LookingOutwards-10 – Page 4 – [OLD FALL 2017] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

LookingOutwards-10-Chickoff

Swing is a video piece created by Yael Kanarek who is an Israeli American new media artist. She is based in New York City, where she was born, while having been raised in Israel. Returning to NYC for art school in 1991, she began her path into the internet art scene, while also having founded Upgrade!, a network of international artists concerned with combining activism with art and technology.

This artwork in particular is a screen capture of a computational video. As Kanarek states, “In this piece, a digital clock is used as the compositional device. The work runs live on a computer and is played by software that syncs video and audio with the computer’s internal clock. Thus, actual time is represented by the audiovisual experience on-screen.” More importantly, the children in the video (brothers and friends) discuss the issues of water scarcity in Israel as well as the lack of peace with Syria. Time being integral to such issues, and whether they are dealt with accordingly is incredibly present in this piece—the rhythmic swinging of the boy is the timekeeper.

dayoungl Looking Outwards – 10

Caroline Sinder’s Nudge Nudge

For this week’s Looking Outwards, we are focusing on women practitioners in the field of computational design. From a list given from the professor, I randomly selected an artist named Caroline Sinders. She introduced herself as many things but among them, I think how she described herself as a machine learning designer and a digital anthropologist was quite interesting. Looking through her website, I realized that a lot of the things she do and experiments with are things that are done frequently in CMU such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and merging of technology and design. Especially, I made a strong connection looking at one of her work “Nudge Nudge”, which is a wearable watch that doesn’t tell time but tells something in relation to time — Google Calendar Events. The idea itself was so clever to begin with. Her wearable tells time in relation to a meeting, class, or anything marked in the calendar and tells you how much time you have in between through variation of colour. Another thing that draw me in was her ideation process; it was very similar to what we do in research methods class as Design majors. She not only thought about the aesthetics and the delivery of the idea of changing colour but also about people’s response to the colour change through experimenting with putting stickers on participants and how distracted they felt when they were reminded of having stickers on their shirts; this experiment was done to measure the level of distraction people not wearing the Nudge would get when they are near an individual wearing Nudge. Little considerations like this revealed something I learned in class and through her post, I was able to see my learnings put into practice.

heeseoc-LookingOutwards-10

I decided to write a post about Lorna Barnshaw, a 3D designer from London, United Kingdom. She earned her degree for Bachelor of Fine Arts at Winchester School of Art, and also studied at the University of Northampton. She creates virtual, glitch sculptures, which I thought was interesting because a lot of her works generate different looks depending on the perspective that the viewers are looking at which could be skewed at some point but still makes sense. She creates these mask-like sculptures, with characteristics unique to the different programs that she uses. Some of her studies look very realistic, and some are highly abstracted, geometric reinterpretation of the human face. They are very experimental, often uncanny, but I think that’s the thing that is enticing about her work and differentiates them from everything else.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/7149765/Layar-Basic-Trial

amui1-LookingOutwards-10

This week, I chose to do my Looking Outwards of Chloe Varelidi. Her portfolio can be found here.

Chloe Varelidi is a game designer that focuses on building playful products to encourage children to “be creative, kind, and curious about the world behind them” (quote from Chloe’s portfolio). She received her Masters in Fine Arts at Parsons’ Design and Technology Program and has since worked at Quest to Learn, Institute of Play, Mozilla, and now littleBits.

I specifically admire her projects for littleBits, codekit and a minicade. that I find particularly interesting. At littleBits, she works as a senior product design strategist. The codeKit is a small introduction kit of magnets and electrical items that create an interactive activity that teaches coding. The minicade is an open source mobile web application that encourages children to make short (40 line) games with their friends. This project aims to also teach coding but in an interactive and “silly” way.

Caption: Chloe says in the future, she hopes that the minicade can become a pop-up structure at any city corner, like the one in the picture above.

LookingOutward-10

For this weeks post, I decided to look at Allison Burtch’s project, Mic Jammer. In collaboration with Eric Rosenthal, Burtch created a small device that can mute people’s microphones. It works by emitting a high ultrasonic noise that is inaudible to human ears but can be heard by microphones.

I found this project interesting because of how relevant it is. Burtch describes the purpose of Mic Jammer as being like taping over your webcam, but for audio and microphones. Personally, I find that there is a growing fear of being watched through my webcam, but I never considered the possibility of being listened to through the microphone and this brings up that second possibility.

