Looking Outwards #1: Volume (Interactive cube of responsive mirrors that redirects light and sound)
This interactive cube of responsive mirrors are made by the NY based art and architecture collective, Softlab. I was fascinated by this project because of its work in combining sound and light into the same place. Especially how the sound and light were used as the building elements of the project. It took the artist a study in the visualization of extremely small particles that compose the air. The human eye cannot see them, but it was made possible with the implementation of the sound and the light.
The responsive mirrors are regulated and controlled by a specific set of computer commands. This would not differ very much from the ordinary software we use in our daily lives. The lights are LED bulbs as well, which is the major source of light in modern buildings. This project opens the door to many visual opportunities for the “invisible”, and the abstract, tangible.
Below is a link to the website: http://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/volume-interactive-cube-of-responsive-mirrors-that-redirects-light-and-sound/
I visited ‘WONDER’ in my senior year of high school to take photographs with a film camera. While my friends and I were touring, we were mesmerized by the atmosphere different lighting and texture creates.
Exhibition ‘WONDER’ was displayed in Renwick Gallery to celebrate their newly renewed museum. The exhibition consisted of artworks from nine leading contemporary artists including Jennifer Angus, Chakaia Booker, and Gabriel Dawe. Highlights of ‘WONDER’ was observing unexpected materials such as threads, insects, and woods.
Jennifer Angus Renwick Wonder
An artwork I remember from ‘WONDER’ is Jennifer Angus, brightly-colored insects’ exhibition. She filled the room with real insects that are primarily in Malaysia, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea. Since she loves the nature and loves to travel to places that are naturally preserved and free from human’s trace, she uses natural sources to create her art. Especially, choosing color magenta red for the wall for its originality from the cochineal insect living in Mexico was interesting because it tells the relation between human’s use of technology to create colors and the nature that provides the source. Jennifer Angus, researching the formula of color to solely use production from nature inspired me to see the link between technology and nature.
When I was searching through YouTube couple years ago for a design technology assignment, I encountered an interactive project done by MIT Tangible Media Group and I was really drawn to it. According to the creators’ website, this project is named inFORM and what is interesting about this project is that this machine renders and displays 3-dimensional objects physically so that the viewers are able to interact with “digital information in a tangible way”. There are three main contributors to this project who came up with the concept – Daniel Leithinger, Sean Follmer, and Hiroshi Ishii – along with many other engineers who contributed to the actual making of this program. However, the information on the duration of the project was not clearly mentioned in the website. As the project was conducted under a MIT owned institution, they would have most likely came up with their own system or software for the project but I am not entirely sure about this. Currently, this project is being developed for applications in geospatial data, urban planning, and architecture.
TrussFab is an integrated system that allows one to fabricate sturdy, large-scale structures that are capable of carrying human weight. Created by Phd researcher, Robert Kovacs, with his team from the Human Computer Interaction Lab, TrussFab is interesting in that it is a 3D fabrication process that does not need specialized equipment nor specific engineering knowledge but rather easy and relatively quick to make. Also, TrussFab utilizes easily accessible material – plastic bottles -to act like beams that form triangular shapes to produce trusses as a whole. The Sketchup plugin that Trussfab uses takes an existing 3D model and automatically transforms it into a Trussfab structure while adjusting for structural stability. Architect named Oanh Lisa Nguyen Xuan constructed a pavilion through Trussfab that was 5m high out of 1268 plastic bottles. This Sketchup editor plugin designed by TrussFab create opportunities for other designers to easily fabricate large, structurally-sound forms with only the Sketchup plugin, 3D printer, and easily accessible materials in hand.
What if we could envisage the future data of our city to give citizens safe feelings in the present?
This project speculates about the possibility of gathering actual data to predict a future data, so we would know the consequences of actual decisions.
This is a work done by Superflux for the Government of UAE. The target is to develop a mechanism to experience numerous possible futures around energy, but more importantly, to stress test the opportunities and broader systemic consequences of each future with Cabinet Ministers and key decision makers.
Augmented models
Their main focus for the project was the creation of the Future Energy Zone. Extrapolating insights from the Ministry of Energy’s econometric data and projections, they created a model metropolis from the future that made the data experientially evocative and acted out the implications of new energy policies on the urban landscape.
Physical base model to augment with digital information
The idea of the “augmented physical model” gives us some perspective about different scales. While people recognize physical models quicker (sense of what it is, scale, material,…), it is not enough for a big data analysis. The augmented digital layer gives us the dynamic state and the main information.
This continuous shift between physical and digital generates a great scope of time. They had to come up with new elements, developing a range of artefacts that had to look outwards towards the past. They generated some “future air” to see what it would be to breathe unpolluted air, in a way to concienciate the citizens to change their lifestyle.
Air pollution sample
This project is obviously expensive to produce, so they involved some public funding, trying to encourage citizens to contribute financially towards a long term investment.
This futuristic project deals with multiple layers of information and scales. It is an urbanistic data project in which different stratum have their word. Because of its nature of “huge scale experimental process”, it is difficult to analyze every single element that completes the synergy. Early stage of a compelling and fundamental project that can create a new paradigm for how cities will work in a near future.
