Darius Kazemi is a computer programmer and artist specializing in “weird internet art”. After graduating from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he was temporarily a video game designer before co-founding a technology collective called Feel Train with Courtney Stanton. In this collective, Kazemi collaborates with other artists to create programmatic bots, such as the “StayWokeBot” and a twitter bot project called “Relive 44” which started reposting every tweet that former President Barack Obama has posted on the platform, in May of 2017.
In his festival lecture, Darius refers to his most known project, which is his Amazon shopper bot. Every month, he gives his bot a $50 amazon gift card and waits for his random packages to arrive at his doorstep. His program uses customized API values with the collaboration of Amazon and the US Postal Shipping system to create a personal shopper that buys him random books and CD’s. Essentially, his program has an output in the form of his random monthly packages. He goes on to explain how he explores the parameters of his API guidelines using Google StreetView and the resulting images.
What I admire about Darius Kazemi’s work is that he explores rudimentary and everyday elements that go unnoticed, and turns it into an opportunity for a new perspective or interest. His Amazon shopper bot would provide the opportunity to the receiver to read or listen to something they never even knew existed or something they would never purchase themselves.
Santiago Ortiz is a mathematician, data scientist, and information visualization researcher and developer who is currently the head at Moebio Labs. Ortiz went to school at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, where he received a degree in mathematics with a concentration in chaos and complexity. Then, from 2000 – 2013, he was doing research and heading Moebio Labs which studied on a plethora of subjects – mostly focusing on creative coding, knowledge visualization, education, and innovation. Moebio Labs uses data to solve and answer real world problems with new strategies.
Something I admire about Ortiz’s work is the inter-activeness of some of his projects. Some of their work like on the Ross Spiral Curriculum , and History Words Flow, are a fun way to represent data that I think would intrigue people to learn and play with. I think because of this, a unique thing he does when presenting is live – playing with his interactive visuals. Not only is it the best way to present his work, but I think it adds to the important of the data being user friendly.
Meejin Yoon is an architect and designer, currently teaching at MIT as a Professor in the Department of Architecture. She graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor in Architecture, and then completed her graduate studies at Harvard’s GSD. Her work focuses on the intersection between space, technology, and materiality, and is most often acclaimed for its innovative and engaging characteristics.
Shadow Play by Howeler + Yoon
I really admire Yoon’s consideration to public engagement in her projects. I think by prioritizing how humans would engage with the spatial qualities of a project, Yoon is able to create very deliberate and intricate experiences that are unparalleled to other public establishments. For example, her project, Shadow Play, creates a unique experience for users by taking advantage of a neglected public space in Phoenix. Yoon creates shade in the desert sun and facilitates air circulation through each cell of her public parasol. The project creates interesting shadows due to the hexagonal formatting of her steel plates, which adds an interesting design element to supplement the project’s strong functional purpose.
During her talk at the Eyeo Festival, she focuses on her projects regarding interactive public spaces– especially topics such as responsive and interactive technology, smart materials, and the public engagement process. Her talk was interesting in that by narrowing it down to specific topics, she was able to choose only a few projects that utilize the technology in depth. And by going through the development process, the audience is able to grasp a deeper understanding the iterations as well as inspirations for the projects
For this week’s Looking Outward, I watched a lecture by John Underkoffler titled “Animating Spirit”. John is an interface designer and CEO of oblong industries. His company’s mission is “to provision the world with new computing forms of genuine value and durable worth, forms profoundly capable, human, beautiful, and exhilarating”. He is based in Los Angeles, California, and received his Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences.
His work largely focuses on creating novel, “human-first” user interfaces. This is really fascinating to me and I admire the way he pushes the boundaries of the existing technologies and interfaces that are used today, and pushes his team to design novel ones. In particular, I really like one of his projects called g-speak. G-speak is a spatial operating environment and novel computing platform that allows designers to collaborate with other users and design spatial, distributed applications across multiple screens and platforms.
g-speak enables the development of multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, spatial, distributed applications.
His lecture was very engaging because of the way he explains complex concepts and ideas in understandable language to someone who may not be familiar with the jargon. I also enjoyed the way he came across as very approachable. He mentions at the beginning how nervous he is, which adds to his charisma when he calmly and eloquently delivers his lecture.
Eyeo 2015 – Jesse Louis Rosenburg and Jessica Rosenkrantz
Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz use their background in architecture, biology, and computer science to fuel their work in computational design for digital fabrication. Together, they started the Nervous System Lab, in which they applied their expertise in digital fabrication and knowledge of generative forms to create products such as jewelry, lighting fixtures, and customizable dresses.
I’m really interested in how they were able to take 3-d printing, which is seen as for producing volumes, and were able to create essentially the fabric of a dress that moves and drapes much like more conventional fabric. It would be interesting to see more of the parametric logic behind the dress.
Heather Knight’s lecture on charismatic technology creation in 2011.
For this week’s Looking Outwards, I watched Heather Knight’s lecture from the 2011 Eyeo festival on charismatic and beneficial technology creation — namely, how to build robots that work alongside and benefit people. Heather has a degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT, a PhD in Robotics from CMU (!!), and a postdoc from Stanford exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces. She worked in Paris for a few years at the start of her career before returning to the MIT Media Lab to work on a robot called “Kismet” under Dr. Cynthia Breazeal. This was her segway into the realm of robotics, as it enabled her to see what it meant to work on an interactive, human-like robot (Kismet was meant to be a functional robot head).
