Rachel Lee Section E Looking Outwards 02

A generative art project I find inspirational is David Wicks’ Innovation Clock. The primary reason I was drawn to this project was its potential for inspiration and further impact beyond aesthetics– the clock extracts real time data from Twitter regarding the discussion of innovative ideas to stimulate conversation and encourage people to create. At a school like CMU, I am constantly inspired by the motivations, passions and compelling projects that my peers are working on, and feel like an artefact like this clock encompasses many attributes that I admire about my classmates and would encourage me to try new things. The programmers of this creation generated an algorithm that extracted up to the minute data from Twitter, presumably posts with hashtags related to innovative ideas or fields. Wicks’ artistic sensibilities are revealed through the lively text functions (hashtags are more hierarchically important with regards to type that Twitter posts) as well as dynamic lighting that reveals a coded map of activity, which reveal his consideration of space, composition and typography, as well as drama and impact.

Innovation Clock by David Wicks, 2015.