Category: LookingOutwards-08

looking outward – 08 – ilona altman

Refik Anadol lecture

Refik Anadol is an artist who was born in Istanbul in 1985. He studied photography in college and also received two MFAs, one of which in Design and Media Arts (DMA) at UCLA. Right now, he is a guest researcher at UCLA’s DMA department, and so works based out of Los Angelos. He describes himself as a media artist and spatial thinker, and often his pieces are embedded within and relate to architecture. As articulated beautifully on his website, “He invites the viewers to visualize alternative realities by presenting them the possibility of re-defining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural formations. Anadol’s work suggests that all spaces and facades have potentials to be utilized as the media artists’ canvases.” Many of his works are housed in public environments and integrate abstract data visualization.

there were some lovely quotes mentioned in the lecture…
archive dreaming project…

Anadol seems very interested in the imagination, as well as visualizing what is usually invisible and the creative possibilities between digital, conceptual structures and the physical world. I admire the way he talks about his work, always sharing his diverse sources of information. I admire how much possibility technology has, and how he uses digital media to its strengths/ processing incredibly large, complicated amounts of data. I love how he talks about information and life, relating the two of them as conceptual structures that organize physical and immaterial data. I really love his project, Archive Dreaming, which takes information from a library data base, and allows a person to walk through every piece of data in a macro structure, and notice the patterns in how the neural network organized this incredible mass of data. Technology is embraced as a tool that can allow for new ways to engage with history; I find this incredibly beautiful.

The way that he has documented his projects is also incredible – there is always a nondescript person in the documentation to give a size reference, he often will use quotes to describe the theoretical underpinnings of his work, and he also has many videos revealing the dynamic motion of his pieces. I definitely have so much to learn from his clean documentation, as well as how clear he is with his process.

Minjae Jeong-Looking Outwards-08

Daniel Shiffman
Daniel Shiffman is an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts. He uploads creative coding tutorials every week on his youtube channel “The Coding Train”.

Daniel Shiffman is definitely one of the most inspiring person among the other speakers. Before I registered 15-104, I wanted to explore what p5.js is, and I found Shiffman’s youtube channel, The Coding Train. His lectures were very easy to understand, fun, and less overwhelming than other programming lectures or tutorials I used to see. It is very obvious that he provides quality lectures rich in information when the reading assignments are his youtube videos. Although I do not watch his videos often, but as I continue learning p5.js, it is one of the websites I would go on if I don’t understand or need more studying.

Margot Gersing- Looking Outwards – 08

Connected Worlds
Connected Worlds, Exhibits at the Hall of Science. Photo by David Handschuh

For this week the I watched a lecture by Theo and Emily of Design I/O from Eyeo 2012. I decided to choose this one because I had seen some of their projects before and really like their work.

Their studio works with design, research and coding to create immersive interactive environments. The environments use design and code as tools to makes theses experiences come to life. Behind all of their projects are the goal to create “delight and wonder” to encourage open play and exploration in children. They have offices in California and New York but their work appears all over the world.

NightBright

I love this studio so much because all the work they make is essentially my dream job. I love working with children and (I work in a preschool) and it has always been my dream to mix teaching, and design to create things for children. All of the projects they do encourage children to explore and openly play. Some of their projects have teaching elements too. They utilize the game and play nature to have the children actually learn something. One of their projects is a games about sharing resources and sustainability and the children not only have to interact with the program but also each other in order to keep up the simulation. They use the Kinect tracking device quite a lot in their projects and hack it different ways to do what they want, like make giant animated and interactive shadow hand puppets.

Using the Kinect to do arm tracking for the Puppet Parade
Puppet Parade
Puppet Parade

In this lecture they go through some of their recent projects and talk about the entire design process; research, to prototyping to implementation. they talk about the importance of testing projects at different levels of completion and how testing to scale is so important. They stress the importance of ensuring that the audience is well defined and that it makes sense with that in mind. In order to present and document their projects they use a lot of video, screen capture and photography. They also save all of the tests that they do throughout the process. In the lecture they show a lot of these test and it is so interesting to see the project come together from the early stages.

Other Projects:

NightBright, Field, Living Library, Connected Worlds

Carly Sacco – Looking Outwards 08 – Creative Practice

Santiago Ortiz at the Eyeo Festival in 2014.

