LookingOutwards-11 – Page 3 – [OLD FALL 2019] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Sarah Kang-Looking Outwards-11

Liminoid Garden, by Filipa Valente and Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, 2014

Filipa Valente is both a practicing architect and experiential designer with experience in major firms and studios. After completing her architectural studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, she went on to obtain her Masters in Media Art and Architecture at SciArc in Los Angeles.

Valente’s project “Liminoid Garden”, in collaboration with the Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre, was an interactive machine assemblage between the city, its users, and the environment. I was particularly drawn to this project because of how the installation was able to respond to real-time environmental data from the city, engaging the audience by promoting awareness. Another cool factor is the interaction between the dancers and the installation and the resulting data visualizations.

Liminoid Garden* @ SKYLINE 2014 Festival DTLA from Filipa Valente on Vimeo.

Margot Gersing – Looking Outwards 11

This week the female creator I decided to focus on is Yael Braha. She is a designer and creative director from Italy. She focuses a lot on large scale interactive projects and sculptures in her personal time. I was really inspired by her project Animal Race. This project was done for California Academy of Sciences in 2013.

This project is a very simple and effective data visualization. People can decided what animal they want to race and then in real time the race with a projected animation. The animation reflects the real speed of the animals so you can see if you are actually faster than a elephant for example. The data from the race is immediately displayed, stored and compared to all the other ‘runs’.

What I really like about this project is how it is so simple and so effective. She used Arduino, Processing, animation software, Resolume and electronics like a projector. It is so playful that people are drawn in and want to participate. It is also a teaching tool about data, data visualization and animals.

Paul Greenway – Looking Outwards 11

History Flow is a data visualization project by Fernanda Viégas, a senior researcher at Google with a focus on human/AI interaction and data visualization. The project History Flow shows study collaboration patterns on Wikipedia and was on display at the MoMA in New York City. To show such patterns on Wikipedia, Viégas collected the entire past editorial data from various different wikipedia pages and input this data into a script in order to create a legible graphic representation. The resulting visualizations make use of color, patterns, and direction to represent various different events and trends within each page’s history and tell a story about that particular topic from the perspective of all its contributed combined.

I found the project to be a really compelling data visualization with an especially unique focus on something I never would have imagined being visualized. The final images tell interesting stories and show the overall interest / controversial nature about their respective topics.

edit history graphic representing the wikipedia page on chocolate
edit history graphic representing the wikipedia page on history

Austin Garcia – Looking Outwards – 11 – Group C

Chloe Varelidi’s Minicade

I have always been interested in games so I was drawn to Chloe Varelidi’s repertoire when looking through the list provided. This particular project is interesting experiment in shared learning and game design. Games are an excellent way to get people interested in art, coding, and design principals. This collaborative method of making and sharing mini-games is an excellent way for people to begin their exploration of games, art, and code.

Collaboration is another well done element of this project. There is a focus on working and learning together so that a greater thing can be made. Each mini game may only be a couple minutes long, but in total, this project could create hours and hours of entertaining content for people to make and share.

Aaron Lee – Looking Outwards – 11

Toni Doves is a media artist active in New York who uses motion sensing for her film, installation and performance. For example, in her exhibition, participants would see their avatars on screen that emulate motions.

One of her prominent projects, ‘The dress that eats soul’, already gives a powerful presence without further explanation by its appearance. A huge mechanical female sculpture in front of movie screen emits different lights and effects that follows to the narrative.

According to artist’s description, the sculpture’s dress is triggered by the movement of the participant and starts to play video and tell a story. The projection on the overheads follows the direction of the participant’s head to enhance virtual reality. The video is dubbed with poem scripted by novelist Rene Steinke. Each video is unique and responsive to the participant’s movement.

The main reason I picked this artist is mainly due to my passion in cinema which Doves has a serious connection to. I was curious to find what aesthetic and technological impact one could bring to the art of cinema. It was also interesting how she was using responsive features of her work to address and develop personal connections to the participants.

Artist’s website: https://tonidove.com/

The dress that eats soul by Toni Doves, (watch from 22:00 and onward)

Shariq M. Shah – Looking Outwards 11

Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer who challenges the “certainties” of space and time in a way that brings into inquiry the supposed conflict between mankind and nature. Throughout her work, there are developments of an intertwined relationship between people, nature, and space, in ways that reconfigure understandings of traditional space making. One project by her practice, Future Farmers, is called Wind Theater and it transforms and translates the physical experience of wind into one that is visual and auditory, using its movements to generate color fields. Another project, For Want of a Nail, brings into inquiry the complex history of nuclear energy in New Mexico, as it seeks to develop a dialogue between the materials and those affected by the materials. Franceschini’s work spans a variety of disciplines and challenges the notions of art, architecture, and research in ways that positions the work in intriguing ways.

http://www.futurefarmers.com/projects

Angela Lee – Looking Outwards – 11

A video showing Shin’m, Eunsu Kang’s environment and performance installation.