The product itself is in the beginning stages of being designed and Burtch as well comments on the fact that the next step is to collaborate with a product designer to re-engineer and design the product. I find it really interesting how the product was also designed around the iphone, specifically the iphone 4/5 and later iphone 6 when it came out. It considers the placement of the microphones (on the bottom for iphone 4/5 and two on top and two on bottom for iphone 6), trying to find best way to hit and aim for the microphones.

http://www.allisonburtch.net/mic-jammer/

dnam-LookingOutwards-10

For this week’s Looking Outwards based on female artists, I looked into Angela Washko. Her works are very unique – a lot of times she is pushing our boundaries of what we can truly call ‘art’. One of the project I found intriguing was her project: “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft”. This was a project where Washko would go into the virtual world in World of Warcraft to tell the players about feminism and gender equality. Angela Washko presented this by showcasing her discussing the issue ingame and on a projector. Personally, I found the work interesting as internet is often used as a place where people show blatant sexism and offend others, but Washko used it to attempt to educated the players. Her project can be seen here.

aerubin-LookingOutwards-10-Section-C

One of Claudia Hart’s many Installations featuring “The Dolls House”

Claudia Hart is a computational fine artist that turns photographs into digital moving art. Originally from New York, New York, she attended school at New York University earning a BA in art history in 1978. She then studied architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and earned her MS is 1984. After exhibiting with the Pat Hearn Gallery, she received an NEA Fellowship in 1989 and moved her practice to Europe where she spent ten years and received many awards and fellowships such as the Kunstfond Bonn, the Stiftung Luftbruekendank Grant, and the Arts International Foundation Grant.

One of her many projects that I found notable portrayed one of her major themes: the blend of technology and nature. The piece is titled “Noh-timeGarden” and it is the third in a series of instillations. These works feature two side by side screens that portray nature in the form of animation. In this particular piece, she portrays a garden from two different points of views that are moving towards one another. Utilizing algorithms and a computer, she is able to digitize nature realistically enough that it appears three dimensional, although it still has the smoothness and perfection of being computationally rendered – seen in the smooth ground and perfectly green pointed leaves. I really admire her ability to make a social statement of nature and technology through her art.

More about “The Doll House”

More about Claudia Hart

looking-outward 10 Thomas Wrabetz

The Breathing Column is an architecture prototype by Caitlin Morris. It is a large installation that reacts to nearby people by turning, expanding and contracting in a lifelike fashion. The prototype is from 2010- I was not able to find a video of the finished installation. In any case, it is an interesting combination of architecture and computing that challenges the perception of buildings as static.

enwandu_Looking Outwards-10

Filipa Valente – creator of dynamic light architecture

Filtered Transparencies (2014 & 2015) — User immersed in created space

Filipa Valente is a Portuguese architect/environmental designer, based in the Los Angeles, California. She specializes in architecture and new media, interactive and experience design, furniture, and exhibition design. Valente completed her BSc and Masters in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, then went on to receive her Masters in Media Art and Architecture at SciArc in Los Angeles. Valente has created a name for herself over the years, holding design and project management positions at some of the world most prestigious architectural practices such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Amanda Levete Architects, Wilkinson Eyre Architects, and Belzberg Architects and Synthesis Design + Architecture. She is part of the organization limiLAB, which has had work exhibited in the Architecture + Design museum of L.A., at the Lisbon Experiment Design Biennale in 2009, and the ISEA 2012 (International Electronics Art Symposium).

Valente and her work with limiLAB stems from an interest in immediate space (architecture, rooms, cities, people), leading to the creation of these magnificent interactive art and installation pieces. Broadly speaking her work exists as an exploration of how technology connects to all these spaces with each other and their surrounding environments. Her work is truly admirable from an aesthetic standpoint. A lot of the work is visually stunning, and that combined with her thought process of incorporating elements of environmental design, really echo through her work. I think her project ‘Filtered Transparencies’ really represents her ideas about exploring the relationships between the environment, architecture and the body, by using layered light, space and sound to create an immersive experience.

rkondrup-Looking-Outwards-10

Jenny Sabin is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio LLC in Ithaca, New York who specializes in computational experimental form making and spatial organization. Her studio pushes the boundaries for parametric design to generate forms which, as a collective, produce a space which is complex and entirely unique. The studio likely utilizes Grasshopper for Rhino software to generate complex curvatures using modular base geometries that are repeated and varied according to the main organizational geometries of the flow surface, as in the following photo.
Considering the role of Cornell University as a leader in cutting-edge architectural design and research, Jenny Sabin’s strong connections to the Jenny Sabin Design Lab at Cornell’s School of Art, Architecture, and Planning are a strong propellant in the drive toward a more modern future in computational architectural design.