Could you be a medalist? Animation Design by Santos.
Mariana Santos
Mariana Santos is currently the CEO of Unicorn Interactive, an independent media startup working on digital storytelling. She graduated from the University of Lisbon with a bachelors in communication and industrial design. Then completed a masters in digital media while working at Hyper Island. Santos describes herself as a visual storyteller, and began her career as a motion animator and post-production editor at Universal Music Berlin.
Santos creates a wide range of work from interactive, animation, film, design, to books. I admire the interactive work she creates, as they tend to follow a similar personal style that’s very straight-forward and colorful. Her style works well specifically with maps and guides. The project I admire the most is the piece ‘Could you be a medallist’, as she took on a retro/gameboy aesthetic that made a super user-friendly piece that was fun and engaging.
Through her portfolio, she presents her work effectively by having automated slideshows with high fidelity visuals at each clickable album. Visuals are also followed with a paragraph description which is consistent throughout. The page is also adaptive, which is something I could implement for my own presentation.
// doesn't work since not a local image
// img = loadImage("https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/rbd-hats.jpg")
// notes say does work
// does not work for me
// img = loadImage("https://imgur.com/v1QmpAE.jpg")
// var img;
// function preload() {
// img = loadImage("./cmu.jpg");
// }
// function setup() {
// createCanvas(400, 400);
// frameRate(10);
// }
// function draw() {
// background(100);
// var scaleX = max(1, mouseX) / width;
// var scaleY = max(1, mouseY) / height;
// image(img, 10, 10, img.width * scaleX, img.height * scaleY);
// }
function preload() {
img = loadImage("https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/rbd-hats.jpg");
}
function setup() {
createCanvas(400, 400);
frameRate(10);
}
function draw() {
background(100);
var scale = max(1, mouseX) / width;
push();
// we will rotate about the upper left corner of the image
// that we will place at 10,10:
translate(10, 10);
// use mouseY value to determine rotation angle
rotate(radians(90 * mouseY / height));
// since we translated by 10,10, the "origin" for the image
// is 0, 0:
image(img, 0, 0, img.width * scale, img.height * scale);
pop();
}
// doesn't work since not a local image
// img = loadImage("https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/rbd-hats.jpg")
// notes say does work
// does not work for me
// img = loadImage("https://imgur.com/v1QmpAE.jpg")
// var img;
// function preload() {
// img = loadImage("./cmu.jpg");
// }
// function setup() {
// createCanvas(400, 400);
// frameRate(10);
// }
// function draw() {
// background(100);
// var scaleX = max(1, mouseX) / width;
// var scaleY = max(1, mouseY) / height;
// image(img, 10, 10, img.width * scaleX, img.height * scaleY);
// }
// function preload() {
// img = loadImage("https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/rbd-hats.jpg");
// }
// function setup() {
// createCanvas(400, 400);
// frameRate(10);
// }
// function draw() {
// background(100);
// var scale = max(1, mouseX) / width;
// push();
// // we will rotate about the upper left corner of the image
// // that we will place at 10,10:
// translate(10, 10);
// // use mouseY value to determine rotation angle
// rotate(radians(90 * mouseY / height));
// // since we translated by 10,10, the "origin" for the image
// // is 0, 0:
// image(img, 0, 0, img.width * scale, img.height * scale);
// pop();
// }
function preload() {
img = loadImage("https://imgur.com/v1QmpAE.jpg")}
function setup() {
createCanvas(400, 400);
frameRate(10);
}
function draw() {
background(100);
var scale = max(1, mouseX) / width;
push();
// we will rotate about the upper left corner of the image
// that we will place at 10,10:
translate(10, 10);
// use mouseY value to determine rotation angle
rotate(radians(90 * mouseY / height));
// since we translated by 10,10, the "origin" for the image
// is 0, 0:
image(img, 0, 0, img.width * scale, img.height * scale);
pop();
}
This is an Eyeo Lecture by Theo Watson and Nick Hardeman. I will specifically be focusing on and speaking about Watson, who is a British artist and programmer focusing on creating work that comes alive invites people to play. He received a BFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design.
