Tag: LookingOutwards-01

Janet Peng – Looking Outwards – 01

Imagination Playground in Play Work Build. Children stand in front of a projection and get their silhouettes turned into a block figure. When they move, the blocks tower explodes/topples.

Play Work Build is an exhibit in The National Building Museum in Washington, DC. The exhibit is about the history of construction and block-based toys. It includes the Imagination Playground; a very unique way children can interact with (and destroy) building blocks (by standing and moving in front of a screen). I find this project inspiring because it revolutionizes the idea of playing this block which is a very old-school and non-techy-y activity. This project reinvents the toy and makes something that could be seen as boring seem interesting. I believe this project required the team at the rockwellgroup to write custom scripts that allows the projection to randomly generate block forms depending on the size and position of the person interacting with the projection. The creators were probably inspired by other interactive exhibit designs that use motion tracking to turn gestures into visual experiences.

Looking Outwards 01

One piece of interactive computational art I interacted with that helped shape my interest in design more than anything else is the browser game by developer Orteil called Nested. When loaded, the program generates a universe via the creation of hundreds of folders titled “galaxy”. Clicking into one of these folders reveals more folders containing descriptions of solar systems, planets, and going further shows the life and geological forms on each one. When I was twelve, I spent recesses with some of my friends looking into the procedurally generated descriptions and translating them onto paper, drawing detailed creatures from just knowing their individual body parts. This type of computer generated art, with the extra steps of our own transitions of text to images. When I read about this class, I was reminded of Nested, and how it inspired me to create art with nothing more than randomly generated text. With the knowledge from this class, I want to take that idea further and learn to wed coding and art.

Shariq M. Shah – Looking Outwards – 01

Holger Lippmann is a generative artist working at the intersection of art and technology whose work, through processing, seems to challenge perceptible reality. Initially training as a traditional visual artist, Lippmann later moved to Berlin in the middle of the electronic music boom. These interests in the visual arts and in electronic music merged into explorations in digital and computational art. Key works from his ‘noise warp’ collection use collectives of elongated shapes to define highly organic and warped field conditions. Lippmann draws inspiration from the flowing brushstrokes of Van Gogh, even drawing from the color palettes of his various paintings. A central concept of Lippmann’s works seems to be the aggregation of a relatively simple shape or element, i.e a line or rectangle, into varying densities and arrangements where they, as a collective, articulate complex and nuanced field conditions. As an architecture student, these visualizations provoke thought and introspection as spatial possibilities can be speculated. Explorations upon the responsiveness of such systems could have aesthetic as well as practical implications.

Holger Lippmann Website:

http://www.lumicon.de/wp