Category: Section E

This week’s Looking Outward, I focused on Anouk Wipprecht who spoke at Eyeo Festival in 2016. She is a Dutch artist who identifies herself as Dutch fashion tech designer who welds fashion and technology together. She utilizes fashion and craft skills as well as soldering and technical skills in order to create dresses and garments that move and glow.

She titles her work “Robotic Dresses and Mimicry” combining fashion and technology in order to create eye-catching and moving pieces of clothing. When working with Audi, she took parts from a car and combined them into a garment. Her work is extremely unique and particularly interests me because rather than slapping on technology or LED lights, she integrates fashion and technology in a very cool manner. In addition, the garments don’t look entirely too bulky but rather very high tech and almost high end fashion. I learned that two different subjects can be combined in order to make something quite beautiful. In modern design, a lot of technology is also integrated together but I believe it should be a symbiotic relationship as Wipprecht shows.

 

 

Her work can be found in this link.

Eyeo 2014 – Adam Harvey from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

The speaker I found interesting is Adam Harvey. He is an artist, technologist, and designer, and research based in Berlin — with a focus on the societal impacts of networked data analysis technologies: computer vision, digital imaging, and counter surveillance. He graduated from Interactive Telecommunications (ITA) in NYU and received his bachelor of arts degree from Pennsylvania State University. During his time at ITA, he explored different and imaginative uses for communications technologies, including their augmentations, how they could improve, and how they can improve people’s lives.

I’ve always admired how technology can merge with art and design in different ways, and Adam Harvey’s projects really embody that idea. I also admire his focus on a very relatable topic to an everyday user of technology: privacy and surveillance. My favorite project of his would be a product that he made, called “The OFF Pocket”. It is a bag accessory of sorts for mobile phones, and it is able to block all wireless signals from reaching the phone — this way, users are able to shield off unwanted tracking.

During Adam’s presentation, he goes through a very interesting introduction that leads into why privacy is important to each individual’s control and personal power. I really admire the overall structure and the well-researched ideas he brings up. A clear strategy that he uses is to bring up topics that most people would be able to relate to and how he brings up why people should care about what he is talking about. Whenever I will be able to present my work, I hope to be able to use these strategies as well.

For further reading on Adam Harvey’s work, visit his website: https://ahprojects.com/

Events in Space Time – Jesse Louis-Rosenburg & Jessica Rosenkrantz (Eyeo 2015)

Talk: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2015/133709845

Jesse Louis-Rosenburg and Jessica Rosenkrantz are part of Nervous System,  a generative design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. Jesse has a background in math and computer science, while Jessica in biology and architecture. In their projects, they are interested in focusing on three main areas of research: science and nature, digital fabrication, and co-creation. They start all of their projects by studying natural phenomena, and translate them into one of a kind products by using design tools, algorithms, and technological systems (essentially digital fabrication) that they create to represent those natural phenomena.

Floraform from Nervous System on Vimeo.

It’s interesting how they are using digital fabrication to find new ways of translating nature and biology into different kinds of products. One project that interested me the most is Floraform. In this project,they delve into how biological systems create form by varying growth rates through space and time, hence the title of their talk. They then created algorithms and mechanisms that created a simulation of differentially growing elastic surfaces that represented these differential growths. These experiments were then used to create 3D sculptures and wearable products. What interested me about this project was how they took a natural phenomenon and created their own algorithms to translate them into physical objects.

Throughout the talk, they used pictures, videos, simulations, and other different types of visualization to present their works in their presentations. I believe this is the most effective way to show their work, which are mostly composed of computer generated products. This makes me realize that there are many different ways of showing not just your end product but also your process of designing that product as well.

https://twitter.com/sandsfishhttps://twitter.com/sandsfishhttps://twitter.com/sandsfish

https://www.sandsfish.com/skullwhispering/

For this week’s Looking Outwards, I chose to study the work of Sands Fish who is currently researching at a MIT Media Lab’s Civic Media Group. He introduces himself as both an artist and a researcher whose interests lie in the field of computer science and design. I thought his works would be interesting to investigate because his works lie closely to the environment of CMU where I’m studying design. I thought it would be interesting to learn about his works and try to identify with some of the design practices I am learning and doing here in CMU.

For his Eyeo 2017 lecture, he focused on “Building Parallel Realities”. Sands Fish specifically focused on futures and how speculative designs can contribute to ” shift us into another reality via objects and devices that aren’t born of the status quo, or of our own time or place”. Mainly, his lecture focuses on the ways to integrate individuals from different backgrounds into one. In this talk, Sands explores how, using design, art, and media, we can embody ideas and worlds in objects, and look critically at our assumptions about how our world has to be. He details his work at the MIT Media Lab building provocative police futures to question who participates in this design space, and how we might create more humane alternatives.

Peer: Supawat Vitoorapakorn

Peer Post: https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2017/2017/10/13/svitoora-07-font-map/

Creator: IDEO

Title of Work: IDEO Font Map

Year of Creation: 2016

Link to Project Work: http://fontmap.ideo.com/

Link to Artist Bio: https://www.ideo.com/about

 

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The IDEO Font Map Supawat discussed in his Looking Outwards 07 interested me for reasons similar as Supawat’s — collectively, typeface can be considered a massive arsenal of bullets used for different purposes. For exploration purposes, the IDEO Map gives users the ability to visualize a type and its similarities to others — by grouping type based on shared elements and the intensity of those shared elements, it becomes easier to encourage the utility of less-used typeface (rather than use established, sometimes over-used typeface).

