Category: LookingOutwards-08

Jihee Kim (Section D)– LookingOutwards-08

Eyeo 2015 – Jake Barton from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

Jake Barton is an American designer and the principal and founder of Local Projects, which is a design firm that is based in New York. The firm specializes on creating public spaces with the focus on designing different experiences. At Northwestern University, he studied performance studies and afterwards started his career in public space design with first getting involved in set designing for Broadway productions. Continuing his interest in human interaction and communication, he went to graduate school for interactive telecommunications at NYU. In an interview with Designboom, Barton said that he was always interested in how crowds of people could be better storytellers than curators, regardless of the subject matter. He always had the desire to incorporate technology in a way that will allow him to gather the public’s voice and make it visible.


A Tour Of The 9/11 Museum With The Man Who Designed It.

What is fascinating about Barton’s workflow is the amount of attention that he gives to the way people’s memory system works, which is evident in his design process for the 9/11 memorial museum. The 9/11 memorial museum has an interesting curatorial system due to Barton’s effort to better memory systems. He believes that having a physical object in front of you to interact with allows you to think faster, learn, engage and build connections with the information given to you. All over the museum are full-sized wall screens that have displays of words collected with algorithms, recordings and writings of people’s stories on the 9/11 incident. Some of these information is projected on physical objects/structures/sculptures that represent 9/11, such as objects that look like debris. As someone studying architecture, I admire these aspects of the museum because of its close attention to the ways to augment people’s experience within a public space and to most effectively deliver data and engage the people through making the public opinion more tangible.

In his presentation in Eyeo 2015, he demonstrates the effects of the relationship between the way people think and the availability of physical objects that aid in their thought/memory process. He discusses projects other than the 9/11 memorial museum, including an app that demonstrates physics equations through playground activities and display screens that make city tour guides more interactive, relatable and enticing. He presented his projects in a coherent, captivating manner, balancing narratives and visuals. Visual elements such as pictures and video clips were coherent and relevant as they were of actual users of his designs. The clarity and conciseness of external materials significantly contributed to his successful delivery of information, which I believe I could incorporate in both my architectural work and work for this course.

If I had to point out one thing that I took away from this 50-minute video, it would be the importance of consideration of the human experience and interaction in designing public spaces. It is interesting how thoughtfully placed activities can amplify the effects of storytelling/conveyance of information. Barton certainly inspires us to take a step further in designing people’s memories so that the information would settle more personally and live longer within their minds.

For his interview with Designboom, visit:

interview with jake barton, founder of local projects

For more information on his firm: Local Projects

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Poisonous Antidote

Mark Farid. Image courtesy of the artist.

https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/4xq99d/london-artist-turns-entire-online-public-portraits

London-based artist Mark Farid explores Poisonous Antidote in an online gallery (Gazell.io) where he offers up his various online presences as 24-hour public portraits over the course of 31 days. He uses data from emails, text messages, phone calls, Skype conversations, and other platforms are then used as fodder for an abstract, ever-evolving 3D-printed sculpture made of four unique parts, each portraying a week of Farid’s life. In his project, he focused on how ones internet personality is established in the form of passwords and other inputs that one might have on the internet about themselves.

From Farid himself, “I’m interested to see how I self-censor and how I change my actions because everything is being broadcast live,” says Farid. “Will I stop saying certain things to certain people? Will I try to look more interesting and fun, so will I go on different websites?”

As his visualization, Farid decided to  3D print the data that he gathered into a solid object, almost like a graph.

