Janet Peng-LookingOutwards-03

The Vespers project by Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group at MIT created in 2016 feature three sets of five masks each. These masks represent the death masks used in the ancient times to protect spirits traveling to the afterlife. Each set has a theme, past, present, and future. The masks featured in Vespers take a new spin on this old artifact as they are 3D printed and generated computationally from data. This is one of the reasons I really like the project; I like how it takes a new concept and makes it feel new and enjoyable to for a modern audience. I also really enjoy the natural and complex form the masks take on. They’re unlike anything I’ve every seen but I feel like I can understand the emotion behind them and can see their relationship to death. The death masks are “entirely-data driven” and “digitally generated”. They rely heavily on algorithms that generate geometries and colors. I think the algorithms and data are based on cellular growth as the geometries in the masks look naturally generated. The creator’s artistic sensibilities manifest in the unique use of a data set in order to produce a historical artifact.