Month: September 2020

Antonin Fourneau, (2012), The Water Light Graffiti Wall

The project is an interactive public art work that earned huge success in Paris in 2012. The art work consists of a giant LED light wall which responds specifically to water. The public interact with the wall with brushes, water-guns, and hands (anything damp will do), creating their own paintings on the light wall. I like that the piece is responsive, dynamic, imaginative, and visually pleasing.

It is a successful art work that provides the public with great fun and possibilities for individual and collective creativity. The project was displayed in many other parts of the world in later years. The artist Antonin Fourneau designed and created this piece. When the water gets in touch with the light wall, electric bridge is created so the light bulbs under the surface of the wall will be powered up. I think the project may have employed machine learning. The designer uses commands to control the lightbulbs. The project is not only entertaining, but also educational in the future as it allows one to leave a message that can be displayed to the society without damaging any public facilities.

The artist of this David Bowie inspired piece is Callum McDougall. The software he decided to use was Jupyter Notebooks because of its flexibility and
his experience running the original algorithm on the software. McDougall used and improved the algorithm to render the image and also to create the lines seen in his art.
He mentions that he ran the algorithm for each color separately, with images he designed with GIMP. This project and the algorithm McDougall utilizes supports an art
theme where lines are used to create specific images and effects that sort of jump off a screen the same way that we transform 2d shapes into 3 dimensional objects. For art
it adds to the skill and methods of manipulation of geometric shapes for the eyes to see what the artists want them to see. He credits pieces from Petros Vrellis who also uses
lines to create images.

Before this course, one project that I found inspirational and left a significant impression on me was a 15-112 term project called “TRIPPLE: Live Audio Visualizer” for the semester of Spring 2018 by Minji Kim. Using previous knowledge and programming skills that she acquired through her course, Minji used Python to create such a project. With visualization through music speakers and general interactive design becoming increasingly popular, Minji’s project was inspired by her love of music as well as other aesthetic visualizers.

I believe that while this project was concluded at the elementary stages, continuation and further development will set the basics of audio visualizers and pave the way for improved and upgraded live visual presenters for all different types of fields.

I am impressed by the Connecting Light project, which challenges the conventional feature of borders and connections using landscape art installation. It uses hundreds of six-foot-in-diameter balloons and LEDs to illuminate the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site in Britain. It transmits messages from the audience by changing the color of those large balloons, which can be seen from miles away. I admire it because it extends for miles so it creates an extensive visual impact on viewers. Also, it can interact with the audience in an extremely beautiful way. It was created by a collective team called YESYESNO, which includes Marcela Godoy, Zach Lieberman, and Molmol Kuo. I was lucky to meet Ms. Godoy in person at NYU Shanghai where she talked a little bit more about this project. According to her, she joined the project when she used to work for a company that was invited by the UK Olympics committee to create a series of art installations to promote the idea of elaboration and connection. It took the team about a year to complete, and Ms. Godoy was mainly in charge of the physical parts of the project, like designing and fabricating customized 3D printed pieces, making drawings, and installing large balloons. To my knowledge, Ms. Godoy used Sketch for 3D printing.

Reference:
Godoy. M., Liberman Z., Kuo, M. (2012). Connecting Light. http://connectinglight.info

One artwork which immediately springs to mind when confronted with the term “interactive”, would be Pipilotti Rist’s installation, “Looking Through Pixel Forest.” This installation was shown as part as Rist’s retrospective solo show at the New Museum in 2016, and demonstrates her unique way of creating environments through light and sound. As you walk into the exhibition space, you are met with thousands of hanging LED light strings which gently pulsate soft shades of pink and blue and white. Against the wall, Rist’s immersive video works are projected, and the whole space is filled with the serenity of her sound pieces. For this installation, Rist collaborated with a lighting designer to develop custom scripts which ensure the LED lights would pulsate and change with the videos in a cohesive way.
What I admire about this work, is how Rist is able to create a sweeping environment by skillfully synthesizing visual, electronic, and sound elements. To work as a multimedia artist is challenging in and of itself, but to bring these elements together in a way which creates a new and one-off moment is impressive and will be a point of reference for light, video, and sound artists moving forward.

