[OLD FALL 2018] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice
Professor Roger B. Dannenberg • Fall 2018 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice
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Darius Kazemi programs and creates what are essentially meme machines, automated generators of jokes based off of a defined format and filling in the blanks using ConceptNet, a program that links words with each other by their meaning. Kazemi’s projects are interesting as they allow our senses of humor, which we take to be organic and characteristic of human nature, to be emulated by machines; some of the examples generated by his bots are quite funny even.
http://tinysubversions.com/
I was drawn to Brian House’s work while viewing his website, which is filled with unconventional projects such as Tanglr, a chrome extension that links your own web browsing with that of a random stranger, and Conversnitch, a small “lightbulb” that discretely records conversation and posts bits of them to Twitter. Compared to my assigned projects in design, the unexpectedness and unconventionality of Brian’s work is really refreshing. I’d like to try doing exploratory work like that.
Brian has a background in computer science and sound, which results in a lot of experiments that generate sound from data. He describes himself as “an artist who investigates more-than-human temporalities.” Listening to his presentation, it was more dry than I thought it would be based on his eclectic projects, and a bit meandering. He didn’t really describe his work in an exciting or passionate way, and it was pretty objective — which I would expect more from projects that were assigned by others, and not self-driven. The content is interesting, it’s just formatted more like a essay than sharing your own art/work. I would present my own work differently.
Some of my favorite projects of Brian House are Fight Logic, Conversnitch, Animas, and Everything that happens will happen today.
Alexander Chen is a creative director at Google Creative Lab. He did various works including MTA.ME, which altered the NYC subway map to a string instrument, and invented “Les Paul Doodle” with his Google Team. He worked with different companies such as The Barbarian Group, Modernista, and Google, where he currently works in. As a both musician and a creative interaction designer, he does body of work that combine both music and coding. He says that seeing his children discover different instruments and playing around with melody inspires him to create coding that lets him see music in inspiring, new ways. One of his project called the “Pianophase” is a visualization that demonstrates Steve Reich’s 1967 piece Piano Phase into lines with different colors and patterns. He made two pianists repeat the the same note in different speed; one musical pattern draws faster than the other one. I really admire his work because as of lover of both coding and music, he figured out a way to make a harmony between the two. Also, the way he tries to show invisible thing, music, into a visual form is a very fresh idea. He presented most of his work and their descriptions in his main portfolio website. His website is generally very easy to interact because of the simplicity and the visuals that are easily accessible. I learned that simplicity in presenting works can help the audience understand the projects much better.
Link to his website: http://chenalexander.com/
Jessica Rosenkrantz is a MIT & Harvard graduate, who studied Architecture and Biology. After graduating, in 2007, she founded a design studio called Nervous System with Jesse Louis-Rosenberg. They work to bring in the fields of science, art and technology together.
In Nervous System, they produce unique and affordable art, jewelry and household appliances based on patterns found in nature. I admire their Arboreal Pendant Lamp the most because I think it is amazing to portray nature, like light, from the computationally generated nature patterns.
To present their work effectively, they explain their motives clearly and walk through how they created a certain program step by step, so the audience can easily understand. They also reason through every step of why they did what they did; for example, on approximately 18:30 of the video, they explain how they decided their boundaries for their program. In order to present my own work, I should learn to present in a logical, easily-to-follow-along manner.
Her website can be found on: https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com
Her presentation video can be found on: https://vimeo.com/33369209
Nervous System – Eyeo Festival 2011 from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.
caption: The work of Amanda Cox’s projects that I admire the most is her primary election visuals as she not only used them to present the outcome of the votes, but she also used statistics and analytics to try to predict the voting outcomes as well.
Amanda Cox is a NYTimes editor of The Upshot section of the New York Times, however her first position was as a graphics editor, a position she held from 2005 to 2016. She was awarded the National Design Award in 2009 and the Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association in 2012. Ms. Cox received a bachelor’s degree in math and economics from St. Olaf in 2001 and a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Washington in 2005. Having won awards in design, one of her most infamous works is the mapping of the primary election in 2012. She loves to correlate the abstract image of politics with more tangible images such as a colored bubble. What I admire about Cox’s work is her ability to branch the intangible concepts to the tangible; the concept of politics to bubbles. As a musician, this is my career as I am to connect my ideas and creation of sound to something that would make sense to the listener. Cox presents in a more casual way, throwing in jokes from her experience and outside references to help the audience member receive a better understanding of her work with visuals of politics.
Nicky Case is a game designer who makes games that are designed to explain complex social issues. His talk was very different from a lot of other speakers’. He started by talking about personal stories. He grew up in an abusive family in Singapore and his family did not react well when he came out as queer. He then used this personal experience to create a game helping others come out.
In his talk, he talked about telling stories and making interactive nonfiction about systems. His most famous work including The Evolution of Trust, Parable of the Polygons and A Better Ballot and Fireflies. I really appreciate The Evolution of Trust, this game really makes the player question their worldview and how trust works. By creating these games, Nicky hopes to change people’s heart and mind and makes people understand the world and each other better.
