Category: Section E

http://www.notcot.org/post/62386/

https://www.bmo200.com/

I came across yoonyouk’s first Looking Outwards from Section E and discovered this installation piece that captured my eye. This is an electric “fountain” created for the Bank of Montreal’s 200th Anniversary by BMO workers and artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins. The idea of a “fountain” came to be because BMO wanted to grant wishes to it’s customers through tossing a coin.

How viewers can interact with this piece is by “tossing” a coin on their mobile devices. The piece senses the devices and responds through hundreds of “flip-up” plates that alter the color of the entire structure from white to blue. Numerous animated patterns and ripples can be made on the fountain stream and on the floor.

YoonYouk finds the project enjoyable since it successfully combines art, interaction, and software all in one great piece. She also enjoys how it uses flip-up plates to alter the structure rather than using electronic screens. I can totally agree with all her points. I found this piece enjoyable because of its easy-going interaction with viewers: there is no need to do something complicated. I can also agree that the use of flip up plates makes the piece truly different. If the piece used electronic screens, I believe the magic and uniqueness of the piece would disappear.

Overall, me and yoouyouk found this piece to be truly innovative, unique, and successful.

Proteus

For this looking outwards, I decided to look into Allissa’s Looking Outwards post on the game Proteus. Ed Key released the game in 2013, allowing users to explore this generated world.

I really liked Allissa’s mentioning of the change in soundtrack depending on the user’s location as well as the time of day. While I did not actually purchase the game myself to play it, I liked the way Allissa described the features in the game in regards to randomly generated topography, flora, fauna, and structures.

While I do agree that the gameplay is slightly limited in the sense that what you can do involves walking around the world and listening to music, I think that is what makes the game so satisfactory. The calm and elegant simplicity of the design paired with the limited gameplay gave it its own aesthetic and atmosphere.

Credit to Ryu Kondrup and his post on The Mylar Typology by Paul Prudence

Title: The Mylar Typology

Artist: Paul Prudence

Year of Creation: 2017

Link to the Project: http://www.transphormetic.com/The-Mylar-Topology

Link to the bio of the Artist: http://www.transphormetic.com/Biography

 

While I was browsing through the Looking Outwards posts I came across multiple artworks that caught my attention. Among these, Ryu’s post on the audiovisual artwork titled The Mylar Typology by Paul Prudence seemed especially interesting for its unique concept and the high-tech methods that was used to create the artwork.

The Mylar Typology is a combination of an ever-evolving visual abstract landscape (that was created by closely filming the reflections on the Mylar sheets and distorting them) and the oscillating tones that are supposed to affect our brainwaves in a way that would make us feel relaxed. Both the oscillating visual art and the audio that are synchronized to each other work as stimuli to our brains by affecting the frequency, amplitude, and periodicity of the brainwaves that are shared by the optical and visual waves as well.

It’s interesting to me how the artist combined both the visual and the audio aid to double the effect that his work has on the audience. I had come across multiple ‘relaxing sounds that are good for studying and relaxation’ that incorporate oscillating sounds but none of them had a visual aid that is just as abstract and science-based as this one.

I also admire the high-technological aspect of the artwork; unlike most other artwork or music that is supposed to calm you down by evoking a peaceful memory or having a mild tone that is associated with a calm atmosphere, this artwork literally manipulates a part of our brain to make us feel relaxed. Without the help of the scientific studies on brains or modern technology that can detect the brain waves and produce them as well, this artwork could have not existed.

 

(Jakub Javora, Dark Forest, 2016)

I came across Jackie’s post on Jakub Javora’s work and was really drawn in by the style and slight animation. Though I’ve grown to be less impressed by how “realistic” something is rendered and more interested with different methods of stylization, I think that the level of realism works well in this piece. Like Jackie, also I really appreciate the narrative level the artist brought into the work. The glowing rectangle (doorway? light?) adds an element of mystery to the piece, which combined with the lighting and the movement of the deer work to create an overall atmosphere of mystery.

 

Artist: Sarah Williams

Year: 2014

Link to the Artist’s Website: http://civicdatadesignlab.mit.edu/

Link to the Brief Bio of the Artist: http://eyeofestival.com/2014/speaker/sarah-williams/

 

Sarah Williams is currently an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and the Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Her work at Civic Data Design Lab focuses mainly on digitally visualizing urban patterns and data for the purpose of making them more accessible to the general public.

I was amazed at the scope and the variety of data that her team and she have created in the past. The scale of her maps range from few blocks in the city to the entire country and include general topics like population, transportation and urban growth as well as some less familiar topics such as natural disaster and the route of the New York Fashion Designers. However multifaceted the topics and ranges of her maps may be, they all have a single purpose: to deliver the information in the most efficient and helpful way. She creates these informational maps to solve the growing urban problems such as traffic, congestion, pollution and other social problems and to inform the audience of how their city looks like in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

In her presentation she mentioned that there are 6 elements of data visualization. This was a good way to organize different aspects of data visualization and to offer a clear steps to how you may visualize the data on your own. I was impressed by the fact that she included the “being open with data” as one of the elements because it seems to imply how open and friendly the society has become, that information and data is something to be shared and not to be kept secret from others.

