Category: LookingOutwards-02

Jenna Kim (Jeeyoon Kim)- Looking Outwards-2

The intelligent beehive (in many different views)

The project, “Genesis of a Micronal Skin”, is a research project/ an installation project by AnneMarie Maes created to examine the idea of Intelligent Beehives through “thorough” research of microbial skin. The Guerilla Beehive is a device that senses the pollution of the current environment. Not only this device looks out for for bees’ wellbeing, but it also changes color depending on the situation of our environment. She was inspired from the idea that we as humans need to alter our lifestyles for the environment for sustainable future (which is a major topic discussed in my Design major). She used different resources such as 3D rendering of pollen grain, cellulose skin growcontainer with bacteria and yeast cells, and many more. This project is admirable because through this installation/ project, the AnneMarie Maes delivers a story about our environment to the audience. It’s also interesting how AnneMarie created a harmony between man made material and natural material. The algorithm that generated the work used “pattern recognition” to record the images captured by infrared camera when a membrane was being developed through microbial cellulose. Creator’s artistic sensibilities manifested in the algorithm because she used it to produce the outer skin in the form of a beehive and graphical rendering of microbial movements. Although she used her artistic sensibilities to create this installation, she could have improved on the form because it is difficult to tell if the form was intended to be a beehive.

Eliza Pratt – Looking Outwards 02


LIA’s mechanical plotter drawings demonstrate how generative art can be used to create expressive works that still retain the signature of the artist. Using code written in Processing (a software program developed for the arts) and Micron pen fastened to a plotter, LIA creates beautiful works that vary in shape and composition. Not only do I admire LIA as a female creative programmer, but these “drawn” prints feel eloquently reminiscent of traditional printmaking practices. Much like in printmaking, the art of printing the work is equally as important as the image itself, and the copies that result from this process are inherently one-of-a-kind. Though created with code and executed by machine, the shapes and compositions of these works show evidence of human thought and creativity. While these drawings may lack the nuances of traditional art, LIA’s personality and expressiveness still clearly shines through.

Elena Deng-Looking Outwards 02

overview of exhibit

This week I looked at Karl Sim’s Genetic Images from 1993. In this project, the user stands in front of a supercomputer and selects one of the 16 images displayed on the screen. The user is then elected to select one of the photos that appeals most to them and in turn that “photo” would be able to reproduce and make it to the next generation. This project was based on Darwinian Evolution and the thing I admire about it was how it was able to transcend the fields of science, technology, and art in such an early stage of technological advancement in computer technology.
Judging by the technology available in the early 1990’s, I’m assuming that the images were labeled from 1–16 and once the user selected one of the images, the aspects of that photo would be meshed together with other selections—to replicate evolution.

example of an image

Daniel Teague – Looking Outward 02

These shoe soles by Nervous Systems really interests me. I was a member of the Cross Country and Track teams in High School, so running equipment, such as a shoe and the design of its soles, are more interesting to me than for most people. This is especially interesting because it’s generating a sole to fit a person’s feet and running gait, or running pattern. This makes each shoe unique to that person.

Jessica Timczyk – Looking Outwards 02

Nervous System, a design studio focused on designing and producing products inspired by natural phenomena, utilizes computer programming to craft their creations. Rather than designing each piece of work individually, the group ingeniously creates computer programs to construct  many new designs, each one being unique. Specifically, the group’s kinematic dress project provides an interesting combination of art and computer programming. A code was seemingly written to design thousands of unique interlocking shapes to make up the dress, resulting in an extremely interesting pattern created by the coder within the “fabric” of the dress which was then 3D printed. It is made up of thousands of triangular panels and hinges, giving the design its motion and mobility. The dress was created and designed by the Nervous System team, including: Jessica Rosenkrantz, Jesse Louis- Rosenberg, Margaret Swanson, and Peter Sanroma in 2014.

The video above describes in more detail the process the team went through to produce the Kinematics Dress.

Vicky Zhou – Looking Outwards – 02

Generative Neural Network produced chairs based on solely aesthetic.

Final series of four physical chairs based on GAN generated chairs

“The chAIr Project” is a series of four chairs that were inspired by a generative neural network, and then created and brought to life by designers. The data set utilized by this neural network consisted of hundreds of 20th century chair designs gathered from Pinterest. Based on this data set, the neural network system generated hundreds of chairs simply based on aesthetics, many times resulting in unpractical renditions and/or pieces that did not even resemble furniture.