Santiago Ortiz is a mathematician, data scientist, and information visualization researcher and developer who is currently the head at Moebio Labs. Ortiz went to school at the  Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá,
Colombia, where he received a degree in mathematics with a concentration in chaos and complexity. Then, from 2000 – 2013, he was doing research and heading Moebio Labs which studied on a plethora of subjects – mostly focusing on creative coding, knowledge visualization, education, and innovation.  Moebio Labs uses data to solve and answer real world problems with new strategies.

Something I admire about Ortiz’s work is the inter-activeness of some of his projects. Some of their work like on the Ross Spiral Curriculum  , and History Words Flow, are a fun way to represent data that I think would intrigue people to learn and play with. I think because of this, a unique thing he does when presenting is live – playing with his interactive visuals. Not only is it the best way to present his work, but I think it adds to the important of the data being user friendly.

 

Gretchen Kupferschmid- Looking Outwards-08

Jake Barton is the creator/founder of Local Projects which is an experience design company that has won multiple awards for museums and public spaces. The work he does focuses on storytelling and engaging audiences through emotions. He is well known for the algorithm 9/11 victims by affinity instead of alphabetically. He also created the Cooper Hewitt interactive museum (which I visited a couple times in the past couple years and always love) which allows visitors to have experiences where they can save different things throughout the museum that you want to view later and you can also do things such as create your own “art” pieces on the interactive tables on each floor of the museum. Jake Barton is not a new name to me, in fact we learned quite a bit about his work in my design course “Environments”, which focuses on the hybrid of physical and digital spaces. Through this course we learned about a lot of the ideas that Barton hopes to include in his work- from creating a narrative in your designs, to finding ways to balance digital and physical, and also focusing on the user and how they fit into the space.

A couple of things Barton mentioned in his talk were different projects he has created, which I listed two below.

-Urbanology Project: You get to chose different tokens (affordability, transportation, livability, sustainability, & wealth); take your place and argue your convictions-this models how cities actually work. Effective way to teach people about cities themselves with technology that is modeling scenarios and creates a data set that can be compared with other datasets and cities. This helps to connect people with the future of cities.

– For the Cleveland Museum of Art: A place with amazing history and architecture, they wanted a new visitor experience. A smart table was the first idea to give an access of information, but Barton wanted to actually make the art more relevant and meaningful. Pulled all interfaces into the center of the gallery and worked with slogans/guiding principles and looked to these principles the curator was trying to explain and create things like representation into experiences. Question of “What does a lion look like? then can chose your definition and see how other visitors voted – crowdsourcing and getting visitors to think about perception- you can experience and interpret with other visitors.

Through his talk, I realized he truly tries to connect with his audience by bringing his work in the form of telling a story or how he solved a problem. But, it is not in a analytical or robotic way, instead, he brings emotions and human experience to the table so that his audience can connect with the work he’s done.

https://localprojects.com

Sarah Choi – Looking Outwards – 08

Jake Barton is a designer based in the United States. He is known for being the founder of Local Projects which is an experience design firm for different brands, museums, and public spaces in New York City. He majored in Performace Studies at Northwestern and continued to graduate school at New York University for Interactive Telecommunications. However, in between his Bachelor’s degree and graduate school, he first worked on Broadway for set design and later interned at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum design firm. While in graduate school, he launched Local Projects as an inspiration from his internship. Jake Barton describes himself as someone who values storytelling and people. 

His video from the Eyeo Festival in 2012 talked about “Like Falling in Love” and how he truly believes people are more interesting than technology. He talked a lot about this interactive game called “Urbanology” he and his team made where people could choose from five different tokens of affordability, livability,  transportation, sustainability, and wealth. His players would then argue with one another on who is more right. Furthermore, he talked about “How Bodies Inspire Art” where he centered interactive interfaces to the middle of the exhibit. I admire his work because he wants the audience to experience more from just the art. He thinks of composition and perception when thinking about how to present his art to other people. 