Watson, Hardeman, and Emily Gobeille have a small studio based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts and are very focused on the new ways of storytelling through creating interactive installations and visualizations.
Along with Gobeille, Watson has founded Design I/O which is a studio that specializes in “the design and development of cutting edge, immersive, interactive installations.” I really like what Watson said about interaction testing and that it “often involves getting on your knees and trying to make your body the size of a five year-old’s body, trying to see how that feels both from an interaction perspective but also a scale perspective.” It is crucial to see how viewers are going to experience your work, especially if they are coming into it from a new perspective, both literally and figuratively seeing this project, Connected Worlds, targeted a younger audience.
Funky Forest Still
My favorite work of Watson’s and his teammates’ is called Funky Forest, which allows children to make trees using their bodies as well as direct water to their roots to keep them alive. Throughout the installation, they will hopefully discover that their actions have consequences and that creatures will either “appear or disappear depending on the health of the forest.”
Overall, I really appreciated how focused Watson was on the feedback and experience of the children who helped play test and eventually fully experience the Connected Worlds project. I found his positive attitude really refreshing. When children were asked to give feedback on some of the creatures, I found it compelling that they were the most descriptive about those they did not like or understand, as well as the fact that Watson and his teammates used that to their advantage by making more characters like that in order to intrigue the kids and make them question what they were seeing.
Reza a computational designer, software engineer, and creative director currently located in the Bay Area. He is currently working full-time at Google on WebAR as a User experience engineer. I watched his 50 minute lecture about physical generative design and his process he gave at the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis.
One of my favorite ideas of his is the observation of organic shapes from the common things around us. His favorite “perfection” is the shapes that are made when milk is poured into coffee. The organic curves that are generated from their combination is what he strives to achieve in his generative design work. He works on many different scaled projects at a time and have produced many things in the past years. I admire how he combines the computational world with the physical.
Afroditi Psarra is a multidisciplinary artist who bases a focus of electronic textiles (or “soft” circuits) and sound. She completed her PhD in Image, Technology and Design from the Complutense University of Madrid and is an assistant professor at the Center for Digital Arts & Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her rigorous research in Cyberpunk and New Media Art with focus on integrating science fiction ideas with performative and digital fields allows her to apply a humanistic approach to how technology is perceived and utilized.
In the lecture at Institute Systems Biology she introduces her work based on her believes that we will have to integrate and envision technologies as extensions of our body that enables us to live in a complicated and dynamic society that is increasingly digital. By partnering with other multidisciplinary artist Psarra is continuously exploring ways to interpret the “invisible” data that connects various aspects of society and how to allow people to be able to interact with and understand that “invisible” space of the world by creating smart e-textiles and “use technology to be used in a more human way” (Psarra, in the lecture). One of her most recent works is called Cosmic Bitcasting a collaboration with Cécile Lapoire to create a wearable cosmic ray detector which communicates the “invisible” information that is embedded in the space around us. The attire created would respond to the gamma radiation, X-rays, alpha and beta particles that are passing through the person’s body by using a series of light and vibrations.
The process of her work is documented on her website which shows the experimentation and coding of the Arduino modules she used to detect the rays and how she translates that data to soft circuits and finally to fabric.
Psarra’s work inspires us to rethink of technology, providing a different, often a sense of fictional sci-fi sensibility to her work that gets people who view and experience her work to be excited and engaged because working with textile is something very common in our daily lives. The integration and making them more digitally compatible will do more than just becoming an extension of our bodies, but also become a medium that connects us to the digital world and the digital world to the realm of the tangible.
The speaker, L05 (Carlos Garcia), is an artist, performer, designer, and engineer. He is a vocalist and producer in hip hop/electronic duo Celsius Electronics and a co-founder of the Branch Out Collective. He leads creative research and design as a member of the University of Michigan’s Emerging Technologies Group, where he manages the GroundWorks Media Lab. L05 is a 2013 Creative Capital Grantee and a 2016 Kresge Artist Fellow. He is in an art group called Complex Movements, which is “a Detroit-based artist collective supporting the transformation of communities by exploring the connections of complex science and social justice movements through multimedia interactive performance work like science fiction, music, projections, animation, workshops, and organizing”.
