LookingOutwards-10 – Page 8 – [OLD FALL 2017] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Jdbrown – LookingOutwards 10 – Les Artistes Females

About a month ago, CMU greeted several innovators in the field of computational design and robotics for a research symposium on smart design and the trajectories of computer-aided architecture / modeling practices. It was a pretty interesting event, and I got to hear five panelists discuss their research areas, and even though my work has nothing to do with computational design, I enjoyed the symposium.

One of the presenters was a woman by the name of Madeline Gannon, a roboticist whose work explores biological models for computer-aided design and mechanical installation. The image I most closely associate with Gannon is that of her interacting with Mimus, her 1,200kg industrial robot arm-thing. Mimus was exhibited at a robotics installation earlier this year and attracted the attention of gallery-goers both young and old.

She has also done work with “painter tools” for 3D printing interfaces, called Reverb. Modeled after squids, these long, drapy tendrils can be layered onto a 3D-scanned torso model to create immediately wearable, intricately geometric shapes with relative ease.

Overall, her work is very interesting, and it’s fun to see her build bonds with these massive hunks of steel and bloodlust. I’ve always been a fan of bio-based design, and her research areas have a solid blend of pragmatic technical expertise and curiosity for the living world.
To see more of Gannon’s work, explore her website.

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Landscape Abbreviated

This installation is a mechanic garden that forms a kinetic maze including modular pieces and rotating planters. the planters are made up with moss collected from the sides of buildings. The artist, Nova Jiang, wanted to create a piece that makes the space and time dynamics unpredictable. The planters are controlled by a computer software that generates new maze patterns based on mathematics, making the audience experience the space in different ways as they walk through it to interact with the piece.

This piece is amazing as it touches on not only technology but also art, 3D installation, and architectural landscape design. I find it very intriguing in the way she organizes space that engages the audience using a computer algorithm.

Nova Jiang is a Chinese artist based in Los Angeles from Auckland, New Zealand. She creates immersive, open-systems in her art work that encourages creative participation from her audience. She obtained her MFA in Media Art from UCLA.

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SUPERHYPERCUBE (published in autumn 2016) by Kokoromi collective

SUPERHYPERCUBE is a VR “first-person perspective” 3D puzzle game developed by Kokoromi collective, and Heather Kelly is a member of this group. In this game, the player needs to switch the direction of a shape in order to go through different panels.

SUPERHYPERCUBE was a VR game with a high-stylized art style and interesting first-person perspective interaction. I enjoyed watching the gameplay video of this game, the sharp sound effect response and simple but modern visual design offer a very clear yet attractive world for the game. I like how this game combining first-person perspective and VR puzzle solving together. The whole game was a simple but funny VR game experience.

Heather is Adjunct Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center, at Carnegie Mellon University. Heather’s extensive career in the games industry has included design and production of AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games, research games, and web communities for girls. She was named as one of the five most powerful women in gaming by Inc. magazine in 2013.

Here is the promo video of SUPERHYPERCUBE:

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^Shantell using the motion sensor device to leave the trail.

^ Rhino screen showing the trail of the device.

Title: Drawing Trails

Artist: Shantell Martin

Year of Creation: 2016

Link to the Article of the Project: https://shantellmartin.art/work/drawing-trails/

Link to the Bio of the Artist: https://shantellmartin.art/info/

Drawing Trails was a collaboration between visual/digital artist Shantell Martin and architect Maria Yablonina as a way to visualize the trail that we leave behind our motions. The concept was to explore the idea that whatever we do and wherever we go we leave an inevitable traces behind us and what they would look like if they were to be digitally captured and 3-d printed.

First, the motion sensor device will detect the movement of the object and transfer the information to the computer, which will use Rhino and Grasshopper with a customized program to visually map the data on the screen. The visual information on Rhino workspace will be then 3-d printed, giving us a chance to visually and sensibly observe the invisible trails that we have left behind for the first time.

The idea that we could observe our own trails is very interesting, but I am still a little dubious if it could be practical in capturing a larger degree of motion. However, simply as a new means of creating a sculptural art, this was a very unique attempt.

^ Sculptures created as Drawing Trails

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Photo of Höweler + Yoon office with J. Meejin Yoon standing on the right

As the founder of Höweler + Yoonarge, an internationally recognized architecture firm,Meejin Yoon‘s practice works with a wide range of scales to furniture scale installations to buildings to landscaping projects. With her partner, the two leads their practice to constantly challenge the relationship between architecture, art and landscape. Media is often used to enrich the architectural experience she designs. A lot of experiential installations are made so she can observe and propose new ways for the public to interact with. One example of this is the UNI project that was installed in New York, with aims to create a mobile, and reconfigurable public “reading” space. A series of yellow caps, or “quills” as they are referred to by the architects, doubles as a bench and also protects the books on the wood shelves. Yoon’s personal accomplishments are also notable with as she is a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. She was also awarded Architectural Review’s New Generation Design Leadership Award.

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This is a video of the process of creating NEUROTiQ.

