Project Soli

https://nand.io/projects/project-soli

DR. IVAN POUPYREV created a data visualization of movements of the hand. I admire that it uses a radar to sense how the hand is moving, then translates that into colors and strokes on a page. It also allows the user to use gestures to play games. I think it has the opportunity to allow users to create their own art.

Dissonant Imagery

http://www.daito.ws/en/work/dissonant-imaginary.html

In 2018, Daito Manabe + Kamitani Lab created a visualization of imagery in the mind using  “brain decoding”. I admire that it focuses on the relationship of brain activity, visuals, and sound to predict the mental visuals that the user is thinking about. I think this has the opportunity to help people generate art covers for playlists of music, allowing them to identify the playlist by the image instead of a playlist name.

I’mHyojung Seo is a media artist and an Associate Professor at Samsung Art and Design Institute. She creates interactive performance works through installations and various platforms of communication that allows human to seek media as the new sense, or sixth sense that goes beyond our five senses. The process and methods in the works are a crucial part of her creative practice. She has many interesting works, but I really admire this work called “rock scissors paper game with face” (2014). Using FaceOSC and ofxFaceTracker(byKyle Mcdonald) from Github, she figured out the data of getting user’s expression. Then she made a face version of Rock-Paper-Scissors game, where to represent Paper – you have to open your mouth big, for Scissors – wide lips, and for Rock – bigger face (meaning your face should be closer to the camera). Rock-Paper-Scissors game is known has a game of luck; but she advised that this game is more about the effort because you have to change your face intensely to make the right sign.

I am using a grace day on this assignment.

In Emily Gobeille’s interactive children’s work, “Knee Deep”, she provides a playground for children to immerse themselves in other worlds, be it the ocean, outer space, or an animated nature scene. This project is admirable because it teaches children the potential joy that can be brought about by experimenting with creative computing. It gives them a taste of augmented reality that is probably unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. It also is a very good demonstration of live green-screening and image manipulation, detecting depth in order to properly place the children in a world, not just on a world.

As an artist, Emily Gobeille has a strong background in immersive visual design, and is an avid integrator of creative design and visual technologies. She often has a playful yet meaningful approach to her works, which is well-presented in “Knee Deep”. She is from Amsterdam, but she now resides in Brooklyn where she studies visual design, motion graphics, and interaction.

Video taken from Nova’s website: https://www.novajiang.com/projects/ideogenetic-machine/

Nova Jiang: Ideogenetic Machine

Nova Jiang is a Chinese installation artist who grew up in New Zealand and is currently based in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in media art from UCLA and has exhibited her work in numerous museums and biennales around the world. Her work encourages tactile and creative engagement between visitors and her artwork. One project that I found particularly interesting was her Ideogenetic Machine, a machine that incorporates portraits of participants captured with a camera and a database of drawings made by Jiang about current news and events. Visitors are prompted to respond to the storyline by adding their own performance and expressions in order to personalize the comic strip. The layout and configuration of images from which new narratives continuously form never repeats. The software also adds blank speech bubbles into the composition which participants can fill with their own dialogue.

What I really admire about this piece, in particular, is that it gives the audience something to take away from the whole experience. Nova allows her art to be used as an ‘open source’ so that everyone can experience it to their own liking and add their own narratives to an incomplete story. This interactive experience not only highlights her own artistic style but also promotes collaboration between people, suggesting that the audience themselves are also artists that hold creative agency in this process of creating.

For this week’s looking outwards to give attention to female artists in the field of creative coding, I would like to focus on Sharon Daniel. Sharon Daniel is a professor in the Film and Digital Media department and serves as chair for the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her works are focused on empowering and giving voice to those who don’t receive as much attention and are often mistreated, and become the victims of injustice in our society.

a screenshot of “blood sugar”

My favorite work of hers is called, “Blood Sugar”. It is an archive of interviews with numerous conversations with different types of addicts. The conversations include why and how they became addicts. The visualization shows the form of sound wave as well as different key sentences that reacts to the movement of the mouse.

