Category: LookingOutwards-09

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^DIFFUSION from Kouhei Nakama

I took Kornrat Euchukanonchai’s looking outwards 05 post which was a week where we were tasked with looking at 3D computer graphics and their capabilities. Kouhei Nakama is a visual art director who also works for a company that does large scale commercial work.

Here he uses a variety of generative and particle based animation to bring 3D figures to life in this motion graphics short piece titled diffusion. Nakama work destroys the boundaries between the human form and geometric using 3D graphics.

In this particular piece, the body is blended with different textures that range from organic to more alien and computer like. The human’s flesh and body is stretched and elongated to its maximum capacity. It changes colours and patterns while questions about evolution are revoked.

I really liked looking at this video because it was a complete deviation from what I had looked at in my looking outwards 5 so it was nice to see the other extent of what is possible with 3D graphics.

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I chose to look at my friend, Katie’s, Looking Outwards for Week 8. She did her Looking Outwards on the Clouds Documentary.

Caption: The opening screen for the Clouds Documentary website. A kickstarter video for the project can be found below and at this website:

I liked how Katie referred to the project as “adding another dimension to the idea of marrying videography, design, and programming.” I strongly agree with this b/c this team figured out how to bring all of these mediums together to create an even more outrageous and innovative creation.

Caption : Visualization of Space Junk: One the interactive graphics that can be found on the cloud.

Caption: Visualization of a noise sphere: One of the interactive graphics found on the cloud.

Caption: Fernanda Viegas. One of the contributors to the cloud.

I chose this Looking Outwards because it also has some relation to what we are doing our project on this week: computational portraits. As you can see from the last photo, Fernanda is pixelating. The Cloud took into another level and pixelated a whole story. I think this project is really fascinating because of the mass amount of interdisciplinary contributors that helped bring this project forth.

 

 

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I was browsing through the Looking Outwards posts for Week 7, because I was interested in learning about other examples of computational information visualization. One really interesting post I found was from my friend Christopher Reyes, which featured a short movie made by Red Bull in collaboration with design firm CLEVER°FRANKE and fashion brand Byborre.

I agree that this kind of constant visual feedback is engaging and effective. I can also see how it can positively influence clubgoers’ experiences, especially with the real-time animations being projected around them in the club. One of the aspects about this that I find notable is the fact that it’s sponsored by Red Bull. More and more big companies are branching out into these new forms of data visualization, and it’s exciting to see how each company is using these forms. Especially in this case, where the data, the clubgoers’ excitement, was being directly influenced by Red Bull’s products. It’ll be interesting to see how companies further manipulate and visualize data to reach broader audiences and achieve better marketing.

Here are videos of the original work:

Red Bull at Night x ByBORRE – The Sixth Sense – Case movie from CLEVER FRANKE on Vimeo.

Red Bull visualizations summary of screencast from CLEVER FRANKE on Vimeo.

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I decided to reply to Joohee Kim’s post, about a generative art titled “Random Numbers,” created by generative artist Marius Watz and data artis Jer Thorp. I was browsing through all the posts she had made, and thought I like the look of the generated object, how the layers of lines create a dimension, and was curious about the algorithm behind it. In her post, Joohee describes about how she appreciates the randomness in this piece of artwork, and I also agree that this work has an interesting way of combining data and randomness, since those are the two contrasting ideas since data isn’t a thing that could be completely random. Also, the fact that the final piece was screen printed by hand gave it a bit more authenticity because it has a original yet unexpected quality to it since the outcome is not necessarily the same each time, and the concept of it is parallel to the “data and randomness” since they use the same exact frame for printing but the results come out as random.

https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/vvzxkb/random-numbers-screen-printed-generative-art-nyc-event

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Living Sculptures Series – Mike Campau

Hee Seo Chun’s Looking Outwards #5 Post

In this post, Hee Seo talks about a project series by Mike Campau where he creates portraits of different people using non-humanistic features generated from computer graphics. I agree with her in that it’s interesting how he uses non-humanistic features to personify a person by juxtaposing them next to humanistic features (like clothing, posture, etc.). I also think it’s interesting how these non-humanistic features can give this portrait character. It shows how you don’t always have to personify a person with a head, arms, body and legs. Also, the fact that this was generated on the computer and made to look very surreal is what makes this piece very compelling. By using non-natural ways of generating and non-natural features to create a “natural” subject, Mike Campau creates an interesting computational art series.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/19683165/LIVING-SCULPTURES-2