3D print of Farid’s data

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Alex Beim is a creative computer artist and founder of Tangible Interactions, a group which creates sensorially-oriented interactive installations that are geared toward our most basic human instincts regarding light, space, and color. Starting his own design studio at the age of 19, Alex Beim later went on to found Tangible Interaction in 2007, citing his experience designing posters for his father’s event planning business when he was 12 as his inspiration for joining the field of the visual arts. After doing creative work for advertisement companies, but wishing to have a more direct connection with the people that his artwork affected, Beim quit and designed his first major project. The zygote ball was a large inflatable ball that changed color in response to touch and auditory stimulus. After having the balls released at a concert at the Arrezo Wave festival in Florence, Italy, Beim’s commissions began to grow, and he took on Tangible Interactions full-time as Creative Director. Tangible Interactions’ work is deeply involved with responsive color and light variability, and draw inspiration from natural phenomena such as clouds and animal life, as well as from human social constructs such as graffiti art and public spaces. Beim is perpetually interested in bringing the subjects of his artwork to the present moment by invoking the power of human sensation.
Personally, I admire the ways in which Beim uses nature as inspiration for his installations. For example, his Jelly Swarm project was made up of dozens of paper jellyfish suspended from a parametrically generated triangular-paneled structure was so immersive because it was at such a scale that an occupant could be entirely enveloped by the installation, limiting the sensorial experience to only the installation itself, helping to filter extraneous stimuli and produce a more immersive experience of the artwork. The way in which Beim explains his installations is so effective because he allows the videos to tell the story of interaction and experience with his art installations, as they are intrinsically sensorial, meaning they are best described visually or audibly rather than textually.

INST-INT 2013 – Alex Beim from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

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Elliot Woods is a digital media artist and technologist from Manchester based in Seoul. He fosters interactions between humans and socio-visual design technologies, more specifically involving projectors, cameras, and graphical computation. He co-founded Kimchi and Chips, an art and technology studio with Mimi Son. They display the realms of material and immaterial, creating speculative visual objects which poke at the unpredictable attributes of things when they are touched with technology. I admire the groups’ success in encouraging the dialogue between digital and modern art cultures, and playing with the illusion of reality and immateriality. I really was amazed by their light projections project, and even wrote on it for my first looking outwards. It is a project in which they create intangible shapes and forms by gathering light projection beams. They present their work effectively by first showing the concept and digital mock ups, then the implementation and actual technical process of creating the work, and the final product. I think this would be a great way for me to clearly present future technology related artworks.

Eyeo 2014 – Mimi Son and Elliot Woods from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

A video of my favorite project from this group.

Light Barrier, 2014 from Mimi Son on Vimeo.

 

http://www.kimchiandchips.com/

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Rachel Binx

Rachel Binx is an avid traveler and designer. She has a data visualization background, and finds it natural to convert her experiences to data points to visualize. She has a double degree in math and art history from Santa Clara University (go NorCal!) She works at Netflix currently.

She created a company that creates jewelry, called Meshu, based on geographic locations on a map that people have visited. She found that the backstories/meaning behind the jewelry was intensely meaningful and personal.

 

Meshu, customized jewelry.

Her work also touches upon manufacturing goods with customized, personal touches using forward looking technologies like 3d printing, and laser-cutting.

Another project of Binx’s is WifiDiary, where she programmed her computer to take a photo of her every single time she connected to a different wifi hotspot.

I really admire how she uses tools and technology to really enhance her projects, such as laser-cutting/3D printing. I’m actually really glad I stumbled upon her work because I love geography, and have always been personally interested in mapping out my own personal experiences. Often, data visualization seems like a lot of heavy statistics, but personalizing it and using it to reflect on your own emotional experiences is a powerful way to use it.

I actually don’t think she’s that effective of a presenter. Her tempo varies a lot, and she seems a bit too nervous about her own work. She should own it more. But she is fine at getting her points across.

Website

 

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Speaker: Molly Wright Steenson

Link to Speaker Bio: http://www.girlwonder.com/ | http://eyeofestival.com/speaker/molly-wright-steenson/

 

 

 

Molly Wright Steenson is a designer and architect currently holding the position of the chair of the MDes program at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work in architectural history and designing human systems directly contributes to the ongoing development of Transition Design, a design practice founded in 2013 at Carnegie Mellon that investigates design’s role in making transitions towards preferable, sustainable futures. Specifically, her work focuses on the effects of existing, emerging, and nascent technologies on city systems (and, subsequently, the city in its next larger context — in a region, a region in a country, a country on the globe) as well as one the people that inhabit these cities.

As a designer currently focused on contributing to Transition Design, Molly’s work is influential to my approaches — I see evaluating things in its next larger context as essential in understanding how the designed products, spaces, and messages affect peoples from different breadths of cultures. As a presenter, I see her tactic of making apt references to relatable material as as useful — if the audience can empathize with the content, it makes the content easier to understand.

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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.

http://marysaints.com/
http://marysaints.com/Could-you-be-a-medallist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8jcbl4erq

 

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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.

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Reza 

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.

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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.