Category: Section A

Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille talk about their projects at the 2012 Eyeo Festival

On today’s edition of “Looking Outwards with Michael Miller,” we will be exploring the life and habits of artist, programmer, and designer Theo Watson.  Born in London, Theo studied Design and Technology at the Parsons School of Design, and has since founded Design I/O and YesYesNo, among doing other cool things.  Theo works on interactive experiences that encourage play, so kinda like games, but generally on a larger scale such as creating digital environments in physical spaces that give open-ended opportunities for people to interact with the space, such as he did with Night Bright and Funky Forest.  One of his focuses in development is rapid prototype creation — making proofs of concept that allow people he’s working with to visualize what it is he wants to do — and I think this is an admirable strategy for project work because it turns abstract concepts into concrete creations which can then be more readily shared and analyzed.  In presenting, he uses a bunch of images and videos of the creation process of his projects, and I feel that this is effective in engaging the audience because it gives them a window of insight into how he works.

(Note, most of this post can also be applied to Emily Gobeille as she also worked on these projects, but I just did more specific research on Theo.  I’m just trying to be clear that Theo didn’t work alone on all of these)

I watched the video of Frieder Nake, a German mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer art. He is internationally famous for his contributions to the earliest manifestations of algorithmic and generative art. In 1963, he began his first artistic experiments with the drawing machine of Konrad Zuse, at the Technical University of Stuttgart where he studied mathematics. The reason why I thought his lecture was interesting and worth watching was first of all, he set a significant cornerstone for computer art, trying out new things in the field yet unexplored. What he has done was so innovative and creative for the time period, and what we are doing in this class right now might not be the same if he hadn’t try out new things himself.He talks through his encounter with early generative art, what he had to go through as a pioneer of the field. Through presenting some anecdotes from of his life, he tries to demonstrate how algorithmic art requires algorithmic thinking, and how computer graphics is the origin of digital media. His lecture help us understand more in depth about the thought process of the people who initiated these practices, in a different language other than actual code. Listening to the talk by somebody who made his way through an unpaved path helped me make more sense of algorithms used in generative art.

What I really liked about his art, I think, came mostly from its originality. Of course, art is original in nature, but for his work, he did not have anything to make reference from. His works are truly experimental from all aspects. I attached one of his works that I liked below. Not only that I enjoy the visual composition or the color of the piece, but because I learned from the video about how he appreciates the whole process of generative art and algorithm, it gives the piece more meaning and life.

• I wasn’t able to find his website anywhere online.

Eyeo 2014 – Frieder Nake from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

“Eyeo 2015 Meejin Yoon” from Eyeo Festival //INSTINT

Meejin Yoon is Korean American Architect who graduated from Cornell University and received her Master in Urban Design from Harvard University. She effectively integrated responsive technologies and architecture to create interactive environment and public spaces.

“Hover” in New Orleans by Meejin Yoon-interactive lighting installation

One of her projects, “Hover”, shows a nice combination of her interest in responsive technology and interactive environment. Hover is a temporary canopy fir the DesCours festival. It is a luminous canopy that has both LEDs and “photovoltaic” cells that power them. She took inspiration from human body cell to create this interactive installation. The installation reacts to the surrounding environment, emitting more light on sunny days and less on cloudy days.

How she used the material and how the material or system reacts to its surrounding is very inspiring. Everything she creates and every material she uses is very intentional as aesthetic as well as systematic. And the result of the practicality of materials, space, and interactive potential created a public installation that interacts with the viewers.

link to hover

The person I chose to reflect on for this week’s Looking Outwards is J.Meejin Yoon

Caption: A picture of J.Meejin and her husband, Eric. Together, they founded an architectural studio, called Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP, as a husband and wife team. Yoon is also a cofounder of MyStudio.

J.Meejin Yoon is an architect, designer, and educator. She started her education in 1995, at Cornell University studying architecture. Then, she received her Masters of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard (1997).

Now, she is the head of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Along with the 2015 new Generation Award, she was has been recognized as Architecture League’s Emerging Voices (2012), Rome Prize in Design (2005) and many more. Her works and research focus on intersecting architecture, technology, nature, and public space.

Caption: Eyeo talk by J.Meejin Yoon on interactive play in public space. I admired her presentation because she presented her work with humor, honesty, and thought processes to specific aspects of the project.

I admire that her work consistently incorporated nature. In addition, I like how her work aims to encourage  human interaction. I admire her as a person. She is very humble, yet so accomplished.

My favorite project was “Swing Time.” I liked this project because it was all about encouraging people of all ages to play and engage. She specifically mentioned, that she wanted to experiment to find a way to allow parents and young adults to be brought back to their childhood days with this project. I also really liked her project, Sean Collier Memorial. I like the way she incorporated Incan architecture and how she said at the end: the project was no longer her’s, but the project was now the MIT community’s.

