For this Looking Outwards post, I decided to look at Monica Chang’s Looking Outwards 03. In this Looking Outwards, she studies programmable bio-composites called Aguahoja, created by Neri Oxman and MIT. Using the most available materials that can be found on Earth currently, they create organic art that moves away from using plastic and other materials that are toxic to the environment.
Aguahoja I Pavilion, standing at 5 meters tall
I agree with her statement on why it is intriguing, the fact that this art is being sustainable in its resources shows the possibility in duality between conserving the resources we currently have in the ecosystem, while not halting our movement towards further modernizing the world.
Furthermore, I also think the statement that they are making in redefining art is strong. When thinking of art, what comes to mind is a lot of traditional materials, such as paint, clay, wire, etc. All of these materials (especially thinking of different types of paint) are also toxic to the Earth. However, using materials that are organic and that the environment has plenty of, traditional art is being challenged and being evolved as Earth does as well.
// Jamie Park (jiminp) Project 9
// Section E
var myPic;
function preload(){
//preload image from imgur
var meURL = "https://i.imgur.com/XmiI0Iq.jpg";
myPic = loadImage(meURL);
}
function setup(){
//createCanvas and fill in the background
createCanvas(400, 300);
background(0);
//load the pixels of the image
myPic.loadPixels();
frameRate(60);
}
function draw(){
//draw rectangles at random points
var px = random(width);
var py = random(height);
//crate variables that would fit into acquiring the colors of the image
var cx = constrain(floor(px), 0, width);
var cy = constrain(floor(py), 0, height);
var colorLocation = myPic.get(cx, cy);
//generate rectangular color blocks
noStroke();
fill(colorLocation);
var ran = random(20);
rect(px, py, ran, ran, random(10));
}
I created a computational portrait of a picture of me. In addition to randomizing the size of the squares, I randomized the degrees of angle in the edges, layering soft and hard rectangles on top of each other.
I really enjoyed this coding process and it was nice to see the final product come together and create a picture of me.
I was inspired by my friend Charmaine’s Looking Outwards post 05. This post is about a CG company in Tokyo that creates 3D models and develops character concept design. Among many other things created by company ModelingCafe, Charmaine focused her research on Imma, a computer generated fashion model. This computer generated model has a twitter and instagram account, where someone weekly posts an image of her.
The gap between the computer generated model, Imma, and real-life person is almost non existent that it is a little creepy. If one did not know who Imma is, one would have easily thought that she is another human being posting pictures on Instagram. Although it is really cool to see the impact of technology on media, I am concerned with the unintended consequences of this type of digital technology. I hope people do not misuse or abuse the ability to render and create identical copies of humans.
In Jamie Park’s Looking Outwards 05, she introduced me to a 3d artist from creative cloud named Roger Kilimanjaro. He is a 3d artist from Paris, France, and he uses Maxon Cinema 4d to render his projects. He mainly creates animated videos of motions that loops over and over in a satisfying manner. On his social media pages, you can find endless short videos and images of realistic and yet unusual 3d renderings that come to life. The videos are very pleasing to look at with the attentive incorporation of popping colors and logical audios as support. At the same time, Roger utilizes his skills to create advertisements for food companies such as Krispy Kream. I agree with Jamie that it is fascinating to see how software like Maxon Cinema 4d allows a vast range of potentials for designers around the world, and it must be life changing for its developers to realize what they contributed to elevate the designers’ experience of their project making process.
Robert Hodgin is an artist/coder living in Brooklyn. His work ranges from simple 2D data visualizations to immersive 3D terrain simulations. Primary interests include theoretical physics, astronomy, particle engines, and audio visualizations. He works in Java, Processing, C++, Cinder, OpenGL, and GLSL.
He graduated in 1998 with a degree in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design.
I was especially interested in Robert’s credentials and where he started out. He graduated from RISD with a degree and sculpture but eventually worked on data and coding heavy projects. The reason why I was so interested is I find myself relating to his pathway in life where I thought I was going to be an engineer coming out of high school but ended up studying design in college. Robert makes effective use of artistic storytelling and easy to understand work processes to describe the how’s and why’s of his body of work. The ones that involve 3d simulations of the earth mesmerize me with their level of detail and use of live data of weather, auroras, time, and terrain.
This video is of Mario Klingemann’s speech at the 2015 Eyeo Festival.
Mario Klingemann is a German artist who is known for being one of the first people to utilize computer programming with arts. His works and studies involve researching the connections between creativity, culture and perception through the perspectives of artificial intelligence and mechanical learning. He told his speech the 2015 Eyeo Festival. He discusses about his approaches towards the concept of “order” from the perspectives of a programmer and an artist. I was interested in his work with the image collections of the British Library Labs. In this work, Klingemann classified 1 million images from the British Library Lab. He did this by using machines learning techniques to define different index for each image. He created an artwork with the information he obtained. Through the assignment we just did that involves locating the brightest pixel of the image, I admire this project so much for his skills of being able to sort through such a gigantic array of information. In his presentation, Klingemann uses various images and diagrams to help people better understand and visualize the information that he is trying to communicate. As a student who is interested in communication design, I am studying how to ease the process of transfer of information between different types of people. His method of coordinately visual graphical information through data maps with his presentation really made the data-grasping task of mine as an audience a lot smoother and this is what I am trying to learn from in design too.
Jennifer Pahlka’s talk about the importance of designing better experiences in government. Posters created to involve people in the city of Philadelphia to participate in polling using a texting feature.