Jake Barton shows a lot of media to show his work. He makes his talks very lighthearted to engage more with the audience. He also talks about doubts in his work which was really interesting. He talked about how he was unsure of using guiding principles as his work was shown to his audience, but talking about themes every person in the audience could relate to was definitely something that engaged me in his work.

https://localprojects.com/

Alice Cai LookingOutwards 08

https://shiffman.net/about/

Daniel Shiffman an Associate Arts Professor  at NYU with degrees in math and philosophy from Yale and a master degree from the ITP. He works with the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. He also wrote two books about processing: Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction and The Nature of Code . Perhaps his most well know the platform is youtube, where he has a channel with only 99k short of a million followers. This account is called The Coding Train, with a very fun and youthful theme with highlights of magenta throughout his videos and images (including his profile picture!). Here, he posts tutorials on coding for web, games, etc. with languages such as p5js, java, and more. He also posts challenges and other varieties of coding videos, Since youtube is so popular and accessible these days, I find his channel helpful in inspiring younger children ( or any beginner) to learn how to code. His fun theme of the train and bright colors makes coding seem inviting and welcoming. He also uses a green screen in all his videos so that he is shown talking in the corner with his laptop. It makes his videos, and especially his live streams, seem more personal and well edited. Overall, not only does Daniel work in a university setting and is very accessible to students, his platform on youtube and social media makes him even more influential in the coding community. 

Mari Kubota- Looking Outwards- 08

Robert Hodgins is an artist and coder. He graduated in 1998 from RISD with a degree in sculpture but went on to found the Barbarian Group and worked with them until late 2009. He also is a co-creator of the Cinder C++ framework along with Andrew Bell, Hai Nguyen, and dozens of developers around the world. In his website bio, he says that he primarily does 2D and 3D simulations using code and that his primary interests include theoretical physics, astronomy, particle engines, and audio visualizations.

The lecture I watched is from Eyeo 2014 but he has also talked in the festival two times before. He describes his job as creative coding but also acknowledges that his job is hard to define. In the lecture he describes the difficulties he runs into while in his creative endeavours. One project he explained in the lecture is “Planet Earth.” The project is a visualization of the earth using material texture data from NASA. The program can visualize using lighting, geography, and the atmospheric effects. 

Robert Hodgins method of presenting his work involves a lot of humor in order to engage his audience, which is a quality I admire. His work itself is also demonstrated in order to grab the audience’s attention. 

Angela Lee – Looking Outwards – 08

A video of Alexander Chen presenting his work at Eyeo 2017.

For this Looking Outwards, I decided to focus on the designer Alexander Chen (http://chenalexander.com/), who is a creative director at Google Creative Lab. He studied Engineering and Digital Media Design at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also is a musician, and much of his work integrates his passion for visual design and music. One of his key projects was MTA.ME, in which he translated the New York City subway map into a string instrument. He has also created visualizations of the first Prelude of Bach’s Cello Suites. I particularly enjoy his Bach’s cello suite visualizations because how sophisticated yet natural looking the motions are. I enjoy how his works are very explorative and experimental in nature. While they may not act as solutions to a defined problem, they suggest new and thoughtful ways of visualizing sound that may influence other people’s work. What I enjoyed about his presentation was his conversational tone–it made him as a designer and his work seem very friendly and approachable. Also, he constantly referred to the work and specific parts of a piece he was talking about, so I didn’t have to speculate but could see it for myself. I also admired the straightforwardness and simplicity of his website. I found it easy to navigate and it allowed the work to shine rather than my focus being on the website.

Danny Cho – LookingOutwards 08

Mike Tucker is an interaction designer who works in the realm of virtual spaces and generative design and mixed reality. He has worked for BBC’s visual effect department and is currently working at Magic Leap, creating future of spatial computing.

His work in collaboration with Sigur Ros, a musician makes me wonder the capability of generative design. The images that are provided for the audience as explanation inspires me to take a step into it. Especially, a quote said by the musician blew my mind, “What if you can have a whole world as your album jacket.” I am curious what the next step would be, and how much in sync different sensory inputs will become as the time passes.

He displays his work in two different backgrounds: in the context of actual usage/installation, and by itself as in the black/white background. This strategy allows the audience be able to take a step back as well as forth, by providing macro and micro perspective about his work.

http://mike-tucker.com/15/
http://mike-tucker.com/15/Tonandi-Loop.mov

I am amazed thinking about how much knowledge about this field and other adjacent ones Mike would have. Regarding space, perspective and music. I want to be a designer where I have a broad understand of the world around me and be able to manipulate my knowledge to create a new reality.