Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for 21st century architectural practice. She is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an experimental architectural design studio based in Ithaca and Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP, a design research lab with specialization in computational design, data visualization and digital fabrication.
Lumen (2017) night time
Lumen (2017) by Jenny Sabin is a digitally fabricated architectural work that won the 2017 Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 Young Architect’s Program. The structure is a socially and environmentally responsive lightweight knitted fabric that adapts to the densities of bodies, heat, and sunlight. Lumen is composed out of tubular structures and a canopy of cellular components employs recycled textiles, photo-luminescent and solar active yarns that absorb, collect, and deliver light. The structure also incorporates an automatic misting system that activates depending on the proximity of a visitor.
For this Looking Outward, I really wanted to look at Amanda Ghassaei design work, specifically her 2017 Origami Simulator. A little about Amanda, she is a graduate of Pomona College and MIT’s media lab. Currently, she is working as a research engineer at Adobe’s Creative Intelligence Lab. With a background in physics and eventually design, she is applying her expertise in the fields of computational design, digital fabrication, and simulation methods
Origami Simulator is a WebGL app that mimics how a certain origami pattern creases and folds. What’s really interesting about this simulator is that contrary to the normal process of making one fold at a time, the simulator attempts to fold creases all at once.
Crease patterns are uploaded into the app as a SVG or FOLD format; from there, the app uses color and opacity to visualize the direction and fold angles of each crease.
The Origami Simulator app also connects to virtual reality and a user is able to interact with the digital forms through that as well.
Overall, I just really appreciate the way Amanda has brought both structure and delight to the seemingly ordinary concept of folding origami.
A rendition of the KitesFight designed by Eva Schindling
A project designed and implemented by a female artist is the KitesFight by Eva Schindling. Schindling focused heavily on the application of technology in the realm of media art. She received a MSc. in Art and Technology from Chalmers University in Sweden and a degree in Interaction and Media Design from FH Joanneum in Austria. Schindling’s range of artwork is very wide with architectural Trojan Horse and simple sound projects. Out of such an extensive array of projects, I selected the KitesFight as it seems very similar to the projects that we engage with during this course.
The project features many triangles that interact with one another depending on a number of rule sets. The algorithm changes varying by the volume of the sound inputted. Then, the triangles follow each other, repel each other, and attach with one another. As we have been working on projects where different shapes interact with one another and we also just did the Sonic Art Project, I believe that though further practice. Such complex projects can be feasible.
Angela Washko is a digital artist who creates experimental games and entertainment that often revolves around feminist themes. One project that really stood out to me is called The Game, which won the Impact Award at Indiecade. As a feminist video game, this project presents an “exploration of consent and the politics, tactics and practices of the male pick-up artist and seduction community.” The format resembles a dating simulator, where players experience several seduction techniques deriving from instructional books and seduction coaches (pickup artists. The pickup gurus attempt to seduce the player, where six prominent coaches try to gain the player’s attention at a bar—an opportunity for players to explore the complex social behavior and psychology behind dating, as well as experience being a femme-presenting individual exploring this difficult and risky path. I found this game to provoke a reflective process step by step, as it allows us to virtually explore and manipulate, while simultaneously complicit in the frequent dehumanizing behavior. This game is unique as it’s composed entirely of scenarios moving on, providing a digital narrative that satirizes this convoluted system of power and desire in the world of contemporary sex and dating.
Exhibition of The Game at The Museum of Moving ImagePeople playing through The Game in the museumA dialogue scene captured in The Game
Short Biography of Angela Washko: Angela Washko has a BFA in painting/drawing/sculpture and an MFA in Visual Art. She currently works as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon. Broadly speaking, her work focuses on feminist issues, “creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it.” For example, she has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft since 2012.
“The Game” by Angela Washko is a dating simulator video game about pick-up artists, where the player is a woman being aggressively pursued by 6 men that attempt to. The dialogue is the strongest part of the game, but the rough graphics, almost horror-like close-ups, and intense music add to the disturbing quality of the experiences.
Gameplay still
The player can choose between several responses that range from positive, where you accept and play into the PUA’s techniques, and negative, where you rebuke the PUA’s advances.
I really like the game as it is now. I think Washko could lean in further to the ‘dating simulator’ aspect. Right now it presents the choices in a fairly equal and straightforward manner, so most may just reflexively choose the options where you refuse the PUA’s, but adding an in-game scoreboard/consequences to each choice (for example, if you act ‘rudely’ and refuse a man you lose ‘social standing’) would add to the suppressive awkwardness of the exchanges and perhaps make the player feel more self-conscious of choosing the options where you don’t play along.
LittleBits was created by Ayah Bdeir in 2010. Specifically, littleBits is a collection of modular electronics that snap together in order to make prototyping more efficient and easy. I admire this project because, being able to work with littleBits in one of my studio classes, I greatly appreciated the ease of being able to create and mimic low-fidelity electronic devices. Not having much knowledge on how certain devices work, I also enjoyed how I did not have to know much in order to work with littleBits, and I was also able to learn more about the general pattern of certain electronic devices along the way, using littleBits. It was a way of learning that is both hands-on and simplified enough as to not overwhelm the user.
