The project I found that I thought was interesting, was Jai Sawkar’s first Looking Outwards on Sensacell’s New Interactive Floor in Valenciana, Spain. The floor has LED lights and sensors that light up as someone walks across it, with the lights fading as the user gets farther from the location. I think this project seems very fun to interact with and is a unique way to change up sidewalks, since they are now often something people never look at or think about now.
I agree with Jai’s thoughts about this project where I also think this was a great way to intertwine computing with design and the product is something pleasant for people to interact with. This project does a good job at allowing new social interactions to come out of the creativity within the design.
eCloud installation in the San José AirportSchematics of the eClouds for the San José AirportTiles used that can go from transparent to opaque.
For this looking outwards post, I found Joseph Zhang’s looking outwards post on the eCloud for data visualization quite interesting. eCloud is a physical representation of weather conditions in the current location. On the side of the walkway, different computer-generated Created in 2010 and a permanent installment in the San Jose Airport, eClouds are generated from other sites on a screen. I want to add to Joseph’s comments on the eCoud to how this physical data-visualization of weather data improves the overall space. As a whole, the opaque tiles create a feeling of direction, leading people to move across the terminal. Additionally, I admire how unobtrusive it is to both allow people to take a glance at the screen to understand the meaning of the formation of tiles but also move quickly through space. At first, it looks as if there is no technology equipped to these tiles, but through live-imputed data, it slightly shifts from transparent to opaque.
Baby Groot, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Framestore, 2017
For this week’s post, I found Youie Cho’s looking outwards post in week 5 to be particularly interesting because it had Baby Groot, my favorite Guardians of the Galaxy character. The artwork in focus is the computer graphics work of Framestore, a collective of film, advertising, and content artists. Like Youie, I’m also inspired and impressed by the attention to detail and careful development in putting Baby Groot’s animated character into the context of the movie, down to the details of its walking patterns and speed. I especially love how Framestore extensively researched the characteristics of babies and children when imagining Baby Groot’s character. Being aware of the these “behind-the-scenes” processes in Baby Groot’s character development enables viewers to make a more humanistic connection to the character in the movie and makes Baby Groot even more lovable.
I decided to look at Claire Yoon’s Looking Outwards 03. As someone who knows very little about fashion, I was interested in looking into this article on how 3d printing and computer generated forms could become clothing. Personally, high fashion has seemed like a far off community that I had very few intersecting interests with. This project though, and this idea that a piece of clothing could be created by someone in CAD software or even by an algorithm and printed by a computer presents incredibly interesting possibilities for the future of clothing and fashion.
In regards to this particular piece, I find the forms to be neat. They have a geometric yet also organic sense to them, and a complexity that I imagine would be facilitated by the computer design process.
For this blog post, I decided to look at Angela Lee’s Looking Outwards 05. Angela discussed about Hayden Zezula’s work, which consist of 3D animations. I agree with Angela’s description of Hayden’s works. She talks about how he limits the number of colors he uses and his lack of details in the warped humanoid forms yet they are recognizable.
Hayden’s work, “Ghost in Shell” that is based on famous manga, also caught my eyes first. The way Hayden used contrast in this particular project is really interesting and strong on the visuals. Another visual element he often uses is lighting. In his animation for Leon’s Walls tour, his use of lighting for the tree is beautiful. Overall, I am glad that I got to find out about this artist, thank you to Angela.
Death Mask representing the past, present and future.
I decided to look at Julia Nishizaki’s post on the Vespers. Theses are 3D-printed ‘death masks’ by Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter Group at MIT. These are modern interpretations of traditional death masks using cutting edge materials, processes and visuals. Part of the reason why I decided to write on this post in particular was because I had never heard of a death mask before. After reading about this a death mask is a traditional mask that was supposed to capture the wearer’s last breath.
At MIT, Oxman, has interpreted this as a representation of the past present and future. My favorite part about these mask is the part representing the future synthetically engineered microorganisms to produce specific pigments or chemicals and are specific to the individual’s genetic makeup. It is so cool how they utilize living organisms within the artificial mask and they work together to create one cohesive piece.
Julia mentions the possibilities of this being a step towards wearable technology and interfaces and I thought this was a really interesting point. I like the idea that these technologies in the future might use microorganisms as part of the piece.
For this Looking Outwards, I decided to focus on my friend Ammar Hassonjee’s Looking Outwards which is about Aaron Koblin’s project Flight Patterns. It is interesting in how it uses lines to visualize three dimensional flight patterns through America. I thought it was interesting how these scientists took data and input that into an algorithm that creating such a captivating visualization.
I agree with Ammar in how it is interesting that Aaron was able to show movement and directionality just using data. I also liked how Adobe after effects was also used to further edit the visualization.
An interesting post I saw was Mike’s looking outwards 09, about Tai’s post, about Refik Anadol, a media artist from Turkey, who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He thoroughly explores the relationship between architecture and media arts, merging machine learning and visual/audio experiences. He creates installations, but has also projected his work onto existing architecture.
As Mike had mentioned, what’s most impressive is the rigorous amount of effort to perfectly map projections onto a piece of irregular architecture, such as the Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Look at some of his work here.
The Looking Outwards post I decided to look into further was Steven Fei’s week 7 post. The project this post covers is called Architecture of Radio and is by Richard Vijgen and his studio. The design studio, based in the Netherlands, focusses on contemporary information culture and how such data can be visualized through digital art as well as physical installations. This specific project visualizes the world of radio waves, collecting live signals from a variety of different sources and compiling them into one cohesive “infosphere” experience. The infosphere is then viewed by the user through a real time phone application.
In his post, Steven was specifically interested in the first person representation of the radio wave visualizations that the app provides and how it could allow the user to view the infrastructure of such signals in a unique and immersive way rather than the typical top down system plans. I too found this aspect of the project interesting and in addition thought it managed to very successfully visualize a system critical to our everyday lives that would normally be invisible to us.
For this looking outwards post, I decided to focus on Looking Outwards 06 by Nadia Susanto, which focuses on the Silk Pavilion created by the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab. This project explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication, and uses a collaboration of an algorithm-generated base structure and silkworms to create a layered structure, in order to determine the shape and material optimization of fiber-based surface structures.
I agree with Nadia’s statement of how the combination of real-life insects and computation perform art, rather than purely using computers to randomly generate shapes. The thought of learning from silkworms, adapting the methods to computational design, and re-using silkworms to complete the final pavilion is a really interesting approach to me. However, when I first read Nadia’s post, I wondered why the two “printing” methods were combined, because it seemed quite redundant. After reading the MIT Media Lab’s website on the Silk Pavilion and watching the video, I discovered that the process of having silkworms generating structure was also a research on how the environment would affect the mapping of silkworms, which could be manipulated to create an ideal pavilion structure:
“Affected by spatial and environmental conditions, including geometrical density as well as variation in natural light and heat, the silkworms were found to migrate to darker and denser areas. Desired light effects informed variations in material organization across the surface area of the structure. A season-specific sun path diagram mapping solar trajectories in space dictated the location, size, and density of apertures within the structure in order to lock in rays of natural light entering the pavilion from south and east elevations.”
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