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The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has a door which opens up to the section of mystery. Each time a person opens that door, an animal is seemingly holographically displayed in a room, along with its species name and the sound it produces.

A woman named Caroline Record was at the forefront of this project. The creation of the section of mystery encompassed four different phases: design, media collection, creating software, and fabrication. The design phase consisted of simply designing a space as well as incorporated a glass that created the holographic effect. After, Record and her team collected images of 30 different species using a 3-D scanner, in which she was able to use to reproduce models of the animals featured in the exhibit. Then, Record designed her own software that allowed the computer to sense when the doors open and closed, switching out the animals so that each time the door opens, a different animal is shown inside. While coding, Record was able to fix more of the lighting and sound problems to generate an even more realistic effect of the animal displayed. I am interested in the design process behind the section of mystery since I actually had the opportunity to see it just about a week ago.

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The project I chose for this week is Camille Utterback’s “Dances of the Sacred and Profane”, an hour-long dance and computer generated video collaborative work shown at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. The project is inspired by the music and art of the impressionist period, and mimics timing, memory, and angles of dancers using a motion graphics projection and real-time particle system. Camille manipulates the dancers movements on screen using onstage cameras projected onto large screens behind the dancers. I think this project is ambitious and extremely successful because the projected and manipulated graphics aesthetically augment and play with the details of the reflected choreography. I really admire the pure viscerality in the concept and the artwork, and the painterly quality of the art. It really does a convincing job of bringing me back to the impressionist era. Camille is an incredibly successful and internationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in digital and interactive art. Her work explores the aesthetic and experimental possibilities of connecting computational systems to human bodies, and has been displayed in galleries, festivals, and museums internationally. She is currently an assistant professor in Art at Stanford University, and a co-director of the Stanford Graduate Design program. She has a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Link to the work: http://camilleutterback.com/projects/dances-of-the-sacred-and-profane/

Dances of the Sacred & Profane from Camille Utterback on Vimeo.

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Reverb
Reverb Video Documentation

REVERB is a project by new media artist and robot tamer Madeline Gannon that bridges the virtual and physical contexts of fabrication and wearable design.

This 3D modeling environment allows the artist or designer to guide the movement of a 3D asset across the curvature of the body, leaving a digital trace that is then 3D printed and transformed into wearable jewelry. The gestures of the artist’s hand are what the 3D asset uses as a guiding path as it leaves it’s trace. Madeline refers to this method as a sort of digital chronomorphology, an offshoot of chronophotography- which is a composite recording of an object’s movement.

The pipeline of Madeline’s chronomorphological process begins with a depth sensor (e.g. Kinect) that records the depth data of the person who will be fitted for the wearable model. A point cloud is then generated and imported into a 3D workspace. Once positioned in there, the same depth sensor will detect the motion of the artist’s hands as they move around, forming the path on which a small 3D asset moves. Finally, the generated chronomorphological 3D model is printed and worn by the person.

Reverb is one of Madeline’s most famous and reputed pieces, covered by virtually every important technology magazine and conference in America. Other successful works include Mimus, a whimsical robot with childlike wonder and curiosity for other humans, as well as Tactum, another exploration in 3D printed wearables that could be custom fit and distributed online. While her education background is predominantly in architecture, she has studied computational design, art and robotics in more recent years. She is currently attending Carnegie Mellon and will be graduating in May with a PhD in computational design.

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Work from Home

by Hanski aka Hannah Epstein

http://hannahness.com/work-from-home

Work from home was an interactive walk in installation. Users would use their phones to text short code to a number which then triggered a response on the participant’s phone. Hannah Epstein was a MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon and TA’d one of my sculpture classes. Her work uses humor as means of expression in reflecting serious topics and consists mainly of rug-hooking, a type of soft sculpture, and video games. It was inspiring to hear her talk about her games and how she exists in the field because before, gaming in my mind belonged only to an audience and to creators of men.

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Kazuyo Sejima

Kazuyo Sejima is a Japanese architect who founded SANAA. She is a leading exponent of contemporary architecture. She earned a degree from the Japan Women’s University and worked in the studio of Toyo It0. She is known for a clean modernist design by using clean and shiny surfaces and use of squares and cubes. She uses natural light to create a fluid transition between interior and exterior. I admire how she uses traditional elements such as square boxes and how she combine traditional elements and modernistic elements. Her idea is not to initiate a complete rejection to tradition, but rather to challenge the conventional process of design.

One of her famous building, New Art Museum by SANAA is located in Lower Manhattan, NYC. The museum shows how she appreciates simple but strong concept by using traditional shape. Her work shows how contemporary architects do not have to use crazy shapes to make good space. The building shape reflects the surrounding urban box shaped buildings. She stacks the boxes on top of the other but makes variation of them through varying sixe and shifting them, which makes dynamicity and an attracting shape. Different from contemporary artists who uses fancy materials, she uses materials that may look moderate externally. However, her buildings encompasses her unique charisma that attracts people’s attention for buildings sharpness and use of essential elements for construction.