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NEUROTiQ is a “brain animating” headpiece created by SENSOREE and designed by Kristin Neidlinger (augmented fashion designer and founder of SENSOREE). This headpiece is a knit fabric structure that is embedded with 3D printed neuron brain sensors (essentially EEG sensors), and uses those sensors to display the state of the brain through colored lights. Each of the colors represent a different emotion, and they are displayed in tandem with the brain waves of the wearer. This design premiered NYFW in 2014 at the 3D Print Show. This project is especially cool because it comes futuristic wearable fashion with technology, integrating the two seamlessly to create a beautiful piece of art. No only does it combine fashion with computer science, but also with cognitive psychology and human emotion. It’s a really unique piece, and presents a really exciting direction for future combinations of technology and fashion.

The designer, Kristin Niedlinger, is a future concepts designer. She has a background in dance, new media, and in physical therapy as a Dance Medicine specialist, and studied at California College of the Arts. She created SENSOREE as Therapeutic Biomedia, to create wearable pieces to augment “Sensory Processing Disorder.” By taking human experiences of this disorder and combing technology and fashion, she highlights a state of mind not usually seen in mainstream media.

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Alka Cappellazzo is an artist and creative coder whose body of work seems to center around code-based animations. She doesn’t have a website, or any interviews and it was generally pretty difficult to find information regarding her. In a way she seems like the type of artist who likes to step out of the spotlight and let her work take center-stage for those who are interested in it. From what I was able to find however, I can say that she is currently based out of Italy and graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts with degrees in New Art Technologies and Network Medias. She is also the current vice-president and co-founder of Invalid Code – an Italy based collective of “artists and programmers born to explore and spread the potential of the code.”

I want to take the time to talk about a body of work of hers, as opposed to an individual work, the series is called White Transparency and consists of a variety of animations or static images which are repetitions of graphics creating an ornamental and visually intriguing design. These patterns cleanly represent her interest in exploring the repetition of images and patterns in nature through the medium of code. Using Processing to facilitate these designs, she frequently codes these patterns while including random and noise functions so as to get some real/interesting or unexpected designs, similar to the unpredictability that nature holds with code. She also makes sure to make the code available to the audience, as she believes that code is something to be shared and expanded upon instead of huddled away and to be jealous of.

Below I am including some links to the processing pieces in addition to screenshots because I believe they are better experienced in real-time than seen in a still image.

White Transparency IV Link https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/187998/embed/?width640&height=480&border=true

White Transparency II Link https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/173726/embed/?width=640&height=480&border=true

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(promotional image for Ooblets, by Rebecca Cordingley)

Rebecca Cordingley (or nonplayercat) is an indie game designer/ developer/ artist. She’s currently making Ooblets (alongside Ben Wasser), a game described as “Harvest Moon meets Pokémon meets Animal Crossing” due to be released sometime in 2018. Cordingley is primarly using Unity, Maya, and Mixamo to develop the game and 3d-model, along with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.

(gifs from the in-progress game, by Rebecca Cordingley)

I really like the simplified visual style of the game, which I think works particularly well with the game’s focus. The main aspect of the project I really appreciate though is how open Cordingley has been about the game’s development, as both she and Wasser regularly share screenshots, gifs, and progress posts on the work they’re doing on the game.

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[ a video synopsis of the project]

Vertical Cinema is a program of ten films by avant-garde filmmakers, musicians and visual artists, printed on 35mm celluloid and projected vertically by means of a specially developed set-up. Vertical Cinema is a site-specific cinema, a cinema attuned to the architecture of the church. What I admire about this project is how it pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a “cinema”. It first challenges the conventional projection of films horizontally by projecting it vertically. And as shown in the video, the installation distorts the films to the point where it looks like projection of light beams. It makes us ponder whether this can still be considered a “cinema”?

A little about Tina Frank:

Tina Frank is a graphic designer, media artist as well as a professor of graphic design at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. She pursued her academic studies in graphic design at Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt Vienna. She was the founder & creative director for the design offices U.R.L. Agentur für Informationsdesign. Her roots were in web design and cover designs for experimental electronic music during the mid 1990s when she also started to work with digital real-time visualization, video & multimedia.

Link | http://www.tinafrank.net/audiovisual-art/colterrain/

Work | Tina Frank. Vertical Cinema. Oct 12 2013

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For this week, I decided to explore the projects of Angela Washko and her work with activism in the form of video games. Graduating with a degree in Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture, Washko uses her works as an artist in order to express her views in relation to feminism and activism. Washko is employed as a fellow at Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and acts as a Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon.

Specifically, I chose to research The Game: The Game, a choice-based story in which the player acts as a female protagonist in a dating simulator visualizing the practices of several prominent pick up artists (their books pictured below).

I thought it was incredibly interesting how Washko played off of the idea of visual novels/dating simulators in order to depict negative interactions and experiences that females face on a daily basis. I think that the way the graphics are depicted along with the text allows for the user to immediately feel uncomfortable yet a part of the world that Washko creates.