Category: Section E

Sha Hwang is an information designer who is working to improve the government at Nava. He founded Meshu, Motivity and worked for Trulia. He started by studying architecture, then animation, modeling and finally data visualization. His works are amazing, but his personality is what made him more successful. In the video, he said: “ I do not have much, but I have enough to give someone space, time to breath.” He knows what is right and does his best to support those rights. He mentioned his mother and her influence on him. He talked about lighting and how it searches for the ground similar to how someone can live one’s life and search for the “one thing” to do. He is inspiring, so as his artwork.

I am doing a mapping project in the studio now. Sha’s mapping methods allow me to think more out of the box. His mapping methods are simple, visually attractive, and more importantly, conveying the information effectively. There are 2D graphics, 3D representations, animations and more. My favorite project from his website is the Photo Reel, which is a collage. He combined 2D collage with computation interaction. I think that is innovative.

Eyeo 2016 – Kyle McDonald from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Kyle McDonald is an artist, philosopher and computer scientist whose artistic medium consists mainly of code. He is heavily involved in creating and collaborating on initiatives that blend engineering with art and through that he hopes to bring connectivity to visual processing and computer libraries. He specializes in new media and uses coding systems such as openFrameworks to create systems with elements of playfulness. His works mainly revolve around the idea of interaction and visualization through code – many of his works adhere to his visual brand of glitchy aesthetics. However, he has also created many larger and higher fidelity works including installation and performance art. I admire his works because it very clearly shows his exploration in having fun and pushing the boundaries of what coded art can become. His smaller scale works like the glitchy renderings are the ones that I personally enjoy the most from an aesthetic standpoint, and it is something I have been trying to render throughout this course. Since creating these glitchy graphics don’t necessarily take up a lot of resources and is very accessible, I want to really try and push myself to see what I can create. His larger installations, like Social Soul, are also works I really respect and appreciate. Many of his installations emerge the visitor in a whole-body experience where the digital and physical come together to create a hybrid experience. These two worlds come together and the perception of space, time, and physicality is heavily altered. I really enjoy this type of isolation and eeriness that McDonald’s installations create and it pushes me to ponder the influence of technology on the physical existence of all matter. Especially in this hybrid age with the integration of digital and physical experiences, it is really interesting to see McDonald’s take on bringing coding into real life. If I ever had access to the resources to make large scale installations like these, I would love to design experiences that play on the idea of blurring the line between reality and the digital realm.

Alexander Chen is an artist at Google who is most well known for his personal work combining music and visualization techniques. At Google, he lead projects like the Chrome Music Lab and A.I machine learning experiments. I think the best way to understand Alexander Chen is to delve into some of his work. One of his the visualizations is for a Beach Boys song. He uses circles and colors to communicate complex auditory ideas. His code works by drawing circles for each note of the song; distinguishing a relationship between circumference of a circular surface and pitch. While this project was fascinating, I was most intrigued by his visualizations with the MTA. I thought his combination of sound with movement patterns was well done. In visualizing MTA patterns and hearing the intersections, it gave me a lot of insight.

A screenshot of the MTA visualization conducted by Alexander Chen.

http://www.mta.me

My artist is Meejin Yoon who is a professor of architecture at MIT. She was born in Seoul, South Korea and attended Cornell for her bachelors and later received further education at Harvard. Yoon’s main area of focus is within the domain of responsive and interactive architecture. Her projects are innovative in her use of technology, especially new and novel technologies that have not been widely adopted.

The project I most admire is Swing time (above), located between the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and D Street. The installation uses custom polypropylene and LED lights that are controlled based on movement. I thought this was quite unique given that most of the projects I have seen thus far in this class have used various algorithms. This piece is reactive and as such uses an internal accelerometer to measure acceleration forces. This combination of data and LED lightning creates beautiful displays that really light up a community.

