using concepts of primitive/complex shapes as we’ve learned in class, as well as objects and animation with arrays that we’re beginning to learn.

Thanks to this peer’s post, I was able to also look into the studio behind this piece, Animade, who works on various interactive/motion pieces. As I’ve been getting more into animation and illustration this semester, I am happy to add this studio’s work to my repertoire of knowledge!

Above: screenshot of Animade’s work on their site

For the first interesting piece someone else has posted, I chose this work, posted by “HDW” and created by Daniel Browns. His work is really interesting – in particular this cover artwork that he did for William Gibson’s republished books. One of my favorite styles of geometric art is the “sprawling city” genre, used in Inception and Dr. Strange. So when I saw Browns’s work, I got very excited.

Another piece that I found interesting was Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work on this algorithm that randomly deletes 1–10 friends from your Facebook profile, once installed. What’s interesting to me about this piece is its simplicity – the concept being, “would you notice the absence of this person if they were deleted without your knowledge?” It’s an interesting interrogation into modern friendships – what does it mean if you never notice one of your friends missing? This piece starts to ask that question.

Josh

Zach Lieberman at Eyeo 2011

Zach Lieberman actually holds a degree in the fine arts, and says that it was mostly by accident that he fell into working with technology. He’s become somewhat of a giant in the art and coding industry, as he was one of the co-creators of openFrameworks and open source C++. As an interactive new media artist, he describes his three muses as drawing, movement, and magic.

I chose to watch Zach’s first Eyeo presentation firstly because I remembered watching clips of his earlier presentation in lecture, and I recalled really enjoying his presentation style. However after watching this first presentation I’ve come to truly admire him for the creativity combined with the innovation of his works. A throughline comparing his projects would demonstrate that a common theme in his work is the relationship with and the effect it has on people. He stresses the humanity behind his work, and creates these sort of exhibits where people can come together. This is also evident in his Open Source materials and his Poetic School for computation.

I enjoyed Zach’s presentation because you felt how sincerely he cared about his work. He wasn’t professional and cold on stage, performing with gimmicks and flashy graphics like some might. He let his work and the reactions people had to it speak for itself. He conversed with the audience in his speech, rather than talking down at them, and he let his humor show through. That’s why his talk was able to pull me in for an entire 50 minutes, rather than bore me to death in the first 15.

Night Lights 2009

For this Looking Outwards, I decided to look into one of the projects that Ashley Chan wrote about. She decided to talk about some of the colorful illustrated works of John De Cesare – specifically about how he renders visual interpretations of musical scores through first studying music theory and creating a “complex algorithmic language” to interpret said musical scores. I’d say that I agree with much of her commentary on his work in the way it looks and acts as a visual representation of music – and the quote she gave from an analysis done on his work by Cooper Hewitt was extremely insightful regarding the way that he works. Particularly regarding her commentary on how Cesare’s work is unique from that of other artists who decide to visually represent score.

I’d venture to say however, that she left out some very fascinating information regarding the artist himself, for example the fact that he didn’t start doing this work until he was in his 60’s or so – he was born in Italy in 1890 and immigrated to the United States when he was a child. It should also be noted that De Cesare was not a musician, nor had he any musical training at the time he decided on doing this and that’s when he really dove himself into the deep history musical theory and the basics of such. As a notorious problem-solver, he couldn’t help but pick away at the complex idea of translating something entirely auditory into a visual art form, whilst still managing to maintain an aesthetically pleasing design and doing the score itself justice.

Link to the Looking Outwards:
https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2017/author/ashleyc1andrew-cmu-edu/