Pipilotti Rist is most known for her video works, many of which are inspired by the single-channel video artists of the 1980s, such as Nam June Paik. She was also a member of the performance art group, Les Reines prochaines. Perhaps Rist’s most famous video artwork, “Ever is Over All” shows a woman striding down a street and smashing in car windows with a flower-shaped hammer. This iconic video served as the inspiration for Beyonce’s “Hold Up” music video from her Lemonade album and a parody from the TV show, “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

Bennett Goeke

One of the projects I found admiring was from a recent show I started watching called “The Morning Show” on AppleTV. Particularly the intro animation that is mainly just many scenes of simple shapes interacting with each other and colliding into different scenes. The intro uses a mix of 3D and 2D graphics which interested me the most. The reason it’s so appealing to me is that I want to learn how to code things to interact and move with the laws of physics. The intro for the show was created by a design team called “Elastic” in which they organized the development by major themes. The intro also tells a deep story about the show depicted in very simple-form shapes. I think this project needed the development of custom software as the way the object move is so complex as they interact with each other so much. I think they might’ve been inspired by some of the projects of Piet Mondrian because they both use simple mediums within their work while also underlies a complex context.

“The Morning Show” – Design Team: Elastic

The Sleep Art Project
By ACNE production and BETC Paris for Ibis Hotels.

This project uses a robot’s 80 sensors to detect a person’s temperature, movements, and sounds while they sleep. This data is then translated into having the robotic arm paint different types of brush strokes and colors.The result is a unique painting created from a person’s sleep pattern.

This project took a team of 100 people to complete it in six months, and uses 50,000 lines of code to run.

This form of art experiments with the translation of a series of motions and conditions into a traditional art form; painting. The artists must have been inspired by the rise of artificial intelligence and the notion of how even our unconscious states can show creativity by using code to take the input (data from sleep) and output a painting.

I find this project inspiring because it translates more abstracted phenomena like temperature into distinct paint strokes and colors. It uses the unconscious human experience to create abstract art through computation. The project points to the future of artificial intelligence and using quantitative data in creative practices. The project can be applicable based on the simple idea of input and output. For example, translating a person’s walking pattern into a sculpture, etc. Overall, this interactive art project explores the collection of data and the execution of a painting in a way that is inspiring for future projects that follow a similar method of programming. Additionally, the programming of a robotic arm to do tasks such as painting invents a new tool for artists to create through a computer controlled arm that reflects a human hand.

An interactive project that I had known about was called Online Town (URL: https://theonline.town). Online Town essentially was a type of video chatting, except that it required each user to “walk around town.” Each user would have an icon/character, and you would use your keyboard to move it around the town shown on the screen. With a specific chat room link, you could invite friends, and they too would also have to move around. The program used your camera and microphone, and in order to hear what your friends were saying in the chat, you would have to use your keyboard to get your character near their character. This was a very cool concept to me, and my friends and I often used it during quarantine.

The program was created by Cyrus Tabrizi, Phillip Wang, and Kumail Jaffer. It launched in early April of 2020. Though there have been editing and adjustments made throughout the project, the creators claimed to have built the first version of Online Town within a single day. They received some seed funding and used their own money to fund the project. It was not explicitly stated how they had divided the work up, but all three creators are highly skilled in programming and even have a tech collective on their resumes.

Because this project is recent and there is not enough information about it yet from the creators, I do not know whether the project required the development of custom software/scripts or “off-the-shelf” software. The creators might have been inspired by programs like Zoom and Minecraft, as they have combined both video chat features and map exploring features.

I think this project opens up the opportunity of having more engaging and social calls. This would serve as a great alternative to Zoom, especially for social meetings or large business meetings. Without the harsh separation of participants into breakout rooms (like Zoom), Online Town allows for participants to ease into groups or even opt out of them, as well as exploring the map with their avatar. I think this would help point to a future where video calls can motivate higher engagement levels in more ways than just talking in a group conversation.

Animal Crossing is a Nintendo game that has been running for about 19 years. The nintendo swtich version “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” peaked in popularity throughout quarantine this year as the game is a life simulator game making it the perfect companion for loneliness.
The game was developed by Katsuya Eguchi, a Nintendo developer.
Since its release, the game has always focused on simulating a difficult social environment. When playing you are faced with difficulties of making friends and starting new, you are even faced with debt and home-owning
There has been ten different versions for the game each with more elements than the last.
I really admire how Eguchi pulled ideas from his own past experiences to create the game idea and really pushed the boundaries from there to create a universal game that can be enjoyed by all people of all ages.
I have known of many life simulator games but none as successful as Animal Crossing.
This game is loved by millennials and generation z as it perfectly balances the trials and tribulations of adulting while maintaining its game-like aspect through the animations and small details.
What is amazing about this game is that every character you come across has its own developed personality. I am not sure about the coding behind the game but I can only imagine how much time and effort went in to creating and programming a seperate personality for every character as there is 397 computer characters in the newest version.