Bdeir graduated from the American University of Beirut in 2004 in Computer and Communications Engineering, as well as Sociology. Her work has appeared in The New Museum, the Royal College of Art, and has taught at both NYU and Parsons. She is both an interactive artist and an engineer, founding littleBits, which joined MoMA’s permanent collection and has been partnered with industry companies like Disney, Pearson, and the New York Department of Education. Bdeir has led many initiatives to get young girls involved in STEM, partnering with the White House, and companies such as Disney, in order to do so. While she is originally from Beirut, she now resides in New York City.
The project that I chose was Liquid Sound Collision by Eva Schindling. Eva creates hardware and software in the interdisciplinary zone between art, science, technology, and design. She received a MSc. in Art and Technology from Chalmers University in Sweden and a degree in Interaction and Media Design from FH Joanneum in Austria. Her work ranges from embodied evolutionary robotics and algorithmic pattern formation to the visualization of otherwise invisible sound waves and has been shown at the Japan Media Arts festival, Hong Kong’s Museum of Art, Moscow’s Biennale of Contemporary Art, Burning Man, the Pixxelpoint festival in Slovenia, and Nuit Blanche Toronto.
The project is a study of the interactions that occur when recorded voices engage with computer simulated fluids. Each individual study sends two words that are considered opposites, such as chaos and order or body and mind, and send them as vibration sources through opposite ends of a fluid simulation. The sounds create waves that collide with each other and the moment of collision is translated into a digital 3D model that is then 3D printed into a sculpture. I find it very interesting how she is using a very scientific technology in order to create these very fluid sculptures. The words that are chosen are opposites and there is something poetic about capturing the intersection of these opposites.
Kate Hartman is a professor and lab director at OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) and a designer of computational wearables. In 2014, she published a book called Make: Wearable Electronics — Design, prototype, and wear your own interactive garments.
Cover of Wearable Electronics
This book provides a thorough knowledge of how to create a garment while incorporating electronics. Hartman kindly explains the science and technology behind each tool or concept, such as circuit or conductive thread, at the start of the book for the beginners. By having a circuit inside clothing, one can manipulate the clothing to make sound, record information, or emit light. The possibility of electronic clothing is endless. Although I am unsure if I will ever make my own electric clothing, as I suck at even making conventional clothing, I was entertained by this new concept. I would like to see how people can use this concept to potentially help people who are in needs.
SUGAR, a game experience designed by Heather Kelley.
For this week’s Looking Outwards, I examined the work of Heather Kelley, a game designer, digital artist, and media curator focused on sensory interactions and aesthetics in video games. Heather holds a Masters of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and has worked in a variety of entertainment-technology realms throughout her career. She’s made stops at Subotron, Quake, Unreal, and even the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, bringing her expertise and work to the classroom as well as to gamer screens worldwide. As a lifelong video game fan, her name immediately caught my eye when I was browsing the list of accomplished women in the field because of her ties to the video game industry and her incredible success within it. After reading over her bio, I was even more impressed by all she’s accomplished, especially her work on the UNFPA Electronic Game to End Gender Violence. It’s clear that Heather is an inspiration to all game designers out there, as she’s managed to combine her creative talents with her desire to create societal change.
One of Heather’s works that I found most impressive was SUGAR, a “cross media collaborative event featuring an original game, scent-generating networked electronics, and couture fashion” (perfectplum.com). SUGAR is, simply put, an immersive video game experience that light-heartedly satirizes the imperial court and Hapsburg history from a romantic perspective. In the game, two players work together to coordinate the dancing of two horses in order to appease the medieval crowd. The art style and imagery are whimsical and geometric, adding a light-hearted flair to her game design and visuals. But what was most unique about SUGAR is the inclusion of an “Action Olofactorizer,” a device that combines hardware, software, and chemicals to produce scents and smells based on the player’s actions. For example, grass, leather, and even horse poop scents are produced to accompany gameplay! Heather’s ability to fully immerse the player and make SUGAR, as well as the rest of her games, interactive experiences is remarkable, and I really enjoyed learning about her work.
Some of the scents, sights, and visuals from SUGAR, Heather Kelley’s cross-media collaborative gaming experience.
Lauren Lee McCarthy’s How We Act Together installation
‘How We Act Together’ is a project done by an artist, Lauren Lee McCarthy. She is a LA based artist who explores “social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithm living.” After looking through her projects, I realized that most of her projects put the viewers out of their comfort zones. For example, her other project called “SOMEONE” is a human version of Amazon Alexa. McCarthy recruited four households across America in which she installed cameras and microphones. When viewers come to the installation at the museum, they get to play the role of human Alexa. When I first read about this project, I was a little creeped out quite frankly because, if people get paid to be strangers’ “someone” behind the screens in the future, it would be creepy.
Just like her “SOMEONE” installation, McCarthy challenged people to feel somewhat uncomfortable by “asking participants to repeat different gestures until exhausted, to a point where the gesture no long feels natural and its meaning begins to shift” in her “How We Act Together” project. Evidently, she is playing around different gestures and facial expressions that are used in social situations. Using a software, participants are asked to scream, which will be detected by the computer once their gestures conform to the metrics of computer vision algorithms. As participants are screaming to the screen as seen in the video above, the screen displays another person screaming back at them. Looking at strangers screaming back at you eventually triggers a natural response from the current participant.
I chose to talk about Lauren’s projects because she pushes participants to a point where they feel uncomfortable by manipulating awkward and uncomfortable social situations. I thought it was really interesting that she exposes her participants to different social phenomenon, which triggers uncomfortable responses. Her projects make one think deeper into uncomfortable social situations we are constantly exposed to.
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