So my research began with the simple search of the words “new media art installations interactive” which led me to discover a project gallery called Teknopolis hosted by a group call BAM. In Teknopolis, a collection of 10 different new media art is displayed, many of them being interactive. One project that caught my eye was the project call Lumarca created by Matt Parker, a new media artist and game designer in collaboration with Albert Hwang. According to his bio, his interests are deeply settled into the exploration of the intersection between both the physical and digital worlds. Lumarca, Latin for “lightbox” is an installation which uses only a computer, a projector, and yard as the projected screen in order to showcase a three dimensional volumetric display of images and motion. And since the materials used were so simple, the cost for the completion of this project was very cheap and affordable.
Below is a short documentary about the project:
According to the documentary, Parker was inspired by his desire to create something three dimensional, something in which the user can experience it instead of viewing solely from a flat two dimensional screen.
In contrast, what inspired me about the project was that this project is cable for any artist to use and create their own versions of new media art using the software and system that Parker and Hwang had developed.
Here are some of the examples of different artists’ works inspired by Lumarca as documented on Parker’s website:
Some critiques that I might have about this project would be that maybe this project was too static? If the creators really wanted to make this a truly three dimensional experience, I feel that it would have been beneficial to incorporate different animations or projections that look like the real world, kind of like the images that one sees in the Oculus rift, but outside of the bulky goggles.
teamLab’s installations in the Japan Society’s 2013/2014 exhibition, “Garden of Unearthly Delights” was my first introduction to the use of code/computer based programming as an artistic medium. Specifically, the work that comes to mind is an installation known as United, Fragmented, Repeated and Impermanent World which was an interactive wallpaper of sorts. The room in which it was installed was lit only by the projections spanning across each wall – which were a plethora of intensely pigmented, pixelated depictions of flowers, trees, water, and nature. As you approached, depending on how you would move your hand or head, cameras would register the movement and respond with blooming flowers, unfurling vines and rippling water (a soft humming tune also played in the background along with some auditory feedback matching the reactions the wallpaper environment had to your presence). It was an amazing interaction, particularly since I’d never seen or let alone heard of code in such a context before, and is what inspired me to take this course and pursue HCI alongside my art career.
teamLab itself is a group of creators: artists, programmers, architects,engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, etc. who collaborate in order to create moving pieces of work that marry the boundaries between art, science, and technology through a unifying creativity. They always have a multitude of people working on projects and as such, have many different sources of inspiration – but what seems to be the most prominent source of inspiration for them is their own drive to create things that go beyond the traditional confines of what we consider art or science, and in doing so – to change people’s minds about the possibilities around them, expand horizons if you will. They have multiple locations (In Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), and are fairly well known amongst the new media world.
below is a link to the teamLab website: https://www.teamlab.art
One piece of media that has inspired me is the YouTube video “TIE Fighter – Short Film” by Paul Johnson. The film was a homage to the 1994 video game with the same name. According to the credits the project was made by a team of only three people. Paul Johnson was the animator, Zakir Rahman composed the music, and Joseph Leyva worked on sound design. Paul and Zakir were housemates, so it was easy for them to work together. The description also states that it took them four years to complete.
From what I’ve read, the team didn’t create new programs or software to complete the piece. This would put it more in the category of last word art. The obvious inspiration of the creator was the Star Wars franchise. However, he was also a huge fan of 1980’s anime. This was shown by the stylized faces that Paul gave each of his characters. One of his previous works was a Doctor Who animation. He is now working on a mech animation which he stated would be inspired by Generation Kill.
Sources Used:
C., Jordan. “Animator Paul.” Mass Appeal, Mass Appeal, 18 Aug. 2015, massappeal.com/animator-paul-otaking-johnson-talks-his-insane-star-wars-anime/.
In my senior year of high school, our top orchestral and symphony groups were invited to perform at a music festival in Washington D.C. and during our free time while on tour, we went to visit the Renwick Museum. The museum featured a work by Janet Echelman, entitled “1.8 Renwick” because the earthquake shortened the length of a single day by 1.8 microseconds.
It was inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and incredible heights of the tsunami waves in the Pacific Ocean and uses some technology that links it to a map of the energy released by the powerful tsunamis across the Pacific Ocean. Many artists are inspired by their surroundings or historical events; the impacts of earthquakes on human society have been also noted by other artists such as Ai Weiwei.
I love this project for its interesting link between the vibrancy of spectacular colors and use of technology to bring a visual experience that symbolizes the powerful impact of a natural disaster. The dramatic color shifts in the netting show viewers how quickly things in our natural world can change and how deadly these shifts and changes can be. I don’t know how exactly or how long it took Echelman to create this project or specifically what algorithm she used but I do know the lights are linked to the energy maps of the tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean during the earthquake, hence the shifts in color.
“Audience” was a collaborative project between Random International and Chris O’Shea in 2008. This project initially started off in 2002 with the lead of Stuart Wood, Flo Ortkrass and Hannes Koch. They aimed to bring art, science, and technology together by installing a motion tracking software that senses movements of human figures when approached. Random International has previous works that portray the cold nature of technology. They are similarly interactive and technology based.
As stated above, this piece consists of small mirrors that have motion tracking softwares and cameras attached to them. When a human figure approaches the cluster, the software senses the target and turns their reflective sides to the moving subject. After all, the human figure becomes the reflected result, and thus the main part of the piece. It emphasizes the cold nature of technology, and the uneasy feeling one gets from this automated response. By reversing from being a viewer to someone who is viewed, the artists aim to find out if machines can evoke emotions in humans.
This piece is truly fascinating to me because the viewers do not have any access to manipulating the piece when it comes to interaction. This programmed system involuntarily moves the mirrors, and act as more of a surprise. Usually, the viewers are given the choice, but I liked how that isn’t the case for this piece.
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