What interests me is that the visualization is not necessarily a crucial part of the story and it could have been explained in many other ways, but because it creates a certain atmosphere, while emphasizing the “voice” of the interviewee, it adds to the experience of listen. Especially how one can rotate the sound wave in the 3D space provides metaphorically different perspectives.

This is the link to her project.

~using one grace day~

Tina Frank is a designer, artist,  and professor at the University of Art and Design Linz. She is the head of the Department of Visual Communication at the Institute for Media. Tina Frank lives is Austrian, but does audio – visual performances and installations all over the world.

In one of her recent pieces of work, What If, Frank and Alexandra Murray-Leslie worked together to question political considerations. They looked at environments people inhabit, patriarchal structures, and feminism.

Geraldline Juarez is a Mexican and Swedish visual artist. She likes to use time-based media, sculpture and performance to consider the materials, histories, technics, politics and economics shaping the dominant narratives and contexts in contemporary media culture.

I am intrigued by one of her 2019 “collection”, here are 4 of the pieces she created known as “non-functional jewelry” mainly made with porcelain, silver clay re-materialized from photographic waste and broken screens from smartphones. The ironic property allows us to reflect upon the durability and add-values of jewelry.

“Jewels are ornaments but also markers of time, what kind of memories will these jewels evoke in the future?” – Geraldline Juarez

Screenware is a method for glazing ceramics using refuse from smartphones and computer LCD’s screens as glass former.

Emily Gobeille is a visual design, motion graphics, and interactions artist based in Brooklyn, New York and from Amsterdam, Netherlands who produces high-end installations for children. As an artist that values interaction with the audience, Gobeille sought to produce technology-based art that invited her audience members to directly interact with the piece. One of her interactive pieces, “Knee Deep,” invites children to “explore unexpected worlds of different proportions with their feet” (zanyparade.com). 

Gobeille created “Knee Deep” with openFrameworks and combined real-time greenscreening with stomp detection to produce an interactive space that revealed seemingly impossible scales of different landscapes like those on Earth and those in space. The stomp-detection aspect of “Knee Deep” allows children to interact with the piece physically, making it more than a visual thing to admire but a fun activity to spend time in.

I particularly liked this piece because it focuses its attention on children. Art is usually viewed as something for adults, but Gobeille breaks that stigma by steering the piece’s attention towards children and creating a space that allows them to interact with a seemingly impossible scenario. As a child, I often enjoyed the interactive, stomp-detection spots in Korean malls, not wanting to leave the mall for that sole reason. Artists like Gobeille provide children with a spark of curiosity that allow them to imagine beyond a real-time setting.

Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch fashion designer that is at the forefront of exploring the intersection between human-centered technology and couture. Through her practice as a fashion designer, she creates designs that are both reactive to the wearer’s personal and external environments. In this looking outwards blog post, I will be focusing on the Spider Dress. The spider dress is made out of 3D printed parts, motors, sensors, and an Intel Edison. Through these methods, the dress is reactive to people that approach the wearer. Depending on the external figure’s speed and the wearer’s data, the spider’s legs will jolt out fast or slow, depending on the situation. I admire how her designs push fashion in the direction of becoming reactive pieces of clothing that take their own personality and heighten the wearer’s own as well.

Amor Munoz, born in Mexico City, studied Law at the UNAM and at the New Orleans Academy of Fine arts. Notes and folds by Amor Munoz in 2019 is an interactive installation that is built to create  a connection between sound and form, using programming and handcraft. There are three cylindrical sculptures that emits sound, which made out of pleated textiles with three different textures. These textures of each cylinder are unique depending on the musical patterns of each sound. This sculptures are activated when people approach their hands to the fabric, creating the cylinder to rotate at different speeds and sounds as they are programmed. I admire this installation by its complex programming and interesting interpretation of sound. Currently a member of the National System of Art Creators, Amor Munoz usually combines performance and experimental electronics with traditional media, which really shows in this work. There is performance (public approaching sculpture to activate) and experimental electronics with traditional media (using textile and sculpture with sound to rotate). I am amazed at how Amor Munoz interpreted and combined sound with technology into an interaction installation, only making it activate when the public reach out.