October 2017 – Page 24 – [OLD FALL 2017] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

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“Eyeo 2015 Meejin Yoon” from Eyeo Festival //INSTINT

Meejin Yoon is Korean American Architect who graduated from Cornell University and received her Master in Urban Design from Harvard University. She effectively integrated responsive technologies and architecture to create interactive environment and public spaces.

“Hover” in New Orleans by Meejin Yoon-interactive lighting installation

One of her projects, “Hover”, shows a nice combination of her interest in responsive technology and interactive environment. Hover is a temporary canopy fir the DesCours festival. It is a luminous canopy that has both LEDs and “photovoltaic” cells that power them. She took inspiration from human body cell to create this interactive installation. The installation reacts to the surrounding environment, emitting more light on sunny days and less on cloudy days.

How she used the material and how the material or system reacts to its surrounding is very inspiring. Everything she creates and every material she uses is very intentional as aesthetic as well as systematic. And the result of the practicality of materials, space, and interactive potential created a public installation that interacts with the viewers.

link to hover

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https://twitter.com/sandsfishhttps://twitter.com/sandsfishhttps://twitter.com/sandsfish

https://www.sandsfish.com/skullwhispering/

For this week’s Looking Outwards, I chose to study the work of Sands Fish who is currently researching at a MIT Media Lab’s Civic Media Group. He introduces himself as both an artist and a researcher whose interests lie in the field of computer science and design. I thought his works would be interesting to investigate because his works lie closely to the environment of CMU where I’m studying design. I thought it would be interesting to learn about his works and try to identify with some of the design practices I am learning and doing here in CMU.

For his Eyeo 2017 lecture, he focused on “Building Parallel Realities”. Sands Fish specifically focused on futures and how speculative designs can contribute to ” shift us into another reality via objects and devices that aren’t born of the status quo, or of our own time or place”. Mainly, his lecture focuses on the ways to integrate individuals from different backgrounds into one. In this talk, Sands explores how, using design, art, and media, we can embody ideas and worlds in objects, and look critically at our assumptions about how our world has to be. He details his work at the MIT Media Lab building provocative police futures to question who participates in this design space, and how we might create more humane alternatives.

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For this post, I watched Chris Sugrue‘s lecture. She is a visual artist, designer and programmer who creates digital interactive installations. She has a Masters of Fine Arts in Design from Parsons School of Design and currently teaches at Parsons Paris, in France. Sugrue’s art is self described as playful, and mainly comprises of light and interaction.

I’m inspired by her work because it focuses on immersing the viewer/user in the interaction and in the world that she has created. Her project Delicate Boundaries is interesting to me because it bridges the gap between the screen and the real world through an illusion where bugs emerge from the screen and onto your arms when it’s touched. I like the life that she gave to the virtual bugs as they swarm your hand desperate to escape. Her other projects, like Memory of Form and Matter and Base 8, also use illusions like Pepper’s ghost to integrate digital imagery in to the physical world.

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CLOUDS

Browsing the list of speakers, the thumbnail for CLOUDS caught my attention. It’s an interactive documentary representing open source communities through depicting the stories of invention and discovery of 45 programmers. The team behind CLOUDS consists of James George, an artist who uses computational photography for making portraits and interactive storytelling, and Jonathan Minard, an alum of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute who uses an anthropological approach to tell stories of the shifts of science and art.

The use of computational graphics to tell these stories lends an even more cohesive approach to telling these stories. It adds another dimension to the idea of marrying videography, design, and programming.

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Peer: Supawat Vitoorapakorn

Peer Post: https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2017/2017/10/13/svitoora-07-font-map/

Creator: IDEO

Title of Work: IDEO Font Map

Year of Creation: 2016

Link to Project Work: http://fontmap.ideo.com/

Link to Artist Bio: https://www.ideo.com/about

The IDEO Font Map Supawat discussed in his Looking Outwards 07 interested me for reasons similar as Supawat’s — collectively, typeface can be considered a massive arsenal of bullets used for different purposes. For exploration purposes, the IDEO Map gives users the ability to visualize a type and its similarities to others — by grouping type based on shared elements and the intensity of those shared elements, it becomes easier to encourage the utility of less-used typeface (rather than use established, sometimes over-used typeface).

As an actual selection tool(i.e. in opposition to dropdown style menu) however, the Font Map can be somewhat confusing — the quantity of sampled “A”s on a frame is overwhelming, and the individual aspects of the typeface, although highly contrasted, get lost in a sea of letters. The user does not have the ability to increase the proximities of the letters further away from each other, nor do they have the ability to swap the A for a different letter.

