The Cat Explorer is a virtual reality demo that allows the user to explore the anatomy of a cat.
The user moves their hand around to navigate the virtual setting, revealing the virtual cat’s skin, muscles, organs, vascular system, and skeleton. I admire this program because I see it as providing a window of opportunity to using virtual reality for interactive education in fields (such as healthcare or life sciences) that I wouldn’t have expected. The demo is engaging, cute, and deceivingly informative, which I believe makes for an effective learning experience. I hope to explore code and design to create interactive programs that are engaging and informative like this one.
“Twitch Plays Pokemon” was a project created by an anonymous Australian programmer in 2014. The project ran on the video game-streaming site Twitch, meant to be played by any user who visited the stream alongside thousands of other users. Commands for the game were typed into the chat, allowing any user to influence the gameplay. The programmer wrote a script in Python to take the commands typed in chat and send them to an emulator running the game. They also created a program in JavaScript that tallied the moves so that those in chat knew what others were doing.
Twitch Plays Pokemon example gif
The programmer stated that they initially created the project as a social experiment. While there were some slight changes to make certain inhibitory actions less frequent, I admire that Twitch Plays Pokemon brings together a huge amount of unrelated people for a single purpose. Thousands of people were all working towards the purpose of completing the game. No matter all of the small moments in the game where it seemed like nothing would happen, Twitch chat was able to beat the game. This extreme crowd-sourcing has only become recently plausible technologically, and it illustrates how we can bring people together with technology.
For the first time, an artwork produced by an AI is set to go on auction (this coming October).
“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” 70 x 70 cm print on canvas
A Paris-based art collective called Obvious developed the AI as a GAN, a generative adversarial network. The group is a collective of artists and AI researchers with three leads at its core. The project creators were inspired by portraits from the 14th-20th century. The team fed the AI 15,000 paintings, to which it applied generative and discriminative components to the data set in order to produce the final work.
I admire the competence of this program to hold its own in the creative world. I am fascinated by the AIs ability to evaluate and produce art without emotion; as humans we heavily attribute art to emotion. I would like to see the group turn their attention to other styles of art in future development. I am certain that AI technology will continue to develop into creative fields as traditional standards are turned upside down.
“Deep City” is a three-part installation in Google’s NYC Headquarters, created by “Hush”, a studio that creates interactive media architecture, and fabricated by “SITU”, a firm that specializes in the fabrication of technically demanding projects. The three-part installation, comprised of “The Passage”, “City Cave” and “The Skywalk”, uses the guests and visitors own voices and movements gathered by sensors as data to computationally produce an artistic experience and record of their journey.
As shown in the video above, this project was very complex in creating software that registered human input as data in a visual way onto a physical medium that itself was complex and custom created. I think these kinds of interactive digital artworks are really powerful as they allow people to interact with tech and data in a pleasant way and therefore expose them to the creative end of code.
Example of a space from the “Plastic Rain” project.
“Plastic Rain is a serie of non-standard retail spaces. Each zone presents vividly different stories and objects.Visitors can immerse themselves the installation aesthetic in dramatic totality. Spaces that offers time for meditation. A gentle inside/out travel.” https://www.behance.net/gallery/69244661/Plastic-Rain
As a person and artist, I have always been fascinated with surrealism, particularly the creation of worlds/spaces that you would never encounter in everyday life. I really like this project in particular because it brings the surreal into reality (or at least allegedly aims to). The idea of being able to explore and live in what’s basically a huge installation is really attractive to me. Fusing art with living spaces, rather than having art as a separate thing to hang on the wall. Not to mention that there are a lot of opportunities with this kind of project; it could be rented out for people to stay in for a day, or even for a few hours, and sold as an experience.
I think the images in the gallery are rendered in a program like Cinema 4D—the sky doesn’t look believable enough to me. This ties into why I’m interested in 3D modeling; as stated before, I’m interested in creating unique spaces. I don’t really know if p5 has good 3D modeling functions, but I do know that 3D tools are available in processing in general. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn more about those in the future.
(Disclaimer: though I’ve mostly only talked about 3D modeling/design in this post, there are a lot of other things about p5/processing that I’m interested in as well, especially the interactive nature of it and how it can tie into web and app design!)
Arts created from the hands of Toshiya Masuda are intended to allow people to think about the existence of his art through the cognitive assumptions of the viewer. By taking everyday objects as the motif of his art works, he wants everyone to relate to his art through his or her interaction of the object. Since everyone has different usage of the one object, everyone has their own interpretation of the artworks. Growing up in an era where digital quality has changed from extreme pixilation to hyper realistic, Masuda is trying to reverse this in the real world. From realistic items that has a unique shape, he simplifies it to simple cubes and pixels. Clay was used as the medium of his artwork to not only to change the way people normal view clay but also change the usage of clay. Instead of creating curve and smooth objects that are normally created by clay, he decides to scrap this idea and rebuild a lower resolution art work.
