“The Creatures of Prometheus – Generative Visualisation of Beethoven’s Ballet with Houdini” by Simon Russell, (2017)
I think this piece is not only beautiful in terms of execution, but because of how well it communicates the information, it also could be used as an educational piece. I remember in elementary school going on a field trip every year to the Naples Philharmonic and that was pretty much my only exposure to chamber music, albeit still a lot of exposure. For those who do not have the opportunity to have that experience, this visualization is a fantastic way, in a much more modern approach than traditional music education, to show how orchestras work and are put together.
Manuel Lima is a Portuguese-born designer with a leading voice on network visualization, studying how information can be organized and creates beautiful and complex diagrams. Lima has been recognized as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is named to be one of the “most creative and influential minds of 2009” by Creativity magazine. He is also the founder of VisualComplexity.com which is a visual exploration on mapping complex networks, a showcase for the intersection of art, design, and science. I admire Lima’s work because his work is explores new ways to visualize information as the world moves on from relying on hierarchical trees into and moves into networks as a platform to illustrate and map the complexities of the world.
My favorite project of his is VisualComplexity because it is a unified resource space that aims to leverage a critical understanding of different data visualization methods. When presenting his work, he begins with giving background and an understanding of his motivation behind his project before diving into the projects he has accomplished. By doing so, he shows what makes his work important and why his audience should pay attention to it. Manuel Lima’s website can be found here.
Meejin Yoon is a Korean-American architect and designer that co-founded Höweler+Yoon Architecture, a firm that uses design practices across the domains of architecture, urban design, public space, immersive experience, and design strategy. The firm is based out of Boston, Massachusetts and Munich, Germany.
What I admire about Yoon’s work is the way she chooses to deconstruct the ideas of private and public space by redefining these concepts. Most of her works shown in her talk feature interactions between people, technology, and public/personal space. One of her most stimulating works to me was her public project, Shadow Play, for creating a public parasol as opposed to a private one by utilizing the shape of the Mobius strip (a concept that Yoon is fascinated with) to create shade in a public place.
In her talk, she chooses to use many visual aids and categorizing to break down her speech in an easier way for her audience to understand the range and depth of her work.
Chris is a media artist whose artistic practice reflects his beliefs in Chinese Philosophy. His works combine traditional and futuristic ideas, constantly exploring new mediums and finding aesthetics in technological intervention.
In 2007, Chris founded XEX / XCEED, an interdisciplinary creative studio and new media art collective based in Hong Kong, who’s works have been showcased worldwide. In 2014, he was appointed as the Artistic Director and Curator of the 1st HK-SZ Design Biennale. His creations have won awards from Reddot, TDC, GDC11, Taipei Golden Pin, Design for Asia, and The YG11 of New York Art Director’s Club. Lately, the “RadianceScape” project was selected in Linz Ars Electronica and the live performance was toured in Sónar Festival and WRO Art Biennale.
By the artist:
I’ll present the creative process behind the highly IG-able immersive installation “Prismverse”. The metaphor of the Battle Royale like wearable device “Collar AG”. Using data to intervent an audiovisual performance as Observatory’s live broadcast. We’ll address questions including How mediums shape our behavior and experience? Why open data is essential for a future citizen? And how could a creator design deeply for a minority audience and yet win the appreciation from general public?
THURSDAY, JUNE 7th • 1:50PM • WALKER CINEMA
PRISMVERSE | LIGHT NOW EXHIBITION
Prismverse is an installation inspired by light rays travelling in a diamond with Brilliant cut – a form that produces phenomenal brilliance with maximized light directed through its top. With a 10 meters LED floor and the complex geometrical tessellated mirror wall, the highly illuminated interior becomes a metaphor for the instant tone-up effect of Dr.Jart+ V7 Toning Light.
A journey to unprecedented sceneries of glimmers begins at the touch of the product centered in the space. Audience will be immersed in splendors of our mother nature, ranging from the galaxy and distant stars, rare gemstones, glistens of flowing water, and refracted light beams. These resembles the brightening, moisturizing, protective and vitalizing effects of the product once applied on skin.
