I agree very much with Yoshi that this project is very beautiful and incredibly in they way it is effective for a specific user.  I think it is interesting how something so useful could also be formally beautiful, and that there would be a commercial incentive toward computer generated forms because of the ease in which they can be individualized.  It is interesting to me that the same forms which occur in nature can be used in the design process, and that there is a warmth inherent to structures that. Resemble natural forms.. I think it is beautiful that there is such a deep relationship between growing natural forms and a sort of. Geometry that unifies that which exists within nature. This makes me think about fractals and sacred geometry. 

I think it could have been interesting if the entire shoe, instead of just the sole, was constructed in this way… 

Mimi Son is a Korean Interaction Designer who studied at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and Landsdown Centre of Middlesex University in London. She currently teaches Interactive Storytelling at Kaywon School of Art and Design and is the director of her own studio, Kimchi and Chips alongside Elliot Woods. Their studio focuses on novel interactions involving people and media materials, discovering new technical and artistic paradigms. Coming from an artistic background she enjoys observing her surroundings and uses her observations as inspiration for creating something interactive and funny.  

Her current work studies the emotional and tangible interaction for future life and the effects of technology from creative approach. In particular, she creates speculative visual objects that has unpredictable reactions when touched with technology. She mentions in her talk that she is quite experimental in the way she works and there is not that much ‘meaning’  behind her artistic choices and I think I can definitely relate to her in a way that my own creative process is also more random and less technical. I think it’s interesting to compare the balance between storytelling and randomness in her variety of work. In her work Link (2010), the installation is a lot more about user interaction as it invites users to record their stories into a city scape of cardboard boxes (see image) and it explores the agency that individuals have over technology. In contrast, her piece called Line Segment Space (2013) is a lot more abstract and undefined and it focuses more on on the viewers emotional with the space that is filled with with dynamic forms created by light and lines. 

I used a grace day for this project.

Eva Franch, currently based in New York and serves as director of StoreFront for Art and Architecture, is a Spanish architect who excels in experimental architectural and art forms. Her work addresses the need for change in cultural, political, social, and technological realms through “architectural doubts.” She categorizes these doubts into three fields. “Utopias” target a range of historical and political doubts; “metaphors” target a range of cognitive and formal doubts; and atmospheres target primarily experiential doubts within architecture.

Franch’s work aims to showcase the untruths of perceivably utopic realms through highly experimental forms and publications. Her work is admirable because she uses her categorical doubts to juxtapose one another, highlighting flaws and factors that typically remain unnoticed within urban fabrics. She uses a wide range of material and media to demonstrate these “architectural doubts,” including clothing and newspaper clippings, suggesting that architecture is highly dependant on various contextual factors.

Link to Franch’s website: http://eva-franch.com/

As I was researching through the speakers for the eye of festival 2019, artist Refik Anadol capture most of my attention. He is a media artist from Istanbul, Turkey but currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in Media arts master of fine arts degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design as well as bachelors of arts degree with summa cum laude in Photography and Video.  He is working in the fields of site-specific public art with an approach of parametric data sculpture and live audio/visual performances. He is famous for his immersive installation approach and he particularly explores space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence. 

Refik Anadol is intrigued by the transformation of the subject of contemporary culture requires rethinking of the new aesthetic, technique and dynamic perception of space. Anadol builds his works on the nomadic subject’s reaction to and interactions with unconventional spatial orientations with data and machine intelligence. Embedding media arts into architecture, he questions the possibility of a post digital architectural future in which there are no more non-digital realities. He invites his audience to visualize alternative realities by presenting them the possibility of re-defining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural forms.. Anadol’s work suggests that all spaces and facades have potentials to be utilized as the media artists’ canvases. I was super inspired by this artist because of his usage of space and technology and how it creates just a vast atmosphere and incorporates nature and digital and media art altogether so successfully.

The artist that I chose to focus on this week is Meow Wolf, which is an artist collective, not just a singular artist. With over 400 employees with skills in a variety of media, Meow Wolf is known for creating immersive and interactive artistic experiences. I have heard of their work before in other classes, but had never done much research into what the collective actually is. I was intrigued to choose them for this assignment because the work that they do is what I hope to do in my design career and they are an organization that I would dream to work for.

The talk from Eyeo 2019 features two collaborators of Meow Wolf that have been working with the collective from the early days. I appreciate the talk because it’s not just about what they made, but how and why they make it. Their message is really about informing the audience about how a collective exists and operates. It was really interesting to learn about the way that the group progressed through the difficulty of establishing themselves as a productive artist group. I think a strong aspect of their presentation was including progress videos showing how the work and team was structured. It’s a fun and informative way to have more visuals than just photos and diagrams.

The group is known mainly for their project the House of Eternal Return, which is a large immersive experience in Sante Fe. The space that they occupy was bought for them by George R.R. Martin, and he then leased it to them to begin the installation. The visitor enters the space and the experience begins on the lawn of a Victorian house. The house looks normal, until the audience begins to explore and finds portals into other worlds. The artists wanted to create a space where the multiverse is present, somewhere where different dimensions are crashing into each other. Meow Wolf is beginning the process to install these spaces in other cities.

I think that Meow Wolf is an amazing group that is doing extraordinary work that I would very much want to be a part of. I chose to focus on them because their artistic interests really align with me own, and I think the talk they gave spoke a lot to the strides they have made to create a supportive and productive artist collective.

I am using one of my grace days for this late submission.