Heather is immensely passionate about “social robotics,” the study of technology with social intelligence that can communicate with us in human terms. She strives to understand how we can build robot interfaces that adjust to human needs, not the other way around. This made me realize that Heather was, in a way, a pioneer in social/autonomous robotics; she was discussing the concepts of ethics in robots and human-technology interaction way back in 2011, well before any of the technologies of today were developed!
Due to her affinity for technology, the performing arts, and entertainment, Heather started working for Syyn Labs, an creative technology group that, as described on their website, “fuses the worlds of technology and interactive sciences with artistic mediums to design and construct visually dynamic spectacles that inspire thought and provoke conversation.” There, she began working on the installation of robots in music videos while developing her own robot theater company, Marilyn Monrobot. It’s an unconventional path, but it’s what led to her working on the OK Go Rube Goldberg machine in their music video “This Too Shall Pass,” one of the most famous music videos in YouTube’s existence! Heather managed the top floor of the machine, or roughly the first 2 minutes of the video. I remember watching this video multiple times growing up and marveling at its artistic complexity, so it was really cool learning about Heather’s involvement in the project.
The Rube Goldberg machine that Heather and Syyn Labs helped build for OK Go.
Overall, I think what I admired most about Heather’s talk was her ability to ground and personify robots. Robots are inherently cold, mechanistic beings, but Heather’s passion for the subject matter and artistic understandings allowed her to find a way to bring robots to life charismatically. It’s evident in her presentation style too; she’s loose, lively, and a whole lot of fun to listen to. It’s her charisma that rubs off on her robots most, and I love the fact that her projects all seem to be passion projects. Today, she’s an Assistant Professor of Robotics at Oregon State University, where she runs the—you guessed it—CHARISMA research group, which uses entertainment and artistic influences to develop Social Robots. It’s exciting work that’s befitting of her energetic nature.
Refik Anadol is digital media artist and director born in Istanbul, Turkey working at the intersection of parametric data sculpture and audio/visual fields in service of immersive ephemeral experiences. Anadol uses data structures and machine learning frameworks to develop experiential conditions that challenge typical orientations and attitudes towards spatial realities, thereby fundamentally shifting what it means to occupy and experience space. His installation work exemplifies the ephemeral nature of “non-digital reality”, that he references in his talk, an idea centralized by the destruction of the singularity, the championing of dynamism, and the triumph of the out of body experience. The networks between architecture, space, art, and computation are all brought into question as a result of Anadol’s work, and his talks suggest that conventional spaces can become canvases for the new digital realities that emerge from innovative computational techniques. One of Anadol’s recent works, Melting Memories, manifests as an all encompassing field condition that seemingly takes over the viewer. The workflow transposes EEG data into procedural noise forms, resulting in a highly dynamic and articulated formal development. As an architecture student interested in the intersection of these various ways of thinking, Anadol’s work and talk is highly intriguing and thought provoking, as it proposes new ways of thinking about space and computation. I intend to use the logic, workflows, and aesthetic attitudes as inspiration for my work going forward.
Deray McKesson & Samuel Sinyangwe have backgrounds as American civil rights activists; more specifically, they have a large voice in the Black Lives Matter movement. The piece presented is in an effort to attain a solution that addresses the sustained rise in police violence in America.
Their work is very interesting and respectable to be, as this is a hot topic in politics now, and is a sweeping movement across America. It has come to the point that when pulled over by police, many citizens are now scared for their lives rather than a simple speeding ticket they may face. I beleive the work they are doing in an effort to spread the information of protests, along with representing the news of police violence are crucial stepping stones in order to bring a possible solution to this. Moreover, their works follow key design principles to allow their ideas to be straightforward and easy to understand. I believe there is great work happening with McKesson & Singyangwe, and it refreshing to see citizens using design and computational practice for the greater good rather than commercial good.
Meejin Yoon is a Korean-American architect and designer. She graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Architecture and then from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In 2014, she was appointed as Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first female head of the Department of Architecture. Currently, she works as the dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University.
Most of her work focuses on interaction in public space. She seeks to bridge technology and play within the public sphere. One of her projects focuses on an urban, public, and interactive space that responds to people that move through the field. The lights in the field would correlate with people’s movements in the field. I admire that she seeks to bring people together in these public spaces. For example, in the lecture, she mentions how people would actually invent games to play while in the space. I also admire how many of her projects focus on smart materials and renewable energy. Her projects seem to always involve the environment and the natural world.
Yoon presents her work effectively by always providing images and graphics that show her development process, as well as photos of people actually interacting with her designs.
Eyeo 2015 video lecture given by Reza Ali, a computational designer and artist from Los Angeles.
The person whose work I chose to look into is Syed Reza Ali. According to his website, Reza is a computational designer, software engineer, and spatial artist out of Los Angeles. He comes from an electrical engineering and computational design background and currently does his own studio work related to user experience and augmented reality platforms. I admire Reza’s workflow of combining artistic and creative theory with the technical aspects of logical and algorithmic thinking that he exhibits in his projects such as his YCAM 3D printed computational forms or his art installations for the Carbone Smolan Agency. He challenges himself to integrate all different kinds of software to add effects and layers of visualization to each of his projects, such as through combining modeling software like 3D Max with algorithmic coding done in C++.
In his presentation, Reza explains his unique design methodology and goes into detail about how he translates programming logical into generative physical forms. He uses the example work experience of his residency at Autodesk to expand on that. His use of captivating images, GIFS, and videos/simulations that project behind him on the screen, such as when he talks about his ofxUI Timeline or his Data Driven Design digital forms, really help enforce his presentation because he can directly reference the purpose of the project or show the audience the visual effect he was going for as opposed to just talking about it.
A project featured on Reza’s website that showcases his installations for the Carbone Smolan Agency.
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