Looking Outwards 10

Eva Mattes is an artist living in New York. One project on her website that caught my eye is titled Life Sharing. For the project, she opened the contents of her personal computer to a public internet server. This project is interesting because she places trust in the public to find interest in her personal life. With the piece she comments on privacy, saying that it’s stupid; she blurs the line of visibility of peoples lives. The piece originally is from 2001, just after the turn of the century, but well into the digital age. Mattes is an artist originally from Italy.

http://0100101110101101.org/

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Memory of Form and Matter

Chris Sugrue

I think this piece was really fascinating to me because it is a physical sculpture that doesn’t actually change its form. Even though it technically static, it feels completely dynamic. It is created through a series of parametric, algorithmically generated forms and is put together in a way that is viewed differently from every angle.

I think this hybrid between digital and physical, and data-driven art is really quite interesting. This is what Chris Sugrue does, she is an artist and programmer who creates these novel interactions, these experimental interfaces. She studied Art and Technology at Parsons, New York and has since done multiple residencies, from Barcelona to New York. She was instrumental in creating EyeTracker, for ALS patients that went on to win multiple design and innovation awards.

She currently teaches at Parsons Paris.

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Social Soul by Lauren McCarthy , Kyle McDonald and MKG 2014

Lauren McCarthy is an artist focus on social and techonolgy. Kyle McDonald is an artist focus on code. MKG is a creative agency specialize in branding.

Social Soul was an immersive digital experience created for Delta Airlines at TED 2014 and was inspired by the question “how does it feel to be inside someone else’s social media stream?”. It’s an space and media projection experience of one’s twitter streams in 360 degree surrounding mirror, monitor, and sound space.

I am intrigued by the unexpected approach on presenting social media physically larger than human scale. People use social media so often daily on their phones and computers, which are always on screens that are smaller than human scale. The scale difference makes people feel the autonomy over social media. Standing in the Social Soul space, I imagining myself feeling overwhelmed. It gives people the sense of they have no control of the endlessly replicants of informations and time. The experience is a metaphor of how powerful social media can be. The mirror is the physical metaphor of replicating information infinitely.

http://lauren-mccarthy.com/Social-Soul

 

 

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The projected I chose for LookingOutward10 is Poly Thread by Jenny Sabin. Jenny Sabin is an architectural designer that investigates the intersections of architecture and science, and applies the concepts of math and biology to material structure. Sabin is an associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She is a member of the Nonlinear Systems Organization and co-founder of Sabin+Jones LabStudio.
The Poly Thread project is mathematically generated and inspired by cellular networks. The material used, the fabric structure, is digitally knitted, and connected and held together by fiberglass tubing.
I like the project because its form is generate by computer but inspired from the form of cells, which is nature. It is organic and dynamic. As an architectural installation, this form can be applied to architectural design such as facade.
You can read more here

(Poly Thread)

(Poly Thread Detail)

(Poly Thread Exhibition)

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Heather Kelley is a media artist and game designer. She is also co-founder of the Kokoromi-experimental game collective- and faculty of Entertainment Technology Center CMU. Yes! she is one of the faculty of the program I’m in right now. I have talked with her some times to get some feedback about my own project, she always gives good inspiration and critiques.  The video is about she talking about the public future of the game at TED. But here, I’m going to talk about one of her work ‘Superhypercube’.

Superhypercube-2016
Superhypercube-2016

‘Superhypercube’ is a VR first  person puzzler game launched for playstationVR. In this game, head tracking is critical to accomplish player’s goal. The theme for game is very retro feeling and she also brings the light and space art movement. This game is not only just game but also interactive art.

Heather Kelley(portrait)

As a game designer and media artist, she has created many and diverse works. You can check her tremendous work pieces on her website.

Heather Kelley’s website

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I looked at a project by Kimchi and Chips, a Seoul-based art studio founded by Mimi Son and Elliot Woods. Their projects play with material and immaterial modes of existence, and combine the disciplines of code, form, material, concept, and mechanism.

Mimi Son was born in Seoul and currently lives and works there. She has taken on the roles of designer, curator, professor, storyteller, and artistic director in various countries and institutions. She has a master’s degree in Digital Media Art and Design at MiddleSex University and Interaction Design at CIID. She is currently the Adjunct Professor at Ehwa Women’s University in Seoul, and works at Kimchi and Chips at the same time.