The individual I chose to listen to and learn more about was Maya Indira Ganesh. On her website, Ganesh identifies as a “feminist technology researcher, speaker, and writer working with arts and culture organisations, academia and NGOs.” I was drawn to her work because she focuses on technology in advocacy, by exploring how to bring together data and art in order to progress social issues. In 2013, at the time of her Eyeo festival talk, Maya Ganesh was the Evidence and Action program director at Tactical Technology Collective, and organization that works with activists, right advocates, and data specialists to help visualize information and enact change. Ganesh is a writer and speaker, rather than a designer or technologist, so during her talk, she referenced her interests, focuses as a researcher, and “Visualising Information for Advocacy,” a book that she had worked on with Tactical Technology Collective, rather than personal works or projects.

I really admired how she spoke and presented her ideas. Throughout the presentation, she used the space around her very effectively. Rather than just reading notes or relying on her slideshow, she kept eye contact with the audience, and spoke almost like she was talking directly to you. Moreover, she framed her presentation with stories and examples of how people used technology and design to shift people’s perspectives. By framing her talk through narratives, she helped the audience to better understand the power of information and data visualization, and ultimately, her goals and inspirations.

Giorgia and Stefanie who share similar professional backgrounds – information designers – met at Eyeo festival in 2014. After spending time with each other, they decided to collaborate for the next Eyeo festival. Then, their collaborative project, Dear Data, was created. Giorgia is from Italy, but lives in New York City working at a company she co-founded, Accurat. Stefanie is from Denver, but moved to London. For their project, they wanted to use data as a way of communicating with each other and learn more about each other from different continents. 

Each week, they had different topics such as how many times one has checked the time, how many times they have thanked someone, and keeping track of how many times they swore as seen above, but it was up to each of them to decide how and what kind of data to collect and the way of they would visualize the data. To add a personal touch on their data visualization – which is something they both value and care about as information designers – they decided to share their data through sending each other postcards. On the front side of a postcard, they would have their visualizations and explanations on the back side. By the time they gave the presentation at Eyeo 2015, they were on Week 40 of sending each other postcards. 

This project was particularly interesting to me because, as people who could never meet each other, they found an unconventional way to get to know each other more, which was through sharing personal data. As information designers, they both value the personal and interactive ways of presenting data to people. This project taught me the power of making data visualizations more personal and interactive so that more people get engaged, which will be critical if you are delivering information to spread public awareness on an issue. 

Speaker: Jake Barton

Jake Barton is a Brooklyn born and raised designer. He is the founder of the Local Projects that focuses on expression of emotions in technology in all ranges of projects such as museums, education, architecture, and memorials, etc.

In the Eyeo Festival 2012 video, he mentioned the Cleveland Museum of Art project which is very intriguing. Breaking the traditional way of how visitors engage in an art museum, Jake successfully turned presentations into experiences. People make active interactions with the exhibit instead of being passively receiving the information.

The team made very different interfaces using technology like face recognition to experiment with a whole different way of learning. At the end of the day, a museum is all about story telling. Instead of reading a tedious paragraph of words, museum visitors enjoy and learn more with interactive processes.

Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. She joined the museum department in 1994 as an associate curator, and has worked her way up since. Before joining the MoMa board, she was a lecturer at UCLA and taught a course at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Although she received her Master’s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan, Antonelli never practiced as an architect. In her long career, she has curated architecture and design exhibitions across Italy, France, and Japan.

Eyeo 2014 – Paola Antonelli from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

What I admire the most about Antonelli is the work she has done in educating people about the importance of design in everyday life. Her curated exhibits in the past have focused on bringing awareness to design in peoples’ everyday lives, and the responsibility that designers hold towards the people they create for. Antonelli was also one of the earliest proponents of MoMa’s digital presence. She created one of the first websites for the museum at a time when the internet barely existed. The website was a digital library for the exhibit Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. Convinced of the importance of curators being able to understand the art they select, Antonelli learned to code the website on her own through the help of several university students.

The way that Antonelli presents is very convincing, with anecdotes given from through her long career. Antonelli presents one argument that people have made against her, and then spends some time refuting that argument before moving into another related point. She makes use of visual imagery and popular symbols to relate to the audience and to keep them engaged. What I learned from Antonelli about presenting is that it is useful to get the audience to relate to you. In doing so, the audience becomes much more engaged as they start to feel familiar to you.

Michael Szivos of SOFTlab is an architect based in New York City, which alone gives me an enough reason to review his talk as an architecture student. Michael created this design studio shortly after graduating from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Despite the fact that he described himself as an outsider of architecture world, it is quite surprising to find what many architecture firms today do in practice seems similar to SOFTlab’s work in the past.

At first glance, SOFTlab’s main body of work largely contemplates about the process of fabrication that support the design idea. However, this studio really governs both the initial design and the fabrication process. Many of their works have been successful and were selected by different publications and exhibitions including MoMa, The Met and The New York Times. One of their projects that I found inspiring was from Mobile World Congress 2017 at Barcelona. This large-scale installation of roof structure was designed for IBM booth promoting Watson. For this project, SOFTlab got its design motif from Antonio Gaudi, the legendary Spanish Architect. The beautiful cladding of aluminum petal like panels glow in different colors to as to show the glimpse of future technology of IBM. It was also interesting to watch beside from coding, many of the digital tools they were using overlapped to that of mine in school.

The way Michael Szivos presents is actually very interesting. Because he digressed from being traditional architect, he starts the presentation by comparing his firm to the fields using movie reference. This whimsical self-introduction gave me a better understating to picture about their practice furthermore.

The attached video is another project by SOFTlab called Iris – an array of responsive mirrors with LEDs that rotate in response to people’s movement.

The attached video is another project by SOFTlab called Iris – an array of responsive mirrors with LEDs that rotate in response to people’s movement.

website: https://softlabnyc.com/