Looking Outwards Week 1 – Page 3 – [OLD FALL 2017] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Listening Post- Looking Outwards 01

Listening Post is an interactive installation that generates random words and phrases from Internet chat rooms. These words (most introducing oneself) appears on more than 200 LED screens which light up the dark room with viewers in front of them. These words are spoken by a male computer voice emanating from speakers. The work magically combines simple instructions like “I am hot” to some heavier topics like whether “I am doing fine”. This project mainly involves two artists, namely, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. The project is installed in Whitney Museum. The project was first inspired by works of John Cage, Philip Glass and Jenny Holzer. For the technology side, the technological advances in data-mining techniques have made a distinct turning-point. To gather the data, Hansen and Rubin created a program that collects and identifies key information of all the phrases from chat rooms and other virtual spaces. Not only the phrases and data are generated through a computer program, but also the male voice.

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Listening Post, 2002-2004| with Audience Interacting with the Posts

This project is so interesting and unpredictable as some phrases may connect to the next one and makes sense to the audience. It has raised “the worldwide protests against the pending American invasion of Iraq, it was startling to witness the appearance of a phrase such as ‘I am a Muslim and am afraid of nothing’, which could have been intended as stoicism or aggression ” (Eleey, 2003). The whole installation composed fear, happiness, pleasure, power, and etc.

Listening Post

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Paint With Your Feet (2011) is a project that was produced for the Nike Free Run+ 2 Pack series by YesYesNo Team in collaboration with DualForces. By developing a custom software with openFrameworks v007b, the team allowed participating runners to create paintings with their Nike + GPS run data. Using the software, they imported the metrics from the run and created visuals based on various factors such as the speed and consistency.
This project is noteworthy in that it is not only visually and conceptually intriguing, but is also successful in providing the participants with a valuable opportunity; they were allowed to create and alter their compositions and to keep them as high resolution prints. Additionally, the team successfully advertised the new Nike products and their merits through their creation.

YesYesNo Interactive projects website

Process photos:

agusman-Looking Outwards 01-A Thousand Faces

Studio: HERRUZO PIERCE STUDIO

Artist: Ana Herruzo, http://herruzo-pierce.com/
Date Completed: October 2013
Topic: Stage Production, Live Music, Projection Mapping, Audio-visualization

The Beats Antique “A Thousand Faces” Tour is a feat of stage production and complex projection mapping. Personally, I find the group Beats Antique quite gimmicky and hokey, with their borderline appropriation of South-Asian musical and visual culture and their quasi-hip “oriental” coffee shop aesthetic. Despite this, the group has managed to pull off some of the most fantastic live performances of the decade, along with the help of the renowned creative studio OBSCURA DIGITAL. Using CAD modeling, 3D software like Touch Designer, and projection mapping tools, Ana and Obscura map video footage and generative art from more than 100 artists onto an elaborate set.

I am blown away by the breadth and diversity in the applications of projection mapping she has explored, particularly within this project for Beats Antique. This project displayed a great degree of balance between showcasing the studio’s innovative production methods and tech while also showcasing unique artistic work. It’s quite “Creative Content/Ideas First” and less “Look At These Cool Flashing Lights”. I’m particularly excited about how this singular experience was such a seamless conglomerate of so many great minds and ideas.

Ana Herruzo is an architect, designer and programmer running her own practice HERRUZO-PIERCE Creative Studio in Los Angeles. Formerly, she was a partner of the ZULARK Design Collective working on publicly engaging architectural interventions. In 2011 following her partnership, she served as an Interactive Engineer at OBSCURA DIGITAL, where she directed the development of large-scale productions and shows all across the world for a number of reputable clients.

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David Wicks is an artist featured on the website Sans Umbrella to showcase his latest work titled “Drawing Water.” The project is essentially a creative visualization to illustrate the relationship of where water is falling and real data about where it is being consumed in the United States. The created animation is very beautiful. I appreciate how organic it’s movement feels especially because it was created by something far removed from nature. The idea behind Wick’s work points to how crucial a resource like water is to all of us as we use it everyday. By forcing someone to think about where his or her water came from it makes us as consumers more conscious that we are apart of a larger system. Opposed to having a view that your water is always ready to go for you when you turn on your sink.

See More of David Wicks’ work here

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The project that I chose is a light installation project by the Seoul based duo artists, Kimchi and Chips. The project creates volumetric drawings in the air, using hundreds of coordinated video projections. In this sculptural work, light projections are made to merge in a field of fog to form animated, physical shapes. 8 video projectors are split into 630 sub-projectors using a combination of concave mirrors– designed using artificial nature algorithms, and each mirror is computationally generated to create a group that comes together to form the single shape in the air. What inspires me about this project is the fact that these artists are basically materializing objects from light, something that is not exactly tangible. The result is surreal and visceral, due to the addition of sound and the set up of the installation. I also respect the exactness of the calculations required to make the projections work: to merge the light beams together, the path of each of the 16 million pixel beams had to individually be measured. The project could have been more effective maybe if they were able to create more complex shapes and movements, but it is extremely impressive already in the way that it is playing with the boundary between material and non-materials, and existence and absence. This project was part of a series of 3 works which materialize 3 dimensional sculptures through different uses of light. Other works in the series include showing depth with many illuminated nylon strings.