Jennifer Pahlka is the executive director of Code for America. Code for America is an organization that works to tackle government-related issues surrounding experiences through design and technological lense. Jennifer Pahlka has a lifelong goal of impacting government operations to become human-centered. From 2013-2014, she served as the U.S. department Cheif of Technology officer, where she was able to change on a national level. In her Eyeo talk, she talks about her work in Coding for America. Through this organization, they select applicants from cities to work on developing a point of intervention that impacts government functions through design and technology. What I admire about Jennifer’s work is how her observations move her to start new initiatives. For instance, she mentions that she listened to someone’s comment about making our interactions with the government easy and clear. Through this talk, she was motivated to develop systems that met that statement. Jennifer also puts an essential consideration of the cost and efficiency of the production of specific interventions. She emphasizes that her fellows should consider the process of development. In focus to her presentation of her work, she explores her thought process in a transparent manner and how it answers her overall design brief. One project that I admire is involving members of the city of Philadelphia to poll in opinions to be used for town halls. Ultimately, it achieves the goal of making it more accessible for someone’s voice to be heard.
Kate Hollenbach leads the design computation team at Oblong Industries that is based in LA. She works with a lot of gestural interfaces and HCI applications and products. A recent work is phonelovesyoutoo, which is an application that captures video from the phone’s front and back camera, and the screen, watching the user’s activities. She creates an interesting perspective of what mobile devices would see when they observe human bodies, as well as looking into the physical and virtual planes of human presence. In this lecture, she explains her projects with very good supporting materials. When she presents her works, it is very good that she shows the demos from a perspective that the user would actually be in, so it helps visualize what the experience may be like. Also, she gives a good context of where the project is, and what kind of future stages the project is moving into.
Infinite Scroll, 2016
A work of Kate Hollenbach that I admire is Infinite Scroll. It is an installation with videos generated from real video capture of user’s scrolling through social network feeds. It is very interesting that mundane rituals can turn into interesting colorful content. It feels familiar because of the scrolling action, but it comes across as something novel because of the way that the scrolling action is expressed.
Connected WorldsConnected Worlds, Exhibits at the Hall of Science. Photo by David Handschuh
For this week the I watched a lecture by Theo and Emily of Design I/O from Eyeo 2012. I decided to choose this one because I had seen some of their projects before and really like their work.
Their studio works with design, research and coding to create immersive interactive environments. The environments use design and code as tools to makes theses experiences come to life. Behind all of their projects are the goal to create “delight and wonder” to encourage open play and exploration in children. They have offices in California and New York but their work appears all over the world.
NightBright
I love this studio so much because all the work they make is essentially my dream job. I love working with children and (I work in a preschool) and it has always been my dream to mix teaching, and design to create things for children. All of the projects they do encourage children to explore and openly play. Some of their projects have teaching elements too. They utilize the game and play nature to have the children actually learn something. One of their projects is a games about sharing resources and sustainability and the children not only have to interact with the program but also each other in order to keep up the simulation. They use the Kinect tracking device quite a lot in their projects and hack it different ways to do what they want, like make giant animated and interactive shadow hand puppets.
Using the Kinect to do arm tracking for the Puppet Parade
Puppet Parade
Puppet Parade
In this lecture they go through some of their recent projects and talk about the entire design process; research, to prototyping to implementation. they talk about the importance of testing projects at different levels of completion and how testing to scale is so important. They stress the importance of ensuring that the audience is well defined and that it makes sense with that in mind. In order to present and document their projects they use a lot of video, screen capture and photography. They also save all of the tests that they do throughout the process. In the lecture they show a lot of these test and it is so interesting to see the project come together from the early stages.
Jake Barton is the creator/founder of Local Projects which is an experience design company that has won multiple awards for museums and public spaces. The work he does focuses on storytelling and engaging audiences through emotions. He is well known for the algorithm 9/11 victims by affinity instead of alphabetically. He also created the Cooper Hewitt interactive museum (which I visited a couple times in the past couple years and always love) which allows visitors to have experiences where they can save different things throughout the museum that you want to view later and you can also do things such as create your own “art” pieces on the interactive tables on each floor of the museum. Jake Barton is not a new name to me, in fact we learned quite a bit about his work in my design course “Environments”, which focuses on the hybrid of physical and digital spaces. Through this course we learned about a lot of the ideas that Barton hopes to include in his work- from creating a narrative in your designs, to finding ways to balance digital and physical, and also focusing on the user and how they fit into the space.
A couple of things Barton mentioned in his talk were different projects he has created, which I listed two below.
-Urbanology Project: You get to chose different tokens (affordability, transportation, livability, sustainability, & wealth); take your place and argue your convictions-this models how cities actually work. Effective way to teach people about cities themselves with technology that is modeling scenarios and creates a data set that can be compared with other datasets and cities. This helps to connect people with the future of cities.
– For the Cleveland Museum of Art: A place with amazing history and architecture, they wanted a new visitor experience. A smart table was the first idea to give an access of information, but Barton wanted to actually make the art more relevant and meaningful. Pulled all interfaces into the center of the gallery and worked with slogans/guiding principles and looked to these principles the curator was trying to explain and create things like representation into experiences. Question of “What does a lion look like? then can chose your definition and see how other visitors voted – crowdsourcing and getting visitors to think about perception- you can experience and interpret with other visitors.
Through his talk, I realized he truly tries to connect with his audience by bringing his work in the form of telling a story or how he solved a problem. But, it is not in a analytical or robotic way, instead, he brings emotions and human experience to the table so that his audience can connect with the work he’s done.
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