Month: October 2017

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Meejin Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 1995, a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University in 1997, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Korea in 1998. Today, she is a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, as well as the co-founded of Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP and MY Studio. Throughout her career, Yoon has received numerous awards and accolades and her work has been widely recognized for its innovative and interdisciplinary nature. Examples of her past projects can be found at http://mystudio.us/.

Yoon’s body of work is focused on the intersection architecture, technology, and public space. I’m impressed by the strategic way she approaches her work; she pays a lot of attention to the practicality of materials, space, and interactive potential. I also admire the publicness of her work. While it’s difficult to create work to be displayed in a gallery, I think it can be even more difficult to create work that is meant to exist in a public space and tangibly benefit the people who pass through that space. One of her works that I feel encapsulates these aspects is the “public parasol” she created in downtown Phoenix, seen below. It’s official title is shadow play, and it was specifically created to provide shade during the hottest times of the day and let sunlight in during the cooler hours. Yoon also managed to save several tons of material by being strategic with the design.

“Shadow Play”, created in 2015 at Roosevelt Street in Phoenix. Photo Credit: http://www.howeleryoon.com/projects/shadow-play 

When watching Yoon’s talk, I noticed her use of visuals right away. She includes so many relevant visuals that it was very rare for the video to be focused on her face. She is also very effective at providing background information that enhances the audience’s understanding of her work. For example, I would have been a little confused with the Mobius strip dress had I not known the cultural differences between how clothing is created. I think I’ll take these ideas to heart when I present my own work in the future. If needed, I’ll try to include any sketches I did and talk about my inspiration(s).

hyt-Looking-Outward-08: Morehshin Allahyari

Artworks

Eyeo 2017 talk: https://vimeo.com/search?q=eyeo+morehshin

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, thinker and activist originally born in Iran and later immigrated to the US. I was particularly drawn to her work  because of her selected focuses on social and political activism using experimental artforms — animation, 3d printing, web art, etc. Two of the projects that interested me in the lecture was the manifesto of Additivism and Material Speculation on ISIS. Specifically, for the latter one, she created 3D printed objects of old artifacts with a memory drive inside the artifact, supposedly preserving it for future generations for reference. I like the combination that the artist works between physicality and digital preservedness.

More work of hers can be viewed here: http://www.morehshin.com/material-speculation-isis/

(Sorry it seems like the Vimeo links were very hard to embed into this post, so I pasted the address link below.)

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Eyeo 2017 – Joanie Lemercier

Website

Joanie Lemercier is a French artist who works on projections of lights in space, exploring with how light and projections manipulated perceived reality. He sees light as medium and space as depth. He works on music festivals, installation, stage design, architecture, and, most recently, nature and landscape.

I am interested in exploring how he creates surreal 2D to 3D experiences using just lights and projections. He create these experiences by imitating the nature, translating instinct feelings, and creating visual manipulation. I am aspire how he goes with his concept to the last, using different mediums to complete high fidelity work. The created experiences are so immersive and powerful. In the Eyeo 2017 talk, it is interesting that he talks about that how human senses can be so easily deceived, that human need to be aware and critical about how they perceive reality.

Eyjafjallajökull, new york 2015

Château des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes, 2010

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Eyeo 2015 – Meejin Yoon from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

J. Meejin Yoon is a Korean-American architect and designer who is both a professor and head of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a specialty in designing for public spaces and utilizing emerging technologies in ways to encourage and facilitate interaction as well as crafting a specific user experience. Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 1995, her Masters of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University in 1997, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to Korea in 1998.

What I love about Yoon’s work is that the technology she utilizes and integrates into her work is not simply a novelty, but is meant to be there and enhances the overall piece. Sometimes it’s more upfront as seen in Double Horizon at the Mexico-US border, which logs the movement of cars through various security checkpoints as ripples of light. Other times it’s subtle, such as in the Sean Collier Memorial at MIT, where there is no visible technology, but the amount of computational precision it took to create that structure with little to no support is staggering.



Sean Collier Memorial at MIT in Boston, MA (Top), and “Double Horizon” at San Ysidro Land Port of Entry near San Diego, CA (Bottom)

During her presentation, Yoon speaks frankly about her work and often mentions when her installations don’t go as planned with a smile, and recognizes that once her work is out in the public sphere, it now belongs to the public, and seeing how people interact with her work is a driving force for her. A lot of her work is very open-ended for people to approach and make the space their own, which is something I’m really interested in incorporating into my own work. It’s really interesting to see how people respond to these public installations, where the user can be as much of a creator as the person who put the installation there, which I think can be a powerful tool in creating these kinds of open-ended spaces. Additionally, her honesty and highlighting the off-beat moments of her process in her presentation helped further convey that idea of playfulness and trust, something that I deeply respect and would like to integrate into my own presentations where I discuss my work as a learning process rather than a shiny final product.