Here is the link: http://www.creativeapplications.net/vvvv/the-light-barrier-third-edition-drawings-volumes-in-the-air-with-light/

the team attaching tape to the mirror structure

farming windows

the view of the mirror structure

a view of the light projections

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Creator: Umbrellium

Project: Assemblance

Video demonstrating the project.

In this project participants use their hands, feet and bodies to control and guide lasers. The laser beams create light structures that participants can manipulate and fortify. Umbrellium Designs is the group behind this project, the group focuses on projects that encourage people to participate in design. This project was partially supported by the sponsorship of Kvant Laser Systems and Pangolin Laser Systems who provided the materials necessary for the project’s execution. Umbrellium consists of “a team of architects, designers, tactical urbanists and creative technologists”. They are Based in London so most of their projects are hosted in the UK. The lasers users interacted with were computer controlled so code was required to follow the motions of users hands, feets and bodies and control the interaction between different users lasers. Prior works that utilized motion tracking, such as the kinect which has drawing capabilities, may have partially inspired this piece.

Sources:

Project Page

About Umbrellium

egrady – Looking Outwards 1

Virtual Reality has caused quite the stir recently in video games, creating a more interactive experience by literally placing the user in the game world. While I may not be referring to a specific design of virtual reality, I am referring to the usherance of this new and innovative form of game design as a collective idea, which I find not only highly intriguing, but also highly inspiring. And while the concept itself may be in it’s early stages of development, the entire idea of virtual reality is inherently promising.

Many established developers are attempted to incorporate VR into their games, such as how Bethesda Softworks is creating a VR adaptation for “Fallout 4”. This is interesting, because Bethesda in this case is inspsired by how immersive Fallout 4 is already, in terms of the game. It puts the players in the shoes of the character, who gets to explore an unfamiliar world. But with the addition of VR, the ‘immersiveness’ is taken to a whole new level.

The usherance of this new form of entertainment creates, with it, a new process in creative development, with a more ingrained focus on world building and immersiveness. I think that the emminence of virtual reality proves that the majority of gamers who desire to play, do so with a similarly equal desire for a sense of escapism, of which virtual reality can most definitely provide. We go from thinking of video games as a simply action based quick button five minutes of fun, to a more cinematic experience, where the user is quite literally put into the shoes of the protagonist, while hoping to experience an event as close to real life as possible, without it being real life, of course. I find it highly inspiring, because it opens up new possibilities for what gaming can achieve. It also additionally opens up a new world of possibilites for creating a universe for which virtual can be employed. The focus is now placed on art, where through art, hopefully entertainment can be achieved.

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Fabric Keyboard:

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I came upon this video a bit by accident. I am very interested in wearable technology in soft-lines and this project by the Responsive Environments team at the MIT media lab. They created a device using a touch and stretch sensitive fabric to create sound. The fabric device can detect touch, proximity, pressure, stretch, and position. The implications for a soft, light and packable/wearable musical controller are endless.

As a designer interested in soft-lines, i deeply admire people that can push the bounds of how we think of fabrics. Adding technology to textiles (something that has been around for thousands of years) pushes and improves our experiences with clothing and personal objects.

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Embedding a musical device in clothing as they have started to explore has implications beyond the field of musical expression. Looking around my dorm room I am thinking of another example of this technology being put to use. Think about putting these sensors in your pillow in bed. Maybe when your head hits it it starts playing rain noise to help you fall asleep.

This is truly an amazing step in wearable and soft-line technology.

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This is the 2016 AICP Sponsor reel. The designers behind this piece used motion capture to record various dancers performing and translate their movements to 3D avatars. The team used a combination of procedural animation techniques and dynamic simulations to add character to the different dances.

I find this piece inspiring because the artists behind the work found a way to not just combine the art of dancing with digital art, but they used the digital side to enhance the movements of the dancers. A good example of this is at 0:58-1:03 in the video. The animators emphasized the spinning motion of the dance by creating a flurry of particles that follow the dancer around. Though it is unclear exactly how the dancer is moving, the particle swarm captures the gesture of the moments in a very life like and real way. This work is a very interesting twenty first century take on the ideas that the Italian futurists developed about one hundred years ago. You may be able to see the similarities in Umberto Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Soccer Player.”

Uberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player

While this video is very entertaining to watch, it only showcases very fast upbeat dancing. I would like to see the technology and techniques that the designers behind this piece used applied to different types of motions. I bet slower more subtle motions could turn into something very beautiful when combined with these effects.

amui1 – Looking Outwards-01

This short film, “The Wishgranter,” was created by 3 artists: Kal Athannassov, John McDonald, Echo Wu. They are all part of the Ringling College of Art and Design.

“The Wishgranter” is ultimately a love story created by an apathetic creature that lives under a fountain.

What I love about animated shorts is that it communicates a strong message through an entertaining and creative medium. I admire that a video of 5 minutes entails a long and thoroughly thought out development process, including thinking on script, characters, setting, music, action, and sounds. What I admire about “The Wishgranter” in particular is the emotion the artists communicate through their characters. For example, it was very clear that the wishgranter was uninterested and unmotivated with his job, but by the end of the short, you could see that the wishgranter became motivated again and invested in delivering love to these two strangers.

A few more videos that inspired me are: “Scarlett” and “Sweet Cocoon” .