Link to New Art Museum

“New Art Museum” by SANAA in Lower Manhattan, NYC

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Video showing the navigation of the Friends in Space website

Created by Giorgia Lupi and Accurat studio, an information design firm, Friends in Space is an experimental digital social platform built to connect Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti on the International Space Station with the world below her.

Sample view of the Friends in Space website, showing the user’s position and Cristoforetti’s orbit

From November 2014 to June 2015, with the help of data collection and processing, the site maps out the user’s location relative to Cristoforetti’s location on the I.S.S., allowing the two individuals to say hello should one be right above the other, as well as allowing users to send greetings to fellow stargazers. It’s a really heartfelt and charming way to use data visualization, and the project enables a kind of emotional bond between Cristoforetti and the people she passes by – users are able to plan out their calendars to make sure they don’t miss the next time Cristoforetti will pass over them, and are able to view all of their datapoints regarding their interactions.

Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi herself is an Italian information designer residing in New York City, and the co-founder and design director at Accurat studio, who is most known for her work in the collaboration Dear Data, a continuous exchange of hand-drawn data visualizations with Stefanie Posavic. Lupi received her Masters of Architecture at Ferrara Architecture Faculty in Ferrara, Italy, and earned a PhD in Design at Politecnico di Milano.

The Friends in Space project can be found on Behance, and more information about Lupi and Accurat can be found on their website, Behance, and their respective Medium blogs.

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Video Introducing Puppet Parade

This week, I’ll be looking outward to Puppet Parade, an interactive exhibit produced in part by Emily Gobeille in 2011. Emily is an artist and designer who focuses on building interactive exhibits that encourage play and she’s a co-founder of Design I/O, a creative studio specializing in the creation of interactive installations.

In Puppet Parade, visitors control one of two giant projected puppets by moving their arm as if it were the puppet. By moving the puppet, the puppeteer can eat different colored blocks to change the colors of their puppet or make funny poses. The puppeteer’s arm is tracked using an XBox Kinect, but custom software was developed to distinguish the different parts of the arm.

Custom software tracks different parts of the arm and correlates it to the puppet

What I find inspiring about this project is how the actions of one or two “players” are able to create an entire area of interactivity, expanding the space and amount of people that can partake in an experience.

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Notes on Blindness is an incredibly fascinating and interactive documentary that follows the story of a man named John Hull, who lost his sight back in 1993. After losing sight, John started documenting his new world through audio recordings and these recordings were used to make Notes on Blindness, which uses a mix of storytelling and VR to replicate John’s experiences. Béatrice Lartigue was the animation and art director for this production that won Best Experimental Experience at the Tribeca Film Festival. She is a visual artist based in Paris and studies things like the invisible relationships between time, space and images. She works a lot with immersive experience and physical interactive installations. I find it amazing how she was able to animate a supposedly world of darkness through some audio recordings. Each moment and aspect of the audio recorded scenes were brilliantly constructed and although monotone in color, was still beautiful.

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For this week’s Looking Outwards, I looked at Caroline Record’s piece called She, created September 22, 2014. There is a mysterious, corporate looking woman singing and typing in sync with the rhythmic processes of a printer. Over the course of the piece, the printer prints 614 sentences in the novel Anna Karenina that start with the word, “she.”

I love that this piece results in a growing mess on the floor, creating an organized, deliberate chaos. I also really like that Record kept some of this piece open-ended, because I love when pieces give room for a viewer’s interpretation. Record writes, “The viewer can decide whether she is the muse, subject or author of this collection of curated sentences.”

Caroline is an artist who uses code to create “artistic systems.” She describes her systems as “sensual” and “clever” and incorporate “extreme tactility with ephemeral, abstract logic.” Record received her BFA in Art and Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, and then received her Masters in Human Computer Interaction at CMU as well. She has exhibited all over Pittsburgh, and currently works here as an independent artist, freelance consultant, as well as a professor at CMU.

http://carolinerecord.com/

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This is a work called Filtered Transparencies by Filipa Valente.

She is an architect, experience &environmental interaction designer. She has studied architecture and Media art. Her work shop is currently located at Los Angeles. She studied at Bartlett School of Architecture in London and Master in Media Art and Architecture MEDIASCAPEs at SciArc in L.A. She has collaborated with different architects, one of them are Zaha Hadid architects. Her project revolves around interest in immediate space that surround us, as in architecture, room ,a city, a crowd of people. This work is particularly admiring to me because of its abstraction and spatial quality it brings. Abstraction is one of my hardest challenge in designing. This combines bit of abstraction with the possible spatial quality that are generated with overlapping transparency of lights, which is not physical but rather abstract.