I deeply admire their current project Beware of the Dandelions, a mobile art installation that functions as a performance, workshop space, and visual arts exhibition. As a project, Beware of the Dandelions exceeds the scope of the performances. The collective started the project very early in 2013 and finished in early this year. They reason why this project took so long is that it is not just a performance piece; rather, is a mobile platform that organizes social-justice movements. First, the Beware of of the Dandelious live performance is a very fictionalized synthesis of the social-justice movements. Second, it shows “community mode” through the members of the art collective who run workshops in partnership with local artists and activists of their performing cities in order to acknowledge the events that are happening there and to understand the needs of people living there. Third, in installation mode, they “present the stories they have gathered in the process of interacting with locals, documenting and sharing social-justice work that goes largely ignored by mainstream media”. Complex Movements uses such experience to show and present performances of Beware of the Dandelions to their audience, centering story progression around the difference in their work.
This kind of presentation is really appealing to me that it can actually affects or just leave impression in people’s hearts.
This is Complex Movements, an artist collective based in Detroit, Michigan, that connects the complex sciences to social justice movements.
For those that do not know what the complex sciences are, it is explained as a study of complex systems, systems with many parts that interact to produce global behavior that cannot easily be explained in terms of interactions between the individual constituent elements.
Knowing this, Complex Movements uses the complex sciences by integrating their original music into visual arts exhibitions and mobile art installations to create a new way to deliver social justice messages of organizations and individuals who do not feel like they have a voice.
In their recent project, Beware of the Dandelions, Complex Movements uses a 400-square foot polyhedron to visually project sci-fi narratives to their audience. The man behind the visuals and animations is Wes Taylor, who hold graduate degree in 2-D design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a Senior Assistant Professor of Art & Design at Lawrence Tech University. What I love about his work is that he created a new way to express the art of storytelling through the uses of computer graphics and music. Looking at the intersection of computer systems and social movements to generate interactive visuals that really speak to its audience is what really inspired me.
Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist, and performer. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Integrated Digital Media at New York University. Kate’s Ph.D. focused on the use of real-time video systems within live choreography and the conceptual framework of ‘choreotopolgy’ a way to describe this work. She works on exploring the interface between choreography and technology. Her works show a very interesting relationship between dance and technology.
I admire the way she tries to re-think the choreography of dance and transform it into another technical form. “Hacking the Body” is one of her projects, in which she and other artists explored the interaction between dances and wearable technology. In “Hacking the Boday 2.0”, two wearables were designed to put on two dancers body when they performed. The wearables transformed the movements from dancers to signals and turned them into sounds. This research was described as “using the concept of hacking data to re-purpose and re-imagine biofeedback from the body.” This project showed an impressive possibility of how to combine live-performance and real-time technology together. It is a great inspiration for people to think about the messages from the human body in a different way.
She usually performs her works with dancers with wearables or other devices together. She used visual and audio feedback as the outward performance for the technical part. By watching the live performance with the real-time technical feedback, the audience can get a sense of connection between these two aspects.
This is the eyeofestival page and speech video for Kate Sicchio.
Paolo Ciuccarelli is part of a research design group, DensityDesign, in conjunction with a university in Italy. At Eyeo, Ciuccarelli talked about The Poetics of Data Experiences: how to visualize big data that displays the information that is expressive of time, space and emotion. Ciuccarelli uses the term info-poetry to teach that design should play with rhetoric and emotion, ensure the meaning of the message is understandable, make it reproducible and potentially open source it. He shows several examples of his student’s work where they essentially create projects that encapsulate data reflective of contemporary society and present it in a manner that follows the main info-design principles. It’s a step upward from a regular infographic; visually representing data in a way that will elicit emotion. I was drawn to example projects that really utilized media to express data as it was stronger than just using a computer to create a generative body.
