Author: mkubota@andrew.cmu.edu

Mari Kubota- Looking Outwards- 02

Unnumbered Sparks is an interactive community artwork made by Janet Echelman and Aaron Koblin. The artwork is a 745 feet sculpture in the sky controlled by visitors in real time using their smartphones. Unnumbered Sparks is essentially a large canvas projecting a Google Chrome web browser that is over 10 million pixels in size. The project was coded using a programming language called Go and the visuals were rendered with WebGL. WebSockets was used to connect the mobile devices to the sculpture. 

Unnumbered Sparks Janet Echelman and Aaron Koblin.

This project grabbed my interest because it is an interactive piece of artwork that requires the cooperation of a large group of people.  Aaron Koblin often creates interactive art and programs that utilizes data input from multiple people at a time. His works like Bicycle Built For Two Thousand, 10,000 Cents, and New York Talk Exchange are examples of artworks created with the collaboration of many people in real time. Interactive artwork maximizes potential when many people interact with it at the same time, which is why I admire this project. 

Mari Kubota- Project 01- Face

In this project I learned shape commands to draw ellipses, triangles, rectangles, lines, and quads. Being organized was important in this project because of the many shapes and the affect the order of the code had on the result.

sketch

function setup() {
    createCanvas (400,400);
    background (255,234,242);

//body
      fill(225,184,123);
      noStroke();
    ellipse (200,400,150,300);
//head
        fill (255);
        noStroke();
    ellipse (200,200,150,170);
//hair bun
        fill (87, 79, 56);
        noStroke();
    ellipse (200,125, 125,45);
//blush
        fill (218,97,139);
        noStroke();
    ellipse (160,225,30,20);
    ellipse (240,225,30,20);
//eyes
        fill (0);
    ellipse (170, 205, 20,20);
    ellipse (230, 205, 20,20);
//mouth
        stroke(0);
        strokeWeight(4);
    line(185,250,215,250);
//eyebrows
        fill(0);
    triangle (185, 180, 160, 175, 155, 180);
    triangle (245, 180, 240, 175, 215, 180);
//hair
        noStroke ();
        fill (87, 79, 56);
    quad(137, 125, 186, 120, 140, 250, 100, 276);
    quad(186, 120, 262, 120, 269, 163, 230, 176);
    quad(220, 150, 269, 163, 290, 280, 260, 250);
    quad(260, 245, 290, 280, 240, 320, 230, 300);
    quad(135, 243, 100, 276, 160, 320, 170, 300);
    ellipse(200,90,55,55);
//ribbon
        noStroke ();
        fill (255,0,0);
    quad(220,85,220,115,180,85,180,115);
        stroke(0);
        strokeWeight(1);
    ellipse(200,100,10,10);
        
  }

Mari Kubota – Looking Outwards – 01

The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City is run using a software the museum developed over almost 20 years called the Digital Universe Atlas. The Digital Universe Atlas was created with the collaboration of a Swedish Company, SCISS, who developed a similar software called Uniview. The software was programmed using the Partiview data visualization engine designed by Stuart Levy. Using data from national and international organizations, the Digital Universe visually conveys information about Earth, every known star, satellite, and planet all the way to the known universe to scale.

Hayden Planetarium by the American Museum of Natural History

This allows the user to understand the astronomical distance and scale of the universe and everything inside it. Though the software is mainly used for planetariums for show, you can also download the software and navigate through the solar system, the milky-way galaxy, and the constellations yourself. This interactive and educational software brings the universe into perspective and where we stand in the universe.