Stephanie Posavec describes herself as a self-employed graphic designer
who considers “data” her favored medium. She specializes in data related design and works on data projects that involve language, literature, and science. She has worked on projects and commissions for various companies and institutions that include Facebook, BBC, Tate Britain, and Victoria and Albert Museum. After moving from the United States for her MA in Communication Design in Central Saint Martins, she decided to stay in London to continue her artistic career.
The simplicity of her the Eyeo presentation slides allowed me to easily focus on her works and the messages she delivered through the talk. One of the works that caught my attention both in her talk and her web site was the project she worked on for the Memory Palace exhibition for V&A in London. The push and pull between the objective logical design decisions and the subjective emotional design decisions that occur in the process of working with data is prevalent in this project, as it exemplifies how she works in between the two worlds.
The work consists of three different prints that are simultaneously illustrative and data oriented. Although the illustrative quality initially attracted my attention as the most appealing aspect of the work, the idea behind the artistic choices is what I find more fascinating. Each of the three prints functions as the map of the world, involving accurate data that displays the locations of various capital cities. I admire this project in that it remains true to the data while containing an illustrative quality, just like many other works by Posavec.
In short, I believe that her works go beyond focusing on data visualisation and information design. Using data as a basis to create an illustrative work of art is what I intend to explore in the near future.

Posavec’s world maps for V&A‘s Memory Palace project

I remember Sarah Hendren coming to CMU give a lecture for the School of Design’s Design the Future lecture series. Her presentation revolves around presenting an intriguing project, explaining the process of it, and then using the story of the process to make her point.  Sarah is an artist and design researcher at the Ollin College of Engineering whose work “engages adaptive and assistive technologies, prosthetics, inclusive design, accessible architecture, and related ideas”. As designers, unless prompted otherwise, we will always assume that the user is of able body, sense, and intellect. Because of this unstated assumption in design, the most designer would fail to consider how handicapped people would interact with their designs. Additionally, even when designers do consider these “not-normal” people, often time designers would assume that these “not-normal” people would want to reestablish “normalcy” through technology. Sarah distinguishes between the idea of cure versus accommodation, should we cure disability or should we accommodate a disability? She contrasts a high-tech electric muscle prosthetic arm that Gizmodo celebrates, with the high-impact almost free prosthetic leg that is made of recycled plastic in India. From communication to products, and environments, Sarah’s work spans no bounds. As a whole, Sarah’s practice is about re-contextualizing disability and transitioning towards a society where differences are celebrated.

“phosphere” Rhizomatiks Research x ELEVENPLAY

Daito Manabe’s: site

Daito Manabe studied math, science, technology/programming and art, Manabe’s art reflects this intersection. I enjoy the aesthetics of his work, it takes simple visual elements and uses them as building blocks to make a more interesting visual. I admire “phosphere” Rhizomatiks Research x ELEVENPLAY which Daito was the visual director for. I was unable find his talk from the festival but he is listed as one of the artists listed for the 2013 iteration, some of his work involves video so a vimeo search of name brings plenty of results. I think an artist’s site is another personalized curation of their work similar to how they would in a lecture. Manabe’s site is very coherent and knows how to present his work within a format that matches the work’s aesthetics. I really like the stills from ELEVENPAY so I linked them above.

^”Hacking IKEA”, a project by Taeyoon Choi focusing on the multiplicity of noise density in a busy context.

I was pretty captured by the work of Taeyoon Choi, a visual and computer artist based out of New York City and Seoul, South Korea, who combines a passion for digital interfacing with a passion for urban and human interactions to create a school of thought he calls “poetic computation”. Poetic computation allows an artist to intervene in a social space to use digital and computational tools to reorganize and reparametrize that space. In doing so, Choi enables spaces to reflect both their natural, intuitive elements of being juxtaposed against his interventions which, big or small, transform spaces in different ways.

Choi’s work is particularly reflective of a new model of architectural thinking that I’m inspired by, which is personally driving my academic path as we speak. If spaces have the power to be fundamentally altered by what we as individuals can do to them, then architects and designers have the power to optimize these spaces for complete user intervention. What does it mean for a store like IKEA, where customers slowly follow a calculated path in environments meant to reflect their own homes, to suddenly exhibit an experience so foreign to a customer that it forces them to remind themselves that they’re in a store? (See Choi’s project, linked above). How can designers use this thinking to drive the creation of spaces? These questions elevate off of Choi’s work and serve as a major inspiration for what I strive to do.