Neri Oxman is an architect, designer, inventor, and a professor at the MIT Media Lab. Her research is focused on how computation design, digital fabrication, material science, and biology intersect, thus coining the term Material Ecology.
I was interested in this project, Mushtari, which is a 3D printed wearable sculpture that supports the flow of cyanobacteria that converts sunlight into sucrose. It’s both indexical and symbolic of the digestive tract, in which it looks and functions as an organ system for absorbing nutrients, digesting biomass, and expelling waste.
phonelovesyoutoo: database by Kate Hollenbach displays the feed of both the front and rear-facing cameras. The recordings are displayed at the original time of day, depicting a glimpse of the relationship between human, device, time, and space. This collection of videos really highlights the information we essentially give for free just by owning a device with so many sensors and recording devices.
Kate Hollenbach is an artist, programmer, and educator based in Chicago and Los Angeles. She explores interactive systems and technologies involving body, gesture, and physical space.
Mary Flanagan is an inventor, artist, writer, and designer that creates games, installations, poetry, and essays. Perfect.city an exploration of the South Korean city of Songdo, a planned international metropolis developed by Gale International. Mary’s goal for the city is that it be designed perfectly. Mary modeled the city in the video game, Sims 2. She then conducted a series renders, along with the video below showcasing the design.
While I do think it is smart to use software to model the city, I do believe that making it through Sims does limit the possibilities due to its constraints. Nonetheless, the project was quite interesting, and I look forward to seeing her future work!
Mimi Son is one of the founders of an art studio based in Seoul called Kimchi And Chips that specializes artworks that combine with the sciences and philosophy. One project that I find intriguing is the public artwork Halo created in 2018 that celebrates the fusion of nature and technology. The computational installation involved 99 robotic mirrors that constantly follow the location of the sun. At the same time, the mirrors emit beams of water mist that draw a bright circle in the air, mimicking the shape of the sun as it is brought down to earth. However, the circle’s completion depends entirely on the presence of the sun. In a way, this project collaborated with nature while exploring instances where it coexists with technology. I find the concept of robotic entities being completely controlled by nature very interesting, as it brought polar opposite aspects of design together to form a large scale installation.
Mesocosm is a software-driven animaton that uses three projections to portray the saptiotemporal organization of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. In short, Zurkow and her team depicts Eden before The Fall, the Present, and Hell in a hybrid animation of Times Square. The project blurs the boundaries in terms of time and ecology by making the animation continuous, as opposed to three distinct projections. I find the uncertainty in when the past ends and when the future begins, and where the landscape separates from civilization to be really interesting. What I admire most about this project is its coherent usage of art and programming. Zurkow and her team not only drew each frame in the animation using a hybrid of images from Google Street View, present-day architecture, but they also created a software to transition each frame in the animated landscapes in response to algorithmic rules. No cycle is repeated and the character interactions and changes in weather are determined by a probability equation. Zurkow’s usage of art/ graphics to depict algorithmic data makes the hybrid nature of this project much more complex and interesting.
Marina Zurkow is an artist who focuses on the intersections of nature and culture. She takes various unique approaches in her work by drawing from her knowledge in life science, animation, and software technologies. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1985 with a major in Fine Arts. After graduation, she traveled all around the world to showcase her numerous exhibitions and projects including New York, Shanghai, San Francisco, Berlin, South Korea, etc. However, she mainly works in New York, and is currently a full time faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts.
This is an installation done by Mimi Son from KIMCHI and CHIPS, which is an art studio Seoul. The installation is called Light Barrier Third Edition, and it is presented in Asian Cultural Centre at Gwangju Korea in 2016.
In this edition of installation, 8 architectural video projectors are split into 630 sub -projectors using the structure on concave mirrors, and each mirror’s backing structure is computationally generated so that they collaborate as a single image in the air. A total of about 16,000,000 pixels are calibrated and so that the light beams can be merge in the haze to create an image in the air. In addition to the visual elements, 42 audios are added to create a sound field.
The installation attempts to exploit the ambiguity and non-conformities between materials and non-materials, reality and illusion, existence and absence. It focused on the theme of birth, death, and rebirth. The entire installation is inspired by impressionism paintings that the images arise from the canvas and became a drawing in the air.
I found this project to be interesting because it combined the idea of traditional impressionism art with computational technology to create a cohesive project. The project is not only visually pleasing but also takes visitor’s experiences into account.