Yoon’s “Swing Time,” an interactive installation where swings lit up according to acceleration and movement, provided a lot of opportunities for play. While not intended to hold more than two people per swing, people would pack into these anyway as the installation permitted this kind of open-ended interaction – it helped that there was a bar next door.

More of Meejin Yoon’s work can be found on the website of her architecture and design firm co-founded by Eric Höweler, Höweler + Yoon, with additional information on the MIT Department of Architecture website.

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Klaus Obermaier is a media-artist, choreographer, and composer in Vienna who creates multimedia art performances/installations using dancing, projectors provided from a team in Japan, animations, music, and computer programming developed and provided from a team in London. When presenting his works, he focuses on hierarchy and lighting along with the types of dances and abstractions. From his works, I learned that subtle details people tend to ignore such as lighting are things that should be he most important things to focus on. One of my most favorite works was named “APPARITION”, a dance and media performance that confronts aesthetic potential and the after effects of integrating interactivity. I like this piece because the animated projection in the background creates a harmony with the projections on the dancers through conflicting patterns and animations. Watching these patterns animate along with the dances and lighting is quite satisfying. His works are truly different and make use of very advanced technology. It’s worth checking out his works.

Website:

http://www.exile.at/apparition/background.html

 

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Above is Yuri Suzuki’s presentation at the Eyeo Festival in 2015.

Below is one of Suzuki’s works I was most interested in.

Yuri Suzuki is a designer, sound artist, and electronic musician from Tokyo, Japan. He likes to explore the relationship between humans and sound, and how sound affect human minds. He has his own design studio in London and has created works for the Museum of Modern Art in NY.
Suzuki seems to have a very intimate relationship with sound in the work he does. A lot of the work he presented at the Eyeo Festival included using records as his main source of sound. One that impressed me was his spherical record called The Sound of Earth. The record is globe-shaped (hence the name) that plays different music based on which area of land the needle passes over. He presents this work by showing samples of the sounds one would hear if they stood by his project. Video format to showcase his work is definitely the most effective, especially to display sound, which pictures cannot.
The most intriguing thing is how personal this project is. Suzuki traveled around the world, and over the course of four years, collected field recordings (like folk music, national anthems, pop music, etc.) from different countries. A journey around his globe takes 30 minutes.
Suzuki goes on to talk about a lot of his other works, one of which includes embedding 67 speakers into a car that records surrounding road sounds of London. His work seems very playful and whimsical, but he takes his work seriously.

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Sarah William is a current assistant professor of Urban planning as well as a director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT’s School of Architecture and planning. The Civic Data Design Lab at MIT utilizes data visualization and mapping techniques to analyze and visualize patterns at an urban scale and also allows different audience members to be able to understand the data and communicates the policies issues from the data. Digital Matatus is a project that I really liked, since it has such a simple design and yet so effectively conveys so much information.Below you can find a link to the works.
Link to her work
Something very interesting about the work she does is that she utilizes a lot of real life and real time data to create these very informative visuals. She believes that data is very essential and very important aspect of life. She believes that data could be used for both good and bad. She believes that it is how we use data which is what makes data truly powerful and impactful.

Screenshot of her work, Digital Matatus

Her presentation has a lot of logical flow to it, where she first explains the important concepts that enable her work, then explaining what some applications of those concepts. Finally establishing a baseline of what basic understanding of concepts, she explains her own project which at that point everyone will have clear understanding of. Below is a link to their presentation.

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Zach Lieberman Eyeo Festival 2011

Zach Lieberman Eyeo Festival 2017

Zach’s Website

Zach Lieberman is an artist, researcher, hacker and maker of interactive computational works that unveil the synesthetic relationships between human behavior, form and color. Most notably, he is one of the co-founders and developers of Open Frameworks, a c++ library for creative coding. You can find the documentation and more information about it here: http://openframeworks.cc/about/

Zach describes his life’s work as a splicing between three categories: artistic, commercial and educational. Though he describes his work as taking place between these binaries, his projects are often seen at the intersection of these spaces. As an artist, Zach primarily explores themes concerning the human form and uses technology as an artificial limb with which we can extend our interactions with the world.


The Manual Input Workstation presents a series of audiovisual vignettes which probe the expressive possibilities of hand gestures and finger movements.


Messa di Voce (“placing the voice” in Italian)- an audiovisual performance in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software.


Eyewriter- a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes.