I’d like to focus on the media artist Eunsu Kang, the artist behind the installation Shin’m. Kang studied at Ewha Woman’s University, where she received her BFA and MFA. For her postgraduate studies, Kang received an MA from UCSC and a PhD from the University of Washington.

Shin’m is a hybrid of a performance and installation which explores the relationships between the body and space through spatial drawing of sound. Kang created this piece in collaboration with Diana Garcia-Snyder (a choreographer), Donald Craig, and Bo Choi (costume designer). I loved seeing the environment respond visually and sonically to the participants’ movements. I think it inspired the participant to try different movements to see what kind of environment they could generate. Moreover, though the piece is very technical, the sounds of nature add a different dimension to the environment and create a soothing, beautiful atmosphere.

Ammar Hassonjee – Looking Outwards 11

“Moving Image” from the Transfer Gallery in LA. This is from the Augmented Wallpaper project by Claudia Hart.

For this post, I chose to focus on the work of an artist named Claudia Hart. She uses technology to make explorations with the recurring theme of “identity art”, in which her work explores body issues, perception, and the relationship between nature and technology. She studied art history at NYU and a Masters of Architecture from Columbia, and then taught 3D art exploration at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. She currently works out of New York and Chicago.

A project of hers that I chose to focus on is her exploration of a series of Augmented Reality wallpapers that display captivating images of art. Over these wallpapers, viewers can use their smartphones to overlay different images and animations over the wallpapers. The animations themselves are embedded in code in the app that activates when the camera moves over the wallpaper. A link to her project can be found here.

A video showing the how the animation layer is on top of the wallpapers.

Kristine Kim-Looking Outwards-11

Caroline Sinders, Jenn de la Vega, Dr. Yohance Murray, Black Box, 2015

Caroline Sinders is a machine learning designer/ user researcher, artist, and digital anthropologist who finds a lot of interest in language, culture and images. She creates many projects related to artificial intelligence, natural language processing, abuse, online harassment, and politics in digital, conversational spaces. All of her works are very intriguing and successful but the one that caught immediately caught my attention was her mixed media piece Black Box.

Gif of what is shown inside the box- images from cellphone footage and historical protests with construction paper cut outs taken from headlines and stills from Eric Garner’s murder.

Black Box is a mixed media 3D project vocalizes the current conversation around police, violence, and race. Caroline and her team took the idea of camera phones as citizen journalism and flipped it. The media story within the box they created can only be captured and see with the phone, just like after a plane disaster, we look to the black box for truth. This project is installed in a room and upon entering the room, you hear and see a visualization of John Coltrane’s Alabama. However, an XBOX Kinect triggers the actual camera phone audio from police incidents as you place your phone into the box, creating new and confrontational context to this well known protest song. What I especially love about this project is the fact that the artists challenged where and how these stories and informations are experienced. They pushed the boundaries of asking themselves how might people engage with content and each other in new and different ways. Of course the whole production of building the box and using technology to execute this idea properly is also very intriguing, but their extra set of details of how and where they displayed their project is very impressive. I really enjoy this project and wish to experience in real life.

Blackbox documentation

Minjae Jeong-LookingOutwards11

While browsing through the provided list of women practitioners, I found Heather Kelley and her game “Superhypercube” very interesting. Superhypercube is a “first person puzzler” on PlaystationVR.

“To play, you control a group of cubes, rotating it to fit through a hole in a series of floating walls that are constantly moving toward you. Each time you fit through another wall without crashing, more cubes are added to your cluster. Head tracking is critical in the game – as your cluster of cubes gets bigger, you will need to lean around it to see the hole and quickly determine what rotations to make. Stay alive as long as possible, and add your high scores to the ranks of players around the world!”

Superhypercube trailer

What I find interesting about this game is that while I am still not familiar with VR games, this game is a seemingly simple educational puzzle game but playing it in VR actually makes it more fun, which is very important aspect in games.

Heather Kelley is a co-founder of Kokoromi, an experimental game collective, with whom she has produced and curated GAMMA event, promoting experimental games as a creative expression in a social context.