Christine Chen-Looking Outwards-08

The above is a video of Mario Klingemann’s speech at the 2015 Eyeo Festival where he presents his perspective on the topic of order in the world of art and computer science. Link: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2015/133783443

Mario Klingemann is a German artist who is known for being one of the first who utilized the use of computer programming in the arts. His works and studies involve researching the connections between creativity, culture and perception through the perspectives of artificial intelligence and mechanical learning. One quote that resonates with his views of the influence of computer programming with art is the quote “If arithmetic, mensuration and weighing be taken away from art, that which remains will be little indeed” from Plato.

In his speech at the 2015 Eyeo Festival of 2015, he discusses about his approaches towards the concept of “order” from the perspectives of a programmer and from that of an artist. A work from him that he discussed during his speech that I was particularly interested in is his work with the image collections of the British Library Labs. In this work, Klingemann classified 1 million images from the British Library Lab and utilized machines learning techniques to define different index for each image. Then, with the new order that he created, he created an artwork (shown partially below) with the information. Knowing how difficult it is think of methods to even run through simple layers of array (from the assignment we just did that involves locating the brightest pixel of the image) I admire this project so much for his skills of being able to sort through such a gigantic array of information!

In his presentation, Klingemann uses various images combined with graphic diagrams that help audiences better understand and visualize that information that he is communicating. As a student of communication design I am actually studying how to ease the process of transfer of information between different forms(people to people, things to people…etc.) His method of coordinately visual graphical information through data maps with his presentation really made the data-grasping task of mine as an audience a lot smoother and this is what I am trying to learn from in design too.

Link to Mario Klingmann’s personal website: http://quasimondo.com