Above is Yuri Suzuki’s presentation at the Eyeo Festival in 2015.

Below is one of Suzuki’s works I was most interested in.

Sarah William is a current assistant professor of Urban planning as well as a director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT’s School of Architecture and planning. The Civic Data Design Lab at MIT utilizes data visualization and mapping techniques to analyze and visualize patterns at an urban scale and also allows different audience members to be able to understand the data and communicates the policies issues from the data. Digital Matatus is a project that I really liked, since it has such a simple design and yet so effectively conveys so much information.Below you can find a link to the works.
Link to her work
Something very interesting about the work she does is that she utilizes a lot of real life and real time data to create these very informative visuals. She believes that data is very essential and very important aspect of life. She believes that data could be used for both good and bad. She believes that it is how we use data which is what makes data truly powerful and impactful.

Her presentation has a lot of logical flow to it, where she first explains the important concepts that enable her work, then explaining what some applications of those concepts. Finally establishing a baseline of what basic understanding of concepts, she explains her own project which at that point everyone will have clear understanding of. Below is a link to their presentation.

Elliot Woods is a digital media artist and technologist from Manchester based in Seoul. He fosters interactions between humans and socio-visual design technologies, more specifically involving projectors, cameras, and graphical computation. He co-founded Kimchi and Chips, an art and technology studio with Mimi Son. They display the realms of material and immaterial, creating speculative visual objects which poke at the unpredictable attributes of things when they are touched with technology. I admire the groups’ success in encouraging the dialogue between digital and modern art cultures, and playing with the illusion of reality and immateriality. I really was amazed by their light projections project, and even wrote on it for my first looking outwards. It is a project in which they create intangible shapes and forms by gathering light projection beams. They present their work effectively by first showing the concept and digital mock ups, then the implementation and actual technical process of creating the work, and the final product. I think this would be a great way for me to clearly present future technology related artworks.

Eyeo 2014 – Mimi Son and Elliot Woods from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

A video of my favorite project from this group.

Light Barrier, 2014 from Mimi Son on Vimeo.

http://www.kimchiandchips.com/

Mariana Santos

Mariana Santos is currently the CEO of Unicorn Interactive, an independent media startup working on digital storytelling. She graduated from the University of Lisbon with a bachelors in communication and industrial design. Then completed a masters in digital media while working at Hyper Island. Santos describes herself as a visual storyteller, and began her career as a motion animator and post-production editor at Universal Music Berlin.

Santos creates a wide range of work from interactive, animation, film, design, to books. I admire the interactive work she creates, as they tend to follow a similar personal style that’s very straight-forward and colorful. Her style works well specifically with maps and guides. The project I admire the most is the piece ‘Could you be a medallist’, as she took on a retro/gameboy aesthetic that made a super user-friendly piece that was fun and engaging.

Through her portfolio, she presents her work effectively by having automated slideshows with high fidelity visuals at each clickable album. Visuals are also followed with a paragraph description which is consistent throughout. The page is also adaptive, which is something I could implement for my own presentation.

http://marysaints.com/
http://marysaints.com/Could-you-be-a-medallist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8jcbl4erq

Afroditi Psarra is a multidisciplinary artist who bases a focus of electronic textiles (or “soft” circuits) and sound. She completed her PhD in Image, Technology and Design from the Complutense University of Madrid and is an assistant professor at the Center for Digital Arts & Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her rigorous research in Cyberpunk and New Media Art with focus on integrating science fiction ideas with performative and digital fields allows her to apply a humanistic approach to how technology is perceived and utilized.

In the lecture at Institute Systems Biology she introduces her work based on her believes that we will have to integrate and envision technologies as extensions of our body that enables us to live in a complicated and dynamic society that is increasingly digital. By partnering with other  multidisciplinary artist Psarra is continuously exploring ways to interpret the “invisible” data that connects various aspects of society and how to allow people to be able to interact with and understand that “invisible” space of the world by creating smart e-textiles and “use technology to be used in a more human way” (Psarra, in the lecture). One of her most recent works is called Cosmic Bitcasting a collaboration with  Cécile Lapoire to create a wearable cosmic ray detector which communicates the “invisible” information that is embedded in the space around us. The attire created would respond to the gamma radiation, X-rays, alpha and beta particles that are passing through the person’s body by using a series of light and vibrations.

The process of her work is documented on her website which shows the experimentation and coding of the Arduino modules she used to detect the rays and how she translates that data to soft circuits and finally to fabric.

Psarra’s work inspires us to rethink of technology, providing a different, often a sense of fictional sci-fi sensibility to her work that gets people who view and experience her work to be excited and engaged because working with textile is something very common in our daily lives. The integration and making them more digitally compatible will do more than just becoming an extension of our bodies, but also become a medium that connects us to the digital world and the digital world to the realm of the tangible.