I found this project really interesting because of the results that ensued due to a focus on simply the aesthetics and physical classic qualities of a chair, rather than the technical qualities, such as maximizing surface area in ratio weight distributed and so on. Because of this focus towards aesthetics, many of the chairs were completely unsuitable for actual use, and served as images for inspiration and unrestricted ideation. It was ironic to see how impractical some of these chairs became, as chairs are commonly viewed as practical, everyday products. What ties this project all together and makes it the most engaging, however, is when the two designers, Phillip Schmitt and Steffen Weiss, chose to bring some of these generated prototypes to real life. Seeing the four designs in real life brings it into our dimension of reality, and allows us to fully engage with a familiar concept repackaged in an unfamiliar form.

Ean Grady-Looking Outwards-02

https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/qkwvp7/generative-video-game-puts-you-inside-mind-bending-art-galleries

‘Strangethink’, an anonymous experimental video game designer, has created a video game, Secret Habitat, that features procedurally generated art galleries that the player can view, in his words he says that the game is, “an almost entirely procedurally-generated world consisting of hundreds of alien galleries containing thousands of pieces of computer-generated art, music and poetry”. In each of the galleries that Secret Habitat features, there are ‘reading machines’ that spit out generative poetry and also generative music. When players enter the game and walk into the gallery, they can view procedurally generated art while also listening to generative music in the background.

Strangethink says in the article that he made the game because he was curious about the effects of ambient music on the user experience, and how it affects their perception of various things. I admire the idea to use procedurally generative art and music because it allows for wildly varying tones, melodies, images to be shown therefore giving each player a different perception-based experience, which in turn allows for his creative vision to be employed. I’m very curious about what programming goes into making a procedural generator, it’s really interesting how his idea for wanting to give the user varying experiences is perfectly imagined through procedural generation.

Grasshopper and Generative Art

John Locke’s emoticon-constructed skull

If you look closely, this skull is made up of little faces. Some are happy, exposing the reds of their mouths. Others are unhappy, pursing their lips to be mostly yellow circles. What I admire is that each of these faces has individual parameters for their mouth and eyes based on how happy they are. Take a greyscale image and remap value to happiness and you get.. a skull made up of faces.

Parametric controls for each face

These were generated in Grasshopper, a plugin for the CAD and Surface Modeling program Rhinoceros, and that short summary above was the workflow. Since Grasshopper is a visual programming language, like parts of the Unreal Engine, you just plug actors into actors.

The Grasshopper program

This specific project was made by architect  John Locke March 2013, and his blog post was titled “=)”. What I admire is that the faces are very expressive with very little, and what’s there is well-articulated. The eyes and mouth aren’t pinned in place, they shift. It also shows a less serious side of the artist. A lot of his work relates to architecture, and this is a fun side project.

Justin Yook – Looking Outwards 02

“Reaction-Diffusion” by Nobutaka Kitahara is a generative art piece. The CG art presented on screen is made from mathematical algorithms to simulate chemicals’ reaction-diffusion patterns in response to sounds; in this project, he used the song titled “Astravel”. According to information on some websites, this reaction-diffusion simulation is created based on the Gray-Scott model. One can see Kitahara’s artistic sensibilities manifest in the algorithm from his use of 3D space instead of 2D, making the viewer’s perspective much more interesting because there are more angles to see the simulation from. I admire this project because it is an amazing way to bind art, science and math together. There are many times when people assume that art and math or science are in separate categories, but “Reaction-Diffusion” represents that phenomenons of the natural world actually are made of both art and math or science; almost like one cannot exist without the other.

 

Alexandra Kaplan-Looking Outwards-02

Image from Memo Atken’s “All watched over by machines of loving grace: Deepdream edition”

This is a work by the Generative Art artist Memo Atken called “All watched over by machines of loving grace: Deepdream edition”. It takes a birds-eye image of the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency) which is then changed through a deep learning artificial intelligence program called Deepdream. This project caught my eye because it used technology to make a statement on the subject. The algorithm causes the distinct building to look like an infinite number of eyes staring back at you, which is an interesting and insightful comparison considering the purpose of the GCHQ.

I am very unfamiliar with AI and any algorithms/processes one can use to create art within them, so I did some further reading on the subject, and I came across a broken down version of the artistic process in an article Atken wrote:

“At a high level here’s what’s happening in #deepdream:

  1. An artificial neural network (i.e. the AI’s ‘brain’) has already been trained on over a million images (to recognise objects in the images)
  2. We show the trained network a brand new image
  3. While the network is processing this new image, we take a snapshot from a particular group of neurons inside the network
  4. We feed that new snapshot image back in, i.e. show it to the network (We can optionally apply small transformations, like zooming in etc.)
  5. Repeat”