Category: LookingOutwards-11

YouieCho-LookingOutwards-11

“The Storm Laboratory ” in London by Loop.pH, 2016

This project is a transparent pneumatic toroiodal form that shows turbulent geophysical air dynamics with thousands of animated carbon particles. This shows the global airflow at a very small scale, at which people can experience the whole scheme. I thought this project was interesting because the idea of physically displaying numerous particles seemed very novel, and I liked that it was rather a realistic portrayal of aerodynamics, not a representation that has been overly manipulated to be aesthetic.

Rachel Wingfield is the female designer, researcher, and educator who founded Loop.pH in 2003. She specialized in responsive environments inspired by the study of living systems while she was in the Royal College of Art in London. She looks at both near and far future scenarios about biological and technological futures. Like in this project, she creates amazing public engagement initiatives, as well as other multidisciplinary visionary environments and experiences.

loop.ph

“The Storm Laboratory ” in London by Loop.pH, 2016

Lanna Lang – Looking Outwards – 11

Addie Wagenknecht’s “Optimization of Parenting, Part 2” // 2012

This project is a robot arm that rocks a baby’s crib when it hears the baby cry or awakes from his/her sleep, simulating a mother’s arm trying to soothe her baby at night. What first drew me to this piece was the fact that it was developed with support by The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry here at CMU while Wagenknecht was doing a residency here. I love the fact that she played with the dichotomy of the baby and its mother but without the intimacy – the exact opposite of how an actual mother would feel towards her newborn. Wagenknecht unraveled the created façade of women and family and the false sense of balance between parenting and career in America.

I think this piece is so effective because the disparity Wagenknecht wanted to convey to her audience is very clear in all the decisions she made to complete this piece. The robotic arm is blatantly industrial, from its structure to its color of factory-like orange to represent the idea of industry – mirroring the precise, reactive nature that parenting demands and suggesting the idea of impossible, flawless perfection that parenting is the opposite from because of human error and learning on the spot.

This project is obviously influenced and inspired by her own experience of being a mother and is critiquing that exact choice. She was also influenced by the observation she had of mothers in society as a whole and the notion of being a mother: she witnessed that mothers were expected to become full-time parents, resulting in female artists losing their creative practice they had spent their entire life building. She wanted to question if the role of the mother could be replaced by technology (as other roles were replaced with – like the vacuum or the refrigerator) without affecting the development of the baby.

Video record of the installation “Optimization of Parenting. Part 2”

Ankitha Vasudev – Looking Outwards – 11

Reactive Canopy is a project by Caitlin Morris, made in 2011. Caitlin Morris is a designer, researcher and educator who uses various software and digital fabrication techniques to create projects relating to the theme of perception and the human-environment relationship. She is currently a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab and has previously taught at NYU and Parsons. As a student she studied Design and Technology, Architectural Building Sciences and Cognitive Psychology.

Reactive Canopy interests me because it combines traditional architectural modelling using Rhino with algorithmic computer vision using openFrameworks (and Grasshopper – parametric design).

Process of creating Reactive Canopy using grasshopper, openFrameworks and Rhino

This project consists of a canopy (modeled in Rhino and Grasshopper) situated overhead that people pass under as they walk past. Cameras track motion below the canopy that causes the apertures of the canopy to open, which creates areas of light on those passing by. The motion data of pedestrians is collected using openFrameworks and passed onto Rhino and Grasshopper.

Demonstration of Reactive Canopy

Click here to watch a video that shows how amount of motion from frame to frame in openFrameworks is translated to aperture size in a Grasshopper model.

Emma NM-LO-11

Caroline Sinders Nudge

Caroline Sinders created a prototype of a wearable watch that told time in terms of user’s schedule. She uses Python, Google Calendar API, Arduino, LEDs, Illustrator to create this prototype. I like that it is a new way of thinking about time and the idea makes sense to me. We typically only want to know the time in reference to an event, so this watch will tell us how much time we have left until that event. I would be curious to try this way of telling time out and see how it works for me.

Caroline Sinders is in her own words a “machine learning designer/user researcher, artist, and digital anthropologist.” She is interested in natural language processing and how it intersects with artificial intelligence, abuse, online harassment, and politics in digital, conversational spaces. She founded Convocation Design + Research agency. Here they focus on the intersections of machine learning, user research, designing for public good, and solving difficult communication problems.

Siwei Xie – Looking Outwards 11

Ayah Bdeir is an entrepreneur, inventor, and interactive artist. She is the founder and CEO of littleBits. Bdeir earned a Masters of Science degree from the MIT Media Lab. littleBits joined the 2016 Disney Accelerator program. It has also partnered with Pearson, one of the leading curriculum companies in the world to co-create curriculum to support their Science and Engineering program.

EE is an interactive installation that examines people’s interaction with Lebanese electricity, an infamously broken infrastructure that they have learnt to live without, or in spite of. I admire it because over the past 25 years, electricity shortages in Lebanon have reached 20 hours a day, creating a sinister imaginary persona that commands life across social, financial and political lines, and seems to constantly play hard to get.

Ayah Bdeir, Elusive Electricity, July 2011, Neon, Steel, Motion Sensor, Cables, Custom Electronics

Original source.