Brian house is an artist with both computer science and sound studies background, which influence his practices and works. His recent concentrations are AI, technology and urban rats. His works explores a great range of topics including the rhythm of body, technology and environment. His art pieces usually display not only audibly through sound tracks but also visually through installations or digital arts. The combination of the installations and the sound track express his idea as a whole piece. These combinations are mostly achieved by technology and Artificial Intelligence.
In his presentation he presented his works from the most recent to his earliest works, explaining each the back ground stories of each:his motivation, inspirations, how he did his work, where was he coming from and what ideas were he expressing through his arts. That made me easily understood the message he was trying to spread through his works.
I find his works very inspiring for the way he combines a visual installation with sound arts, allowing people to understand him with two different senses at the same time. It showed me how dynamic an art can be displayed with the power of technology.
Eyeo 2014 – Lauren McCarthy from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.
Speech from Lauren McCarthy
The speaker that I would like to discuss about today is Lauren McCarthy. She from New York city (currently based in Los Angelos) and is an artist and programmer. She is esteemed in the sense of programming because she was the person that developed P5js, which is the website that we use in class to learn various part of javascript. Her motto is “I make art that confuses me.” The statement makes me wonder a lot, because it kind of dives into the idea of what the purpose of art is. Is art merely there to look pleasing? Is it to make us think? Is it to invoke feelings?
She considers herself a more of a hacker than a people’s person, meaning that she has more of a ease at dealing with computers than fitting in to the norm, so to speak. Therefore she focuses a lot on in relationship between people and machines/devices in her body of work. A lot of the projects that she makes are related to how can technology make a person, more human?
Some of her artwork include: Happiness hat, anti-daydreaming device, body-contact training suit, and conversacube. These all focus on different aspects of what it mean to be human and sees to how it can help improve a person’s aptitude in that. I admire the happiness hat the most out of her artwork, because it makes one think, what does it really mean to be more human? Does simply emulating the behaviors of a refined human make someone more human? In a way, I differ in view from what the projects are trying to portray, because I think that the purpose/place it’s coming from is way more important than action itself. Meaning, just because I smile for the sake of smiling doesn’t make me more human. The smile should come from the desire to make someone else happier or to display how someone else is making me feel.
She presents her artwork by tying different stories and thoughts together with the project, instead of simply presenting them in an orderly manner. I think that this helps illustrate her main purpose and the purpose of the devices she creates. I think that by tying stories to how I present, I can more deeply engage the audience and such.
Website of artist: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/
Video of happiness hat is included in the embedded video.
The above is a video of Mario Klingemann’s speech at the 2015 Eyeo Festival where he presents his perspective on the topic of order in the world of art and computer science. Link: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2015/133783443
Mario Klingemann is a German artist who is known for being one of the first who utilized the use of computer programming in the arts. His works and studies involve researching the connections between creativity, culture and perception through the perspectives of artificial intelligence and mechanical learning. One quote that resonates with his views of the influence of computer programming with art is the quote “If arithmetic, mensuration and weighing be taken away from art, that which remains will be little indeed” from Plato.
In his speech at the 2015 Eyeo Festival of 2015, he discusses about his approaches towards the concept of “order” from the perspectives of a programmer and from that of an artist. A work from him that he discussed during his speech that I was particularly interested in is his work with the image collections of the British Library Labs. In this work, Klingemann classified 1 million images from the British Library Lab and utilized machines learning techniques to define different index for each image. Then, with the new order that he created, he created an artwork (shown partially below) with the information. Knowing how difficult it is think of methods to even run through simple layers of array (from the assignment we just did that involves locating the brightest pixel of the image) I admire this project so much for his skills of being able to sort through such a gigantic array of information!
In his presentation, Klingemann uses various images combined with graphic diagrams that help audiences better understand and visualize that information that he is communicating. As a student of communication design I am actually studying how to ease the process of transfer of information between different forms(people to people, things to people…etc.) His method of coordinately visual graphical information through data maps with his presentation really made the data-grasping task of mine as an audience a lot smoother and this is what I am trying to learn from in design too.
Link to Mario Klingmann’s personal website: http://quasimondo.com
Minimaforms is an experimental architectural design practice founded in 2002, the vision of two brothers, Theodore and Stephen Spyropoulos. Theodore is an architect, and Stephen is an artist and interactive designer. Their work is synergistic, and look at possible futures and designing projects that act as prototypes. They’re interested in looking at communication and the way information is deconstructed and connected.
Their work is quite refined. The more pure architecture projects not display parametricism, but specifically resemble communicating nodes, or as they say, an agent based system with an emphasis on how they communicate over time. One of their projects that I particularly admire is titled Archigram on their website, and is an evolution on a 1966 Archigram project “Living Pod“, which is a proposal for a trailer home-like dwelling that can move and connect to other units to create larger structures. I think the project is impressive both on the conceptual level, but especially that they brought it all into a large physical model. Additionally, they took the idea of the pod and literrally evolved it, developing spines and tails to connect, which does fit with the idea of a time-based development.
Their presentation strategy felt “standard architectural”. They ran through their work, showing images and videos, going through the goals and results of the projects. By looking at the results of the projects, you can frame what it is an individual or group aims to change or improve.