LookingOutwards-10 – Page 3 – [OLD FALL 2018] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Eliza Pratt – Looking Outwards 10

“Emerald City”, a project developed by a team of women at Intel, explored the use of embedded technology to benefit women in an urban context.

Adelle Lin is a technological designer with a background in math and architecture. In a collaborative project for Intel with Caroline Foster, Reema Upadhyaya and Natalia Pulido, she served as researcher, UX designer, and Technology Prototyper to create “Emerald City,” an exploration of embedded technology in women’s shoes. While this type of research had previously only been tested on menswear, Lin and her team identified issues that were common for professional women in an urban context.

In addition to helping with tasks like navigation, the technology included features to help women feel safe.

In addition to features that would assist with weather alerts and navigation, these “smart boots” also included technology connected to a crime heat map that could detect unsafe neighborhoods and allow emergency messaging. I believe that considering safety features such as these is essential to why more women are needed in the field of creative technology. Moreover, as a design major myself, research projects such as these allow me to visualize how I might utilize my skills to help other women in a variety of contexts.

Jisoo Geum – Looking Outwards – 10

Pussykrew is a new media duo formed by contemporary multi-disciplinary artists Tikul and mi$ gogo. The two were born in Poland but met in Dublin and began merging their artistic and technological strengths to create groundbreaking 3D digital imageries. Their works are usually surreal, hyperrealistic, and at times grotesque. Although they both came from the fine arts background, specializing in paintings and drawings, they immediately emerged into the mobile and graphics aspects of the new media. They learned visual programming, physical computing, and many other areas of digital media at Newcastle University, and self-taught the skills they had to know for 3D/CGI animations.

SEVDALIZA – THAT OTHER GIRL (2015)

A music video work commissioned by an Iranian-Dutch singer, Sevdaliza.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koAtzvSBvfE

Since I am very interested in 3D rendered images and animation, every work made by the duo were very admiring. I appreciate the hyperrealistic and detailed depiction of curves of the human body as well as various textures rendered into the surface. Their overwhelming visualization, use of color, and composition all encaptivated me. Another reason why I was drawn to Pussykrew was that of this interesting quote:

“The internet and digital tools can be seen as a utopian environment that gives you freedom from social constructs such as gender. Technology can be used as a vehicle for the dissolution of sex and gender as well as a means to link the body with machines.” —Pussykrew

I think this quote truly depicts their artistic vision: grotesque yet beautiful and addicting imageries as a reflection of current human relationship with technology.

Audrey Zheng – Looking Outwards – 10

Lauran McCarthy is goals: she is a new media artist and creator/lead-developer of p5.js. Her work examines how issues of surveillance, automation, and network culture affect our social relationships.

Accomplishments
Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as Ars Electronica, Fotomuseum Winterthur, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Lauren is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She is a Sundance Institute Fellow and was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyebeam, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT³.

Schooling
She graduated from MIT with a BS in Computer Science and Art and Design and also holds an MFA from UCLA.

Example Project: Facebook Mood Manipulator
Facebook Mood Manipulator is a browser extension that lets you choose how you want to feel and filters your Facebook Feed accordingly.

Facebook Mood Manipulator Extension
It is based on Facebook’s research into massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. The linguistic analysis is done with Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), the same system used in the Facebook study. Studies show that browsing social media sites such as Facebook for extended periods can lead to a depressive mood.

For more information, visit Lauren’s website: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/

Lingfan Jiang – Looking Outwards 10

The project I chose for this week is “Filtered Transparencies 2.0” done by Filipa Valente in 2015.

Filipa is a female creator of dynamic light architectures. As for this project specifically, it is an interactive installation that uses layered light, space, and sound to create an immersive experience. It uses projected imagery and a maze of transparent screens to blur physical spatial boundaries and transports its users into an augmented hologram-like environment. The reason I admire her work is that to me, the most important aspect of architecture is the human experience. Instead of using solid walls to create spatial conditions, she used light to create a completely different world. Hologram is being used a lot in fictional movies, but not many architects are trying to combine those technologies into architecture. Therefore, I think she did a really good job in that area.

Filipa Valente is a Portuguese architect/ environmental designer based in LA. She completed her BSc and Masters in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London and the Masters in Media Art and Architecture MEDIASCAPES at SciArc in LA. She has held design and project management positions at different prestigious architectural practices around the world such as Zaha Hadid Architects.

Justin Yook – Looking Outwards 10

Chloe Varelidi’s Minicade project uses a simple approach to teach people how to make mini games. I think that Minicade is not only an education tool but also serves as an inspiration that can convince other people to branch out further from the web-app and create their own video games. Varelidi’s career started out when she pursued a Master in Fine Art at Parson’s Design and Technology Program. After acquiring the degree, she worked for various video game developer studios as creative director, and senior game designer. Later, she set up her own company called Humans Who Play, a business that encourages doing good with play. Minicade was developed when she was a member of LittleBits.