Many of his projects, such as those noted above, pose the human as the central performer of the art. I admire this model of art creation and personally strive to engage an audience through my work in the way Zach’s pieces do. In interaction-driven artworks, we can see the tangible relationships between the human form and the artist’s visual expression, combining the two in a very poetic way. This places the audience in a very unique position of autonomy, allowing themselves to become the “creators” of new, generative works.

In his free time, Zach also loves to explore sketching for his own personal fulfillment and enjoyment. He posts daily sketches to his social media, garnering the attention of thousands each day.

Some of the most commonly observed visual motifs and elements he uses are circles, organic blobs, colors, typography and alphabet, masks and the body.

Zach enjoys being a mentor and educator to many. He has held teaching positions at the School for Poetic Computation and Parsons, and holds Friday Open Office Hours on Twitter.

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Jer Thorp – Eyeo Festival 2011 from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada. He has a background in genetics, and his art practice explores boundaries between science, data, art, and culture. He curates large scale data into elegant information analytics, some real time. He has collaborated with important institutes like the New York Times, NASA, and the 9/11 Memorial. His work takes large scale data that is hard to imagine and represent simply for a quick experience. He is able to break down large data into a part to whole relationship, then builds up an analytic that uses that logic. He uses many simple, iterative, and aesthetically pleasing diagrams that are easy to understand and remember in the moment. The graphic style and references are also consistent throughout the presentation (or at least the presentation of one project). These simple diagrams then build up to a much more complex and large scale analytic that is easily understandable.

link to his website

cduong-looking outward-08-Interactive Play in Public Spaces

Meejin Yoon is a Korean-American architect designer that went to Cornell University for a Barch and Harvard Graduate School for Design before before going off to teach at MIT and soon becoming the first female head of the department of architecture there. She created MY STudio to pursue creative works to intersect architecture with art and technology. She is based in several areas such as Boston, Massachusetts and Munich, Germany.

She thinks of herself as someone who wasn’t very inept at technology when she first started teaching at MIT and decided to take a course at MIT, even though she was teaching there, called “How to Make Anything”, which was basically a crash course on micro-controllers and fabrication. Here she created a project that was a defensible dress. This really showed how much she cared about personal space and public space, which are what all of her projects are based on. She has a strong fascination of the invisible line between public and private space.

She works on creating interactive play in public spaces, stating that they “gotta be fun” for the public or they won’t be successful. She also thinks that when creating a truly engaging public space you need to create something unfamiliar, “defamiliarize context so rules of engagement are less clear”. There were three projects that I really enjoyed hearing about: her design entry for the athens olympics, sculpture in roxbury, swing time.

The project for the competition at athens olympics was to really understand how people respond to and move through a public space and created in a public space you don’t know what is going to happen since you cannot predict people’s behaviors, which causes people to want to fool around with something to figure out how it works, which might cause it to break or cause them to just play around with them.

The sculpture reflected the citizen’s engagement with the city through an app that already existed that allowed citizens to engage with the city and tell the city what they might find like potholes, etc. Eventually the city would fix these problems within a specific time. Each part of the sculpture changed depending on the types of reports made and how the city was changing through the lights becoming brighter or dimmer depending on how many people reported a specific type of problem.

Photo of Sculpture in Roxbury

One more project that fascinated me was one where she studied how people interacted with public space to study if they even would interact with it. People seemed to really enjoy it. She wanted to create a project that people could engage with playfully, which was Swing Time. She made it into something more familiar and designed it after a tireswing, which helped adults feel like children again when they interacted with this project and even scaled the tireswing up so that the public really got a sense of being young again.



Three pictures above are of the Swing Time. The second one is of a diagram of the installation to incorporate the main idea of the project.

What I really admire about her projects is that she really cared about how the public reacted from her projects and she also learned from previous projects to better create her next project. She was really thinking about how the public could engage with a space and how to make it really enjoyable for them, which I really love. I also really love how she has integrated different fields of her interests into one specific field because I have the exact same interests: architecture, design, technology, and I wasn’t sure if it was possible to even combine the three. However, after listening to her talk at EyeO it seems that anything is really possible if you put your mind to it.

She gave a lot of examples and background information during her lectures, which was really interesting because it was easy to follow her train of thought and why she did what she did in each of her projects. You could also see a clear connection between her previous project and the next project to see how she has improved gradually each time she creates a new project. She also added some jokes here and there to keep her audience’s focus. I like that about her presentation and I want to learn to incorporate those into my presentations because I understand that lectures could be boring and that you need to engage with the audience in some way to make them want to keep listening and actually hear what you’re saying rather than just zoning out.

Eyeo 2015 – Meejin Yoon from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Links to all of her projects: http://www.howeleryoon.com/
Her Company “MY Studio”‘s site: http://www.mystudio.us/