The speaker and designer that I chose to write about is Jake Barton. He is the founder of an experience design firm called Local Projects that works with museums, brands, and public spaces. The basis of his work is engaging his audience through emotion and technology with storytelling. His firm is based in New York, NY and he describes himself as a user experience designer. In his talk. Mr, Barton describes the creative process like falling in love– just as messy and scary and exhilarating. His projects are very diverse and range from designing parts of the 9/11 memorial Ground Zero to rendering interactive sculptures in Times Square. My favorite work of his is the Times Square interactive water sculpture. The sculpture displays a giant heart inside of a glass cube of water jets. Beside the sculpture is a podium that says touch me and when a person touches it, the sculpture beats to the person’s heartbeat. If the person holds another’s hand, the sculpture beats faster and so on. The message of the sculpture is about the beauty and importance of human connection– a message that really resonated with me. Mr. Barton connects with his audience through humor and using common emotions to relate to one another.
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.
The pair Mimi Son and Elliot Woods have a studio called Kimchi and Chips. Son is a Seoul based artist specializing in storytelling through interaction design. She studied Interaction Design at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and finished her Master of Art in Interaction Design at the Landsdown Centre of Middlesex University in London. Woods is a digital media artist from the UK. He was educated in physics and is using his background to produce sense-able phenomena from abstract domains.
They focus mostly on exploring the differences between material and immaterial. Using light as an immaterial to create material, many of their works are results of projection mapping techniques.
LINE SEGMENTS SPACE, 2013
My favorite piece is called “LINE SEGMENTS SPACE”. The gallery space is filled with a three-dimensional web of string. With careful projection mapping, the strings are lit up to create dynamic imagery. Through the use of light as immaterial, a complex form emerges.
Reza Ali is a man who identifies himself as an explorer, designer, engineer, and researcher who pushes the limit of computational designs to achieve a new level of workflow. Beginning his career as an electrical and mechanical engineer, he began to branch outwards towards art and digital designs. His main workflow varies, but his core ideology is being able to switch between different mediums to produce the best product. One example he talks about is his project, Voronoi Puzzles. Within this project, it was important for him to start with codes and computational design, which would lead to him 3D printing. With 3D printing, he would begin working through a physical workflow, which would once again be put into a digital workflow. By learning new programs, he could easily turn his digital works into reality with his extensive works with 3D printers and CNC routers.
As architecture students in CMU, we have access to a wide range of digital fabrication machines to help bring our ideas to life. By transcending different workflows, he was able to improve his design constantly and improve his skill sets quality and quantity wise. Reza’s way of working is a complex yet very effective way of designing. Not only are just designers, but also an engineer that uses different codes and programs to help achieve our best design.
The work above is called Prismverse by Hong Kong media artist Chris Cheung. Chris is an artist who tries to integrate his artistic practice with his background in Chinese Philosophy. His work have common themes of integrating the traditional and the futuristic ideas as well as the aesthetics of technological intervention. Chris is currently the founder of an interdisciplinary creative studio called XEX, based in Hong Kong. Their work has been displayed all over Asia.
My personal favorite work of his is Prismverse. Prismverse is an installation that tries to immerse the viewer in infinity through sight and sound. Chris and XEX hoped that the diamond mirrors in the space would give the viewer a sense of the universe populated by infinite stars, and the omnidirectional speakers will present an ambient soundscape that immerses the viewer from all directions.
Lemercier is a French artist that studies and focuses his works on our perception of light projection in space. His projection performance, some of them live, have been seen throughout the world starting in 2006. He has an interest in physical structions along with light mapping. He founded a visual label, AntiVJ, with a partner in 2008; and has kept it going until 2013. He then founded a new studio in Brussels, which focused on development and research of installations and experiments using light projection in space. His past works include working for Mutek, a music festival in which he worked with stage design, Flying Lotus and Portishead’s Adrian Utley – both whom are artists, and others. Starting in 2010, Lemercier focused more on installations and gallery work. From then, his works/projects have been exhibited at the China Museum of Digital Art, The Sundance Film Festival, and the Art Basel Miami.
Joanie Lemercier relates to his audience by including his process/initial works throughout his talk/videos. The audience is able to follow how he got to his next iterations/prototypes and the direction he takes next. His works fascinate me because he uses light as a medium and space as a canvas. I have never thought of using light as a medium before, but more of a tool/accessory. I really admired his thoughts and his process works, especially the ones shown on his twitter because they are raw and offers me fresh perspectives on material and tools. When he drew landscapes initially, he knew that something was missing. He was inspired by real time and space events of certain moments and used light to give it more living qualities and dynamics through moving projections.
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