I found their project Litescape intriguing because it attempts to make a 3D representation of something we usually cannot experience in visual depth- sounds. By using a 3D projection system based on the original Wiremap project by Albert Hwang, Litescape allows motion graphics and visual information to take physical, visible form, occupying the same real world measurable space as its audience. I think it does a good job of immersing its audience into the unique environment of sounds, light, color, and depth. It’s really interesting to me that they tried to quantify, or rather, give physical attributes to a thing so naturally abstract, such as sound. Sound is something we constantly experience, and I think this installation accentuates just how much vividness and depth sounds are capable of, by illustrating them in a different, colorful, visual way.

http://www.kimchiandchips.com/#litescape

Litescape 3D from Elliot Woods on Vimeo.

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This week, I’ve looked at the work of Claudia Hart. Hart is an artist who creates computational art through a feminist standpoint. She looks at digital technology and media, and shows that new media technology is not a “rupture, but a reflection of very conventional ways of thinking”.

Tech culture is still a space dominated by men, and interestingly cites David Noble, who says that “high tech ethos is actually emerging from medieval Christian monasteries and describes it still being driven by an unconscious millennial desire to recreate the world afresh, without women and outside of nature.”


The Doll’s House Process work

These images are from Hart’s project called The Dolls House. It uses the philosophical concept of rebirth and renewal, and used math to create hyptonic images. You can see more here.

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The woman I decided to focus on is Lauren McCarthy—an artist who is currently based in LA and Brooklyn and who focuses on exploring social and technological systems. She graduated from MIT with a BS in Computer Science and Art and Design and also holds an MFA from UCLA. She is also the creator of p5.js!

Follower App

Her ongoing project, Follower, is a service that “follows” you. If the user is selected, they download an app and wait for a day. At the end of the day, the user is given a photo of themselves that was taken by the Follower. While obviously not an app meant for everyday use—such as facebook, gmail, twitter, etc—Follower is meant to create a more obvious relationship between a user and the idea of being under surveillance. What I really admire about this project is how it confronts the idea that people want to feel connected or have attention, like followers on twitter and instagram or friends on facebook. She brings up a good point that some people would even buy followers! A competing idea to this would be Google tracking, NSA monitoring, etc. which people tend to have a greater distaste for—but why is that? This project makes being followed feel more “real”, and really makes the user ask themselves what it meant to them.

For more information, visit Lauren’s website: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/

 

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^ Mimi Son’s ‘Lit Tree”

For this looking outwards, I am looking at the work of Mimi Son who is the creator of interactive artworks with novel displays. Mimi Son was born in Seoul where currently she lives and works. She completed her master degree on Digital Media Art and Design at Middlesex University and Interaction Design at CIID. She is currently the Adjunct Professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul

Being a student of architecture I am really interested in a lot of her work because she uses a lot of programs that we are taught in class to create something so beautiful and sculptural. She uses her blog Kimchi and Chips to present her work and to show the viewer a constant updates of her different experiments int he virtual world.

In this project, a small potted tree is augmented with video projection, creating volumetric light patterns using itʼs own leaves as voxels. This technique allows a tree to have a visceral conversation with human visitors, and to become a new type of aesthetic object. The tree that can display digital media’ is a provocation against a current asymptote of outdoor digital media that champions media facades, we instead suggest interventions in reaction to existing unscripted entities within the environment such as trees.
The projection triggers photosynthesis effects which affect tree growth, suggesting the possibility of 3D printing a tree, and of visitors feeding the tree through interaction with it.

What is made even more interesting is the fact that Son has made the structured light projection coding and technique available online for free.

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Neri Oxman is an American-Israeli architect, designer and professor at the MIT Media Lab. She is in charge of the Mediated Matter research group, where they focus on combining design, biology, computing, materials engineering with architecture and art. Her work is primarily determined by its context, whether it be a helmet based on a CT scan of the brain (design fits the body not only by the shape but also by the physiological makeup of the body) or an acoustic chair that absorbs sound (design corresponds to the pressure points on the human body). Everything she does relates to something specific that gives it a sense of context. Most of her organically-shaped, beyond the norm designs are 3D printed.

One of my favourite works of hers would be the Mechanic Biomaterials Deposition using chitosan (2014). She took chitosan paste, developed solutions of different chemical concentrations and used that solution to 3D print, with a robotic arm, a structure in large scale. The microorganisms (a byproduct of the air bubbles from the printing process) and embedded bacteria take carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar/energy. Not only can the product as as a structural beam, but also as a facade mesh (eg windows). The product also biodegrades to nourish marine life or nourish soil. What I like about this project is that the product is thought of as a cycle that is part of the natural environment. She takes what is natural to create one environmentally-harmless man-made object, which can then be returned back to the environment.

Below is a TEDtalk given by Neri Oxman.

 

Researcher from Mediated Matter researcher group holding the chitosan and water-based structural member
Close up of the chitosan-based structure