A Clay Representation of an Egg Cooking
Even though this type of artwork may seem a bit backwards, I am captivated with how he is able to use simple clay blocks to make people rethink the material of the artwork and the representation of artwork. Even though I am fascinated with how he conflicts the admirers of his art, I believe that he should also be able to expand on his medium and use different materials that have a more definitive form and deliver a more powerful statement. Many artist, designer, and architects should have the same ideas that Masuda is trying to convey and allow their work to inspire viewers to rethink their previous assumptions and way of thinking.
A Clay Representation of an Extruded VaseA Clay Representation of a Pair of Shoes
The Neon Map, an interactive feature that archives neon signs around the city and encourages user participation.
A year ago I developed an interest in the neon lights heritage of my hometown, Hong Kong, and stumbled upon neonsigns.hk, an interactive online exhibit created by the M+ Museum of Visual Culture. Perhaps the thing that I admire the most about this project is the effort that the creators put into shedding light upon a dying custom and celebrating the integral part that such neon signs play in the city’s culture. I also appreciate the multimedia nature of the project, as documenting the history and narratives of neon signs through video, story and interactive live maps (a community effort that goes beyond the original curatorial team, but includes commissions and willing participants) provides a more variegated picture and immerses the viewer in the experience. The ‘Neon Map‘ was created based on Google Maps, though the geographical tags and participant uploads might have been developed with third party software. I believe that the project creators were inspired by museum exhibits in general, but wanted to find a permanent way to preserve this curated exhibit; furthermore, the Neon Map may have been inspired by a walking tour, as interactive elements are embedded in the project. Future opportunities for development and expansion of this project are highly likely, as the ‘Adding Your Neon’ tab encourages viewers to add to the existing narrative and further the legacy of neon signs.
The summer I inhaled the 2D animated movies made by Studio Ghibli. I did some digging into my favorite one, “From up on Poppy Hill,” (2011) and learned about Ghibli’s really interesting process that combines both software and hand-drawn art. Studio Ghibli uses a software called OpenToonz, which is a free software also used for TV shows like Steven Universe. It’s free and commercial, however it’s an open software, so you can code in whatever tools you want. Studio Ghibli created a tool for themselves- a GTS scanning tool. The founder of the studio and one of the most successful directors perhaps of all time, Hayao Miyazaki, believes firmly that the root of animation is hand drawn art. This means that they need a great scanner to stitch the characters into the sets and the frames into scenes. Miyazaki stresses using minimal cgi for the films.
For “From up on Poppy Hill,” there was a massive production team of both the original movie and the English dub. There were 21 animators, and the film was directed by Miyazaki’s oldest son. The film’s production was interrupted by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster and the blackouts following. It forced the team to work mostly at night to avoid disruptions, and slowed production significantly. However, even though some staff members had to go on break for ‘mental affectedness’ from both the quake and the long hours, the studio was determined to release on time and they did just that.
The inspiration for Miyazaki was that there was no inspiration. He made his studio to revolutionize and revitalize the anime movie world, and he did that. He did work previously in Japanese film and television, but he values the ideas most. Every film of his started with an idea and a story. Miyazaki just retired, so people have wondered about the future of the company, but I think that this film most notably points to the director’s ability to create success as well.
This is the English dubbed trailer for the 2011 Studio Ghibli film, “From up on Poppy Hill”
Jenny E.Sabin’s Lumen project is really interesting because her project allows for many varieties of transformation and multiple experiences. She got inspiration from this project by thinking about architecture, materials, and their response to the environment. Through this project she was able to innovate the application of materials to bigger scales. The canopy of Lumen is made up of windows of different sized cells and conical forms hang down various lengths from it. Each individual solar active fiber is knit through a Shima Seiki machine with the whole project consisting of over a million yards of thread. Because of its lightweight texture, there is continuous movement and with its fiber makeup, it generates a reactive response with the sun. The process of this project require a robot to test weave the fibers around a mold and computational software like rhinoceros and grasshopper to simulate how these fibers might move. The process for this project was long and required the help of her students, Dr. Peter Lloyd Jones, his lab, other research associates, and Andrew Lucia.
Lumen Article – Author: Laura Amaya on Jenny Sabin Discusses ‘Lumen’ as MoMA PS1’s 2017 Young Architects Program Open
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