Month: September 2020

In this project, Daniel Rozin and his team members decided to create ‘mirrors’ that requires the idea of participation of interaction where the viewer becomes a part of the project/artwork. Audiences can understand the interface that exists between them and the piece. People see themselves reflected from uncommon materials like wooden tiles, trash, fans, etc. When he first created the wooden mirror, it took him a year to actually build it. He had to cut out all the tiles and get the motors to learn how to control them(all of the electronics, mechanics, and the fabrication was needed).

I found this project very interesting because they built and programmed to reflect the viewer’s form(which is the idea of a mirror but a different way of the showing). Daniel Rozin had to prepare to create a complex piece that required controlling cameras and moving close to a thousand motors. I believe that Daniel Rozin has come up with this project because he perceived the world and themselves differently. When people thought about the wheels and the radio as great inventions of mankind, he thought about a simple mirror. Daniel Rozin talks about this project that shows the light when a person stands in front of it. He thinks that “it takes more than the audience’s image but maybe it’s capturing something about our soul and displaying back to us.”

Looking Outwards Text – 01
Iris Yip / 15-104 D

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A project focusing on computational art that really inspires me is Angela He’s ‘A Coding Project a day for 20 days’. It is a series of small coding projects (web-based) done over the course of a few weeks ranging from simple mechanisms like sliders to loading screens to interactive mini-games.

The premise of the project was to help her develop skills that she could use for her future, larger-scale projects like developing webpages and/or games. I thought breaking down the daunting task of learning to code into smaller, more feasible tasks was a great way to get into coding and overcome its admittedly daunting nature for beginners. I was really fascinated by her easy-to-follow documentation of her journey, and was inspired to take this class and learn coding for myself because of how she broke it down into simpler steps and incorporated illustration and visual elements, which really intrigued and excited me. I found that the coding brought an additional layer of interaction to her visual works and opened up a lot of possibilities that don’t necessarily exist in traditional types of 2D art like illustration. The balance between code and art really appealed to me as a designer, and I really admire the casual nature of the project and how she let herself learn by doing and taking inspiration from others without copying.

She explored a lot of different softwares for coding, as well as different online resources including GitHub and even going into Chrome Developer to see for herself the kind of code a webpage might use.

On the project page, she goes into a lot of detail about what inspires her, including projects hosted on websites like CodePen, and Awwwards. For visuals, she also looked at websites like Behance and dribbble. She is relatively well known for her illustrations and her visual novels (completed for Ludum Dare, a game jam competition.)

REFERENCE:
Project Link
Author: Angela He, also known as ‘zephybite’

One interactive art piece I admire comes from teamLab Planets TOKYO. It’s a piece called “The Infinite Crystal Universe” and it uses hanging strips of LEDs in a presumably reflective space that simulates an infinite environment. It utilizes pointillism to create visuals for the user. Due to this being a piece put into the museum by its owners, one can assume that a large number of people worked on it. As for the time it took, the project must have lasted for months if not years. The piece utilizes its own app to “throw” elements into the LED galaxy, so custom software was created that took information from the phone such as the direction the user is facing. Although I am not sure if the creators were inspired by any specific past works, the piece is entirely space-themed and the promotional video is occasionally reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s stargate scene, with lights flying by the viewer at incredible speeds. The piece is also similar to a large-scale version of the mirrors that use LEDs to create the illusion of an infinite hole. I think that this piece can lead to more art that allows viewers to interact with it in multiple ways, from physical steps to digital apps. I do not believe that the piece itself is so revolutionary that a slew of new space-themed 3D artworks will be created, but I do believe that this piece is incredibly interesting in its own right. I would love to see more interactive art pieces that make use of perspective and 3D space to create seemingly endless environments. Personally, I have always been interested in space and I would love to create something like this myself, had I the time or the budget to do so.

Iris Van Herpen’s Computational Couture

As a foremost, I admire the aesthetic beauty and its gracefulness of the designs themselves – along with the serenity and eeriness her lines, especially this one, brings out in the show. I have always been interested in fashion and as an architecture major, the two seem to be a great successful collaboration done by Iris Van Herpen.

There were numerous people involved, including the designer herself, cloth makers, computational designers, music artists etc. I assume each piece takes weeks or months to come up with and finish.

I believe this project consists of many different softwares including revit, grasshopper, rhino, javascript, etc. From my research, the designer seems to have created the project using her own creativity and influences from her personal experiences in life.

The designer, mentions, is influenced by little things in life such as umbrella hooks, hair pins, etc.

Here is where you would enter your blog text.

Pixar is where I would work if I didn’t work at CMU.

Espen Kluge , “Alternatives”

During my deep dive into tech artists, I came across a portrait series by Espen Kluge titled, “Alternatives”. The creation process included compiling multiple photographs and reworking them with creative code to arrive at an abstracted portrait. Each portrait uses soft colors which portrays a gentle color scheme to a harsh compilation of lines and geometric shapes. His portraits feel architectural, but are toned down by their muted colors. It’s interesting to note that he experimented with different facial expressions per portrait to arrive at an abstracted face. In an interview, he states,” evolution has trained us to read the nuance of human facial expression with a higher degree of sensitivity than any other visual input.” his focus on the subtle expressions are covered by the multiple generated vectors on his portraits, but still evoke the creases and lines of a facial expression. He used processing and JavaScript to create his colorful portraiture series and explained that the code loops through all the pixels at semi random, and generates lines between the pixels to create the portraiture.

One computational project that I found inspirational was “datum” by Norimichi Hirakawa. This project was an audiovisual installation built through pixels. This project was part of Hirakawa’s residency program at the Kavli IMPU, where he experimented with the boundary between the human’s perceptible and imperceptible beauty. The pixels of the footage is arranged in a 6-dimensional space. Using pictures taken by the artist himself, he turns them into a mathematical analysis of pixels that warps curve, gradiation, motion, and color. This project shows how technology and computational art can be used to challenge concepts such as beauty and the sublime while also bringing together science and art by representing it through the beauty in the nature of data. I find this project to be inspirational through the visual and emotional impact that the project holds to the viewer, leaving them in strict awe. The binary aspect of art and science in his work blends creativity and coding.

Norimichi Hirakawa: http://counteraktiv.com/