Sources:

http://www.minica.de/

http://varelidi.com/

Sharon Yang Looking Outwards 10

The project developed by a woman practitioner of the computational arts is Kate Hartman’s Botanicall, first started in 2006, and now in display in Museum of Modern Arts in New York through many iterations. It is still an on-going project with a collaboration with three other artists that are Rob Faludi, Kati London, and Rebecca Bray. Its purpose was to embody a connection between the humans and the nature in both literal and figurative sense. Botanicalls is a networked sensing communication system with which the houseplants is able to make use of the channels of human communication such as telephone calls or Twitter. The conditions and the needs of the plants can be communicated. She and the collaborators developed the Botanicall kit; the first kit was a set of Arduino shields, the second included a custom, leaf-shaped PCB design. I admire the artist’s innovative idea of a device that enables the communication between plants and humans, which is something you would only see in sci-fi books or movies. It is also amazing how she was able to implement it with the technology that is available to her. Other works of Kate Hartman include Lilypad XBee, a sewable radio transceiver that allows your clothing to communicate. She is based in Toronto, OCAD University where she is the Associate Professor of Wearable & Mobile Technology and Director of the Social Body Lab. Her work spans the fields of physical computing, wearable electronics, and conceptual art.

Botanicalls Kit

Phone communication through Botanicall

Botanicall being used on a houseplant

Sources: http://www.katehartman.com/about/

Botanicalls

Looking Outwards 10- Jaclyn Saik

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a self described “transdisciplinary artist and educator”: basically, she’s doing a lot. I was drawn to her because she is interested in using art as research, something I really don’t hear that much about since most of the time people separate these two worlds. She is most well known for “biopolitical art”, where she will use biological research to inform her practice or activist art. Dewey-Haborg is well-known for controversial projects where she uses found human DNA and her own algorithms to create sculptures and figures.

One project of hers that stood out to me is called “DNA Spoofing”. I picked it because I don’t think I’ve seen many people make jokes out of human DNA before, so this was intriguing. She takes a “playful” approach to genetic surveillance by discussing the different ways that humans shed their genetic material in public, and the ways in which is could possibly be harvested and used. She created an entire exhibit (which was shown in a lot of museums across the US and Europe) that includes a video example of how human’s shed DNA, as well as a display of the daily common objects that facilitate this.
I love this work because it sits at the intersection between science and art, particularly biology, which I’ve always been interested in. I also like how she is identifying the ways in which we accidentally volunteer our own genetic information to strangers, something I’ve never really thought about before and makes me a little uncomfortable (I think good art should do that). From a technology standpoint, this project is interesting because it’s talking about something she herself does as an artist/researcher.

The exhibit on display at the Ohio Museum of Contemporary Art, where users can interact with these objects while viewing the video.

The actresses in the video, posed in front of the everyday objects they then demonstrate with

Robert Oh- Looking Outwards-10

Caption: Phoenix Perry’s Bot Party (2017)

For this week’s Looking Outwards Post, I decided to talk about “Bot Party”, created by Phoenix Perry in 2017. Bot Party is an educational tool that Perry created to teach children about how sounds get created. The boxes are able to detect when a person is holding them. Furthermore, if two people who are both holding these boxes hold hands, the bots are able to detect this and create sounds. I really admire the fact that Perry created this fun, interactive game to educate children.

Perry is the head of MA independent gaming, Goldsmiths, University of London (she is also a lecturer under the department of computing). Perry has created other educational games to teach younger children. I really appreciate the work she has put in to make education more fun.

Kevin Riordan Looking Outwards-10-Section C

For this week’s looking outwards, I chose Distortion Pavilion, a reconfigurable art piece by Caitlin Morris. This was created in 2010 for an annual club-culture music festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. The piece has been developed in a collaboration between American and Danish architects and designers. It was primarily constructed of acoustical foam. I admire how it is able to be both functional and aesthetic, as it is able to block sound in the midst of the festival while being colorful and architecturally aesthetic to add to the festivity. I also admire that the acoustical foam is robust enough to have many people sit on it. The piece can be taken apart and reconfigured. The artist Caitlin Morris is based in New York and she is a designer and an engineer working with Hypersonic. She mainly focuses on digital and fabricated media. She explores the interaction between perceptions in physical space, with particular emphasis on sound and visuals. She also experiments with the boundary between digital and physical representations of space.

Looking Outwards 10 Liz Maday

A video depicting the seaside location of Drift.

Drift (2004), designed by Teri Rueb, was inspired by idea of losing one’s self in an environment, something that seems to be increasingly difficult to achieve with the ubiquity of GPS and an increasingly explored world. This project invites the subject to allow themselves to simply “drift” in this ever changing sonic environment.

This interactive sound installation positioned by the Watten Sea of Northern Germany covers a region of about 2 km x 2 km. The subject wears headphones and experiences sounds that respond to movement, as well as the position of the tide and of satellites. Because of this constant change, one will never predict where any particular sound will be heard. For example, during low tide, the sounds are closer to the sea, and during high tide, they move outwards into the nearby town.

One of the reasons why I admire this work is because of how it utilizes technology in a way that enhances the beauty of this natural environment without making the subject overly focused on the technology used to create the installation. I also think that this installation would have a really wonderful effect of altering your consciousness in relation to the environment, and encouraging new perspectives.

Teri Reub is an artist whose work involves both sound and location through the use of mobile media. One of her largest contributions to her field is the establishment of “locative media” (interactive-installations based on GPS technologies) around 1997. She is now Professor of Media Study at the University of Buffalo, where she founded the Open Air Institute, which furthers learning and initiatives that deal with both media and ecology.