 

 

Zach Lieberman – Eyeo Festival 2011 from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Artist Zachary Lieberman is a a creative coder who utilizes technology to create new, unexpected realities. He has held positions at several creative firms around the world and he currently teaches at the Parsons School of Design. In addition, he studied Design and Technology at Parsons. According to his website, his goal is to surprise people using technology that “breaks down the fragile boundary between the visible and invisible.” Zachary Lieberman’s body of work is centered around using technology and computational methods to create art. In his presentation, Zach Lieberman discusses IQ font, which is his project that takes the movement of a driving car and turns it into a custom typeface. Lieberman worked with two typographers and a professional race pilot to design the font and he tracked the car movements with a software that he designed. I admire this project because it directly takes inspiration from a movement and translates that movement into art. In his presentation, Lieberman articulates his thoughts clearly and he effectively combines his speaking points with visuals. These strategies kept me engaged as a viewer, so I think I could implement these strategies when I talk about my own work.

I watched the speech by Kate Hollenbach, is a programmer and new media artist from LA who works with a lot of technologies that and compute human gestures and the relationships between the human body and the objects in space around them. I chose her because a lot of her work is inspired by the idea of looking at humans through the perspective of the machines that they use, mainly phone and computers, and this reminded me of assignment 08-A and the eye tracking software we looked at. Coincidentally, I am learning about eye-tracking right now in an entirely separate design-studies course, so it seems like this topic is spanning almost every different discipline/topic I am studying right now!

Kate was a very good presenter. She was very comfortable on stage and utilized video examples of people interacting with the products that Oblong, her design agency, built. I especially liked the example she showed with a near-360 surrounding display of screens that allowed a person to stand in the center and interact with programs from a full-circle perspective.

I also was interested in the software Kate designs to enable this rapid-time spatial analysis. One program her agency built, “greenhouse”, allows coders to prototype using space and incorporating users into their design immediately, which sounds like something I want to do!

Below is another project she made, about human life through the perspective of our laptops and phones.

http://www.katehollenbach.com/

AnnMarie Thomas is a mechanical engineer and advocate for early engineering education. She is most well known as the founder and director of the Playful Learning Lab at University of St. Thomas, where she is centrally located, which encourages children to playfully learn.

The best way I can describe her work is fundamental, imaginative, and playful. AnnMarie strips away the complexity of learning engineering and simplifies it to tangible pieces, akin to toys. In the way I think legos are the smallest, most basic building blocks of analog toys, I feel that her work is similar to the most basic building blocks of interaction design across the physical and digital tools.

Her project, Squishy Circuits is a beautiful example of basic software and hardware interaction that feels like playdough. Its form is in a book, likely to make the course and tools accessible for parents and teachers to use. (something I also admire).

AnnMarie’s Website

A lecture of hers where she focuses on the importance of play and what that means.

Eyeo2012 – Shantell Martin from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Shantell Martin is a world-traveled artist who uses digital drawing as means of performance art. Although based as a graffiti artist in England, Shantell originally gained renown for her performances in underground concerts and clubs in Japan. While she claims that her work as a young artist channeled the frustration and disillusion she felt growing up, her time spent engrossed in Japanese culture led her to achieve a sense of zen as she drew. As she was living in Japan, Martin became heavily involved in the “noise” music scene and was hired to draw live as a complement to the bands’ performances. These drawings would be projected on the walls in a way that matched the energy of the music or choreography during these shows. After accumulating fame in Japan, Shantell moved to Brooklyn where she took on projects outside of a venue environment. By creating digital and traditional drawings on cars, rooms, tables, and anything she could access, Shantell proved that drawing could be made into a spatial performance that was accessible to the public.

While watching Shantell’s lecture in the 2012 Eyeo conference, I admired her drive to push the boundaries of how and what drawing should be. I particularly liked her “doodle volkswagen” project, in which she would draw on her friend’s car on the street and bring smiles to faces all throughout Brooklyn. During her presentation, Shantell combined live, digital drawing with pictures and videos of past work and experiences. By adopting a narrative approach, she details the events in her life that influenced her artistic vision and the choices she made. I admire her style of presenting, as it felt very personal without feeling too structured or rehearsed. If I were to give a lecture on my own creative endeavors, I believe I would like to adapt her style of using personal experiences to amplify the emotional connection to my work.