Crumpled Italia
There was a project called Crumpled Italia where pieces of paper are displayed in a grid to represent different countries. Each piece of paper was crumbled to a percentage that matched the statistic of domestic abuse in the country. I found that piece extremely profound as it really elicits empathy without being exposed to a “gory” image which is what info-poetry is about. I find the general topic of representing and visualizing data fascinating. Ciuccarelli explains that he was fascinated with understanding complex systems and using data visualization to make sense of them as well as teach to others. As a person, I share that same fascination and would be interested in learning how to fuse generative computer graphics and tangible materials with design.
Essentially, his form of presenting data is the same in which he enjoys using graphics to communicate ideas and numbers but rendering them in such a way that the viewer experiences an emotional response. I noticed a lot of the times, the viewer is responding to abundance of data but the data is also elevated by variables such as color and music. This is a good example for myself to reference when thinking about how presentation and documentation of information should display not only the data itself but the context, mood and tone of the data.
For this Looking Outwards, I couldn’t help but do research on more than one artist – and I felt like in discussing one of the projects I saw and loved, it was essential to discuss the histories of each artist instead of just focusing on one thing.
Georgia Lupi is an information designer, artist, and author from Italy who utilizes data as her medium through which to tell stories and spread information. She originally started out as an architecture student, but transferred into design. She is also the co-founder of Accurat, a New York City based data-driven design firm. Her body of work reflects her job as a data-designer, and much of her work literally pertains to figuring out intuitive ways to visualize data to viewers that are disconnected from the meaning of such information. One such piece is permanently installed in the MoMA at the moment which acts as an interpretive landscape for a fashion exhibition that occurred earlier this year
Data ITEMS: A Fashion Landscape 2017 — Detail, picture from the opening
Stephanie Posavac is also a designer based out of the UK (but U.S. born) who tends to favor data as a medium for her work (specifically language, literature, and science) and earned her MFA in communication design, while her background lies in book design and text visualization. She focuses majorly on the visual representation of language or numbers and both have had their work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Her body of work also greatly reflects the way that she uses data and design (but focuses more on the design aspect in her work). An example of one of her pieces would be this collaborative project she did with David McCandless, where he provided content and text and she decided how to visually present the idea. Her main focus was getting people to want to look at something they normally would care to look at, and I think that drawing attention to things people don’t notice or avoid is very important to her practice as a designer and data analyst.
Left v. Right, Stephanie Posavec and David McCandless (no date available)
Now “Dear Data”, a project that is still going on, and which they collaborated to create is a project in which you can clearly see both of their interests lying in. “Dear Data” is a collaboration not only amongst themselves, but among the people who want to be involved as well – anyone who chooses to contribute becomes a part of this project. In short, the dear data project is a serious of postcards detailing how their week was regarding one topic (i.e. love life, pet life, work, etc.) sent between these two artists, on the front is the data which could be seen as just nice illustrations by anyone who does not understand, and then on the back lies the key, or in other words – how to read the drawing on the front. The idea was to create a collection of data that not only had some coherency but that could support hundreds of different kinds of stories form anyone who decides to participate. For them, it became a way of looking at their lives, and trying to put different aspects into a new context both visually, and in terms of meaning. The discussion topics themselves became performances, and art projects. This project is something that I genuinely admire because of the intricacy and care it holds for the artists, and even for those looking in from the outside. All of the information is personal, and it was started in an attempt to really connect with another person – what it’s led to is even more beautiful in that it not only fulfills everything the artists wanted from it, but goes beyond and inspires new ideas/realizations regarding the visualization of data and in a way brings back some magic for each of these artists in their respective fields.
They started off the presentation by talking about themselves/who they are how they met, which is a great segway into their collaborative piece considering it is not only their first collaboration but it is how they are getting to know one-another. They were also extremely confident and used some humor in discussing themselves and their work, which is something that’s important when you present if you want to be sure to grab an audience’s attention and respect. They go on to talk about the way they relate to design and their methods of working before actually discussing the project itself, allowing for a lot of build-up and a good foundation in terms of why this project was even of interest to them. They set the audience up to listen and think about data-design and how the work they discuss addresses it in a clever way through giving insight into the way that they work.
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