This week, I’m focusing on Tina Frank, an Austrian designer, artist, and professor at the University of Art and Design Linz, where she heads the department of Visual Communication at the Institute for Media. Frank collaborates with musicians to create installations and audio visual performances, though more recently, her design work has shifted more towards data visualization for scientific projects. In addition, Frank is interested in teaching digital publications, and experiments in synesthesia.
” What If,” an immersive image sound installation by Tina Frank & Alexandra Murray-Leslie at the Klanglichtfestival in 2019
The project that I chose to look at is called “What if,” created by Tina Frank and Alexandra Murray-Leslie as a part of the Klanglichtfestival in 2019. “What if” is an immersive image sound installation meant to challenge how we think about and approach society and the world, through the use of color, forms, sounds, and images. This work is made up of three scenes, “Growing,” “Fantasy,” and “Future Dreams,” which, as stated on Frank’s website, address questions such as “What does our environment look like if it were only inhabited by mosses and ferns? How would our everyday life be if detached from patriarchal structures? What if feminists ruled the world?”
“What if” within the venue, Künstlerhaus – Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz
I found this project particularly interesting because it uses critical design in order to question our current ideologies, values, and assumptions, and to provide glimpses into different possible futures or scenarios. Although the installation and the visuals appear very abstract at first, the different layers of overlapping audio, voice, music, images, and flashes of light immerse and draw you into these different worlds, creating a deeper meaning within the work and serving as a critique on society and how we approach topics like the environment, women, and feminism.
Nataly Gattegno is an artist and one of the two founding partners of FUTUREFORMS. She is primarily focusing on design research and urban speculation through the lens of art and design theory and urban design. She was born and raised in Athens, Greece. She received her MA from Cambridge University and Masters of architecture from Princeton University.
Render of Cosmos by FUTUREFORMS
Cosmos is one of their many interactive pavilion designs. It is a dynamic shading canopy that fosters pedestrian interactions and establishes a visual focal point at the site. Cosmos creates an open shaded space for people to fluidly move through and congregate as it provides a contemplative play of shadow and lights. The people around the area would enjoy spending time underneath the artwork’s intricate organic structure and kaleidoscopic skin and depending on the different times of the day, the shadows will be changed.
I really admire this project as the geometry of the artwork is really stunning and there is a Fibonacci-like Sequence algorithm underlying the three-dimensional structure and skin of the pavilion. The geometry allows the shadow, which is something that’s always very neglectful, to play the main role and even as interesting as the pavilion itself.
Caroline Sinders is machine learner as well as user researcher. She has a variety interests ranging from politics, digital spaces, as well as convocational design. She has worked for IBM, Intel, Wikimedia Foundation, and more. Caroline has a variety of different media projects as well as research that she has done over the past few years. The one that really stood out to me was a project called Nudge Nudge.
I was very intrigued by its design in the beginning, then I followed upend read some more about the projects. It is a device worn like a watch that alarms when there is a reminder approaching. But to alarm the user, it doesn’t use anything but color to indicate the sense of time. This way it reminds users when a task is near or a reminder that needs attention soon. Its used was used in the study to show times in between a meeting for example. I think this is really awesome because it is definitely a unique way of showing and telling time. It is also a different way of reading an alarm that isn’t exactly direct.
Different stages of the alarm. (The bluer the watch face, the closer to the time it is.Thes are interfaces used for the Nudge Project.
Filtered Transparencies is an interactive installation created for the Paseo Arts Festival by architect and media artist Filipa Valente. I decided to write about Valente’s work because she runs a platform called limiLAB for experimentation in the fields of architecture, user experience design, and animation, which is interesting to me because of my interest in UI/UX. With this piece in particular, Valente really focused on making her audience ponder about their relationship to the space around them by immersing them into a light-generated hologram-like environment. I thought it was really interesting that she used a mix of art and technology to create a commentary on how people perceive reality, how they fit into their own generated world, and how that perception is so easily manipulated.
Filtered Transparencies, Filipa Valente, 2014.
The installation is created in a 3-dimensional space, with multiple payers of projections adding to the complexity of the piece. Each element (different shapes or lines formed by the projections) also seems to receive influence from the viewer’s movements, so that no two viewers ever have the same experience. I think the algorithm behind this work probably involves something similar in concept to our text rain assignment, where objects created by code are interacting with input from a camera.
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