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(Above is Kate Hollenbach’s lecture at INST-INT 2014)

Kate Hollenbach is an artist and programmer who develops interactive systems and technologies that incorporate the human body, human gestures as well as the environment’s physical space. Her experiences came from being an interface designer and product developer from a computer science undergraduate background. She was previously the Director of Design and Computation at Oblong Industries, where she oversaw the Mezzanine project. One of the projects she took part of while at Oblong that I thought was the most interesting was “Tamper”. It uses multiple screens that play videos and the Tamper system allows the user to edit videos (cinematic design) through gestures alone, which is sensed through wearing a glove. What I love about this project is that this type of technology always seemed so surreal and only seen in movies. However, it is possible through sensors and data collection. It is making the imagined possible. And then from the Tamper project, it led to other projects that are more developed, such as the G-Speak (eg. allows more than one human interaction with the system) or the Rummage (eg. photo sorting). All of her projects think about the 3D space, transforming two-dimensional things like videos and photos into an object within a XYZ plane. As her works are very complex and may not be easily understood or visualized through words alone, they are explained through demonstration videos of someone interacting with the system.

(Below is a demonstration of what Tamper does)

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The person I chose to reflect on for this week’s Looking Outwards is J.Meejin Yoon

Caption: A picture of J.Meejin and her husband, Eric. Together, they founded an architectural studio, called Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP, as a husband and wife team. Yoon is also a cofounder of MyStudio.

J.Meejin Yoon is an architect, designer, and educator. She started her education in 1995, at Cornell University studying architecture. Then, she received her Masters of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard (1997).

Now, she is the head of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Along with the 2015 new Generation Award, she was has been recognized as Architecture League’s Emerging Voices (2012), Rome Prize in Design (2005) and many more. Her works and research focus on intersecting architecture, technology, nature, and public space.

Caption: Eyeo talk by J.Meejin Yoon on interactive play in public space. I admired her presentation because she presented her work with humor, honesty, and thought processes to specific aspects of the project.

I admire that her work consistently incorporated nature. In addition, I like how her work aims to encourage human interaction. I admire her as a person. She is very humble, yet so accomplished.

My favorite project was “Swing Time.” I liked this project because it was all about encouraging people of all ages to play and engage. She specifically mentioned, that she wanted to experiment to find a way to allow parents and young adults to be brought back to their childhood days with this project. I also really liked her project, Sean Collier Memorial. I like the way she incorporated Incan architecture and how she said at the end: the project was no longer her’s, but the project was now the MIT community’s.

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INSTINT 2014-Jen Lewin

I decided to look into the works of Jen Lewin based on the information she delivered during her Eyeo Festival talk in 2014. Based in New York, Lewin works as a light and interactive sculptor, making works that allow the public to create their own art. What I found inspirational was Lewin’s focus on the “experience” of her art. Traditionally, art is almost always defined by its final product. However, with Lewin’s publicly available art, that is not the case. Lewin’s ability to allow her art to be ever-changing as a deviation to the norm makes it even more admirable.

The way that Lewin presented her work made me appreciate her work even more. Rather than just displaying each of the projects she accomplished or listing out the things that she had done, she went into her process and reasoning behind her decisions. The way in which she was able to express her thinking to her audience was incredibly effective in a way that positively promoted her work.

Magical Harp Sculpture

After watching the video, I delved in to her Magical Harp sculpture, located in Palo Alto, California in 2015. Deemed, playful, yet sophisticated, the piece was included in the Magical Bridge Playground, an unconventional sort of playground allowing those of different cognitive and physical abilities to enjoy. The consideration of those with different capabilities as well as the overall construction and design of the piece was incredibly inspiring to watch.

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Complex Movements: Beware of Dandelions, 2016

L05, also known as Carlos Garcia, is a member of the Detroit based collective, Complex Movements, a group that aims to address social justice issues through multimedia performance art. Their current project “Beware of Dandelions” is a mobile art installation made up of a 400 square foot dome like structure. Viewers go inside the dome as the piece, which combines performance, hip hop, and generative design. This piece seeks to communicate about community organization, function as an oral history archive and as performance art. I was interested in Complex Movement’s work because of the approach Beware of Dandelions took to local social justice, turning it into an artistic attraction that allows visitors and locals to engage in the issue in a captivating manner.

Link to Complex Movement’s website

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While we center art on a lot of traditional style painting, drawings, and some new technology generated visual arts, Sissel Tolaas work is very interesting. In fact, it stinks. Sissel Tolas focus on scent and its ability to bring back memories. Tolaas has collected over 7000 different real scents. She believes that scent is one of the strongest image and memory provoking sense that we have. In her presentation, she showcases the variety of the scents she has collected and how they collect the scents in the first place. While Sissel Tolaas does not have a seperate artist page, she does have the smell memory kit infosite.