Category: Section A

“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.

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.

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.

 

Article:  https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/08/pixelated-ceramics-by-toshiya-masuda/

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

Lumen Video

 

This project, titled Material of the Web, was made by a friend of mine, Andrew Shen. He made it for one of his computer science classes at the University of Pennsylvania. In his words, it is “… an attempt at representing and visualizing the nature of screens.” Andrew is a designer, and as such, has a lot of experience working with how we interact with our screens, and how they interact with us. It frustrated him that we didn’t seem to be “taking full advantage of the medium.”

The caption on the bottom right of Andrew’s project:

“The contemporary fringe is the material with which we craft the tools and environments of today. The platform for these tools and environments of today is the web. We understand the properties of wood, leather, and plastic. But what is the screen made of? What material is the web made of? We treat the web as a fixed canvas right now–we create Photoshop documents with set dimesions, and carefully place our static elements onto the dynamic domain of the screen. Not only are we decieving ourselves, we’re not taking full advantage of the medium with which we’re working with. How can we utilize the screen as it truly is: a material that stretches across a series of devices? What does it mean to design with the web, for the platform of the contemporary? This project is an attempt at representing and vizualising the natue of screens–as a modular system of highly interactive components constantly in flux. That is the contemporary fringe. It is modeular, it is edgeless, it is iteractive, it is always changing.”

Material of the Web, an interactive project designed to represent the dynamic nature of screens.

I chose this project because it opened my eyes to how screens really work, and how it approaches what could possibly be the next era of design; it is First Word Art. Before seeing this, I never realized the limitations that exist when designing for a screen. However, when Andrew told me about the gap between how we design for screens and how we use them, I realized how big that gap really was. It is inspiring to me that he created this from scratch, simply because he felt that it was missing. I admire that the project leaves you asking yourself what a screen really is because by asking these questions, we will be able to move forward. It is more than just a fun interaction, it leaves you thinking, even non-designers such as myself. To me, Andrew’s project points toward a future where we are better enabled to create, where our tools will match the task. It inspires me to not settle for something that worked in the past; it inspires me to look toward what we could be doing next, to create the next era of creation.