Sophie Chen – Looking Outwards – 09

Neil Mendoza’s Eyeo Festival lecture

For this week I looked at Alex Kaplan’s looking outwards post about Neil Mendoza. Neil Mendoza is an artist who has an MA in math and computer science from Oxford University and MFA in design media art from UCLA. One of his projects that particularly stood out is “Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine”, where he built a contraption that, when a hamster runs on its wheel, draws a picture of a running hamster. I really resonated with Alex’s comment about how Mendoza opened her mind to the different possibilities of programming and code outside of the digital world. So far, I’ve been looking at and thinking about code in a very digital sense. Even when it is interactive, I think about it as the user vs. digital interactions, whereas Mendoza’s work integrates code to create physical and analog pieces. This opens a ton of new possibilities, especially for artists, to create unique and meaningful work.

Video of Hamster Drawing Machine