Three examples of the series

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Hamza Qureshi Looking Outwards Week 8

I was very inspired by the Looking Outwards blog written by my peer Hamza Qureshi. Like Hamza, I am interested in the possibilities of design through user experiences and architecture, and found that this specific project exemplified just that. Artist Taeyoon Choi has skills in both the arts and computational coding, so he combines those skills to create something useful to all who come across his works. From Hamza’s blog post, Choi coins this term ‘poetic computation‘, in which it “allows an artist to intervene in a social space to use digital and computational tools to reorganize and reparametrize that space.”

Hacking IKEA

In his project, Choi makes a field recording while making noise with motors and microcontroller in the showroom, often interacting with the shoppers and the products on display. Since it is producing only harmlessly tiny noise, the symbolic importance is gained by paying attention to the noise created within the shop, and also the products, which will become a material noise in near future.

 

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Choi at work

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In her looking outwards, Sharon looked at the works of Columbian based artist, Daniel Aristizabal. I picked this looking outwards because I was shocked at the images were made from a computer program and not actually real. I love that the artist’s drive is to make mundane, everyday things look so surreal with the pop of contrasting colors, while at the same time maintaining the realism of the images. I also agree with the artist’s method of working: starting with pen and paper. I feel like the convenience of modern technology sometimes causes us to lock in on too many details before even having a desirable idea. I always became locked in on changing minute details in Photoshop or inDesign, and kind of got tunnel vision for hours, before realizing I wasn’t even that into the idea I was working on.

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I looked at what jwchou’s Looking Outwards assignment on generative art. He looked at the Postmodernist Art Generator by Don Relya, which took into account choices that artists make when creating art and used code to generate random postmodernist art instantaneously. With every iteration, the code is altered to take more factors into account. The last such iteration was in 2010.When responding to the piece, jwchou was interested in the artist’s statement where he said that while an artist’s actions can never be computationally reproduced completely, this parsed their actions, with constraints in order to create an algorithm for postmodernism.

I find this concept to be extremely interesting. The way it looks into the artistic process in an analytical way is very appealing to me, and I think presents an interesting counter argument to those who look down on modern and postmodern art as not being “real art” by presenting the complexity of the decisions that go into said art. I especially liked the final screenshot attached of the most recent iteration of the code, which I attached below.
Link to jwchou’s post

Link to artist’s website

PostModernist Generator, third iteration made in 2010

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Cloud Piano

I was looking through some of the posts and I found this one particularly intriguing. I am extremely drawn to the idea of the natural world represented through computational means in a very human way, that make these natural phenomena more present with us as humans. This is particularly striking because it provides a whole new sensory interaction with a natural phenomenon that is so elusive, so erratic and so notoriously mysterious.

I also really appreciate this because of it’s simplicity and innocence. It has truly been created from a place of curiosity and wonder and appreciation. I love that it takes this childhood fantasy and makes it accessible to us in a way that purely provides joy and pleasure.

It’s also really interesting that it sounds so beautiful and playful without sounding over-written or composed. It sounds like the most perfect string of serendipitous notes.

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Rachel Park sure can look outwards. 

I’m really inspired by a project she found when researching in Week 7 called Digital Calligraffiti:

^Video trailer for the project

Calligraffiti isn’t necessarily new or groundbreaking – in fact, it’s become an important movement in the development of the underground organized abstract vandalism movement. However, in this project, the Public Art Lab did things a little differently. Digital Calligraffiti is a project that bands together refugees with visual and graphic designers to create art and computational visualizations to raise awareness of social justice issues.

The project acts as a canvas for refugees to express issues that they face in a universally noticeable medium. The installation took place throughout public spaces in Berlin in 2016 and served to help normalize the voices of refugees in a country whose influx of Syrian refugees proved to be a contentious point of debate to native Germans.

The project uses a computational derivation of a font scheme to allow refugees to partner with visual designers to create uniquely serifed and expressive works of art.

I’m inspired by pieces like this because it bands together designers with those whose voices are often silenced. These kinds of partnerships use computing for social good to help raise the perspectives of the underprivileged to the forefront of the public eye.