As an actual selection tool(i.e. in opposition to dropdown style menu) however, the Font Map can be somewhat confusing  — the quantity of sampled “A”s on a frame is overwhelming, and the individual aspects of the typeface, although highly contrasted, get lost in a sea of letters. The user does not have the ability to increase the proximities of the letters further away from each other, nor do they have the ability to swap the A for a different letter.

 

INSTINT 2014-Jen Lewin

I decided to look into the works of Jen Lewin based on the information she delivered during her Eyeo Festival talk in 2014. Based in New York, Lewin works as a light and interactive sculptor, making works that allow the public to create their own art. What I found inspirational was Lewin’s focus on the “experience” of her art. Traditionally, art is almost always defined by its final product. However, with Lewin’s publicly available art, that is not the case. Lewin’s ability to allow her art to be ever-changing as a deviation to the norm makes it even more admirable.

The way that Lewin presented her work made me appreciate her work even more. Rather than just displaying each of the projects she accomplished or listing out the things that she had done, she went into her process and reasoning behind her decisions. The way in which she was able to express her thinking to her audience was incredibly effective in a way that positively promoted her work.

Magical Harp Sculpture

After watching the video, I delved in to her Magical Harp sculpture, located in Palo Alto, California in 2015. Deemed, playful, yet sophisticated, the piece was included in the Magical Bridge Playground, an unconventional sort of playground allowing those of different cognitive and physical abilities to enjoy. The consideration of those with different capabilities as well as the overall construction and design of the piece was incredibly inspiring to watch.

Klaus Obermaier is a media-artist, choreographer, and composer in Vienna who creates multimedia art performances/installations using dancing, projectors provided from a team in Japan, animations, music, and computer programming developed and provided from a team in London. When presenting his works, he focuses on hierarchy and lighting along with the types of dances and abstractions. From his works, I learned that subtle details people tend to ignore such as lighting are things that should be he most important things to focus on. One of my most favorite works was named “APPARITION”, a dance and media performance that confronts aesthetic potential and the after effects of integrating interactivity. I like this piece because the animated projection in the background creates a harmony with the projections on the dancers through conflicting patterns and animations. Watching these patterns animate along with the dances and lighting is quite satisfying. His works are truly different and make use of very advanced technology. It’s worth checking out his works.

Website:

http://www.exile.at/apparition/background.html

 

Zach Lieberman Eyeo Festival 2011

Zach Lieberman Eyeo Festival 2017

Zach’s Website

Zach Lieberman is an artist, researcher, hacker and maker of interactive computational works that unveil the synesthetic relationships between human behavior, form and color. Most notably, he is one of the co-founders and developers of Open Frameworks, a c++ library for creative coding. You can find the documentation and more information about it here: http://openframeworks.cc/about/

Zach describes his life’s work as a splicing between three categories: artistic, commercial and educational. Though he describes his work as taking place between these binaries, his projects are often seen at the intersection of these spaces. As an artist, Zach primarily explores themes concerning the human form and uses technology as an artificial limb with which we can extend our interactions with the world.

The Manual Input Workstation presents a series of audiovisual vignettes which probe the expressive possibilities of hand gestures and finger movements.

Messa di Voce (“placing the voice” in Italian)- an audiovisual performance in which the speech, shouts and songs produced by two abstract vocalists are radically augmented in real-time by custom interactive visualization software.

Eyewriter- a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes.

Many of his projects, such as those noted above, pose the human as the central performer of the art. I admire this model of art creation and personally strive to engage an audience through my work in the way Zach’s pieces do. In interaction-driven artworks, we can see the tangible relationships between the human form and the artist’s visual expression, combining the two in a very poetic way. This places the audience in a very unique position of autonomy, allowing themselves to become the “creators” of new, generative works.

In his free time, Zach also loves to explore sketching for his own personal fulfillment and enjoyment. He posts daily sketches to his social media, garnering the attention of thousands each day.

Some of the most commonly observed visual motifs and elements he uses are circles, organic blobs, colors, typography and alphabet, masks and the body.

Zach enjoys being a mentor and educator to many. He has held teaching positions at the School for Poetic Computation and Parsons, and holds Friday Open Office Hours on Twitter.

(Eyeo 2015 – Amor Muñoz from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT)

Amor Muñoz is a multimedia artist from Mexico City. She’s interested in combining experimental technology with more traditional media, in particular textiles. Most of her projects are heavily interdisciplinary, reflecting this interest. She originally studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before briefly moving to the US to study art at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, though she continued practicing law for some years after.

As someone who’s also very interested in textile art and embroidery, I’m fascinated by the way Muñoz combines/ incorporates them with technology. Her art is also frequently commentary on cultural or social issues, and Muñoz lists her “Maquila Region 4” (MR4) project as a prime example of all these pursuits. The project is a take on “maquilas,” which are cheap labor factories typically owned and managed by US companies along Mexican border towns. MR4 is a moble “maquila” that hires people (at the US minimum wage, which is much higher than the Mexican minimum) in poor areas to produce embroidered soft circuits with conductive thread.