Category: LookingOutwards-01

An interactive project I knew before this course were the Pokemon games, specifically Pokemon Red and Blue, the first two pokemon games. These games were developed under the names PocketMonsters: (Red, Green, and Blue) by Gamefreak, published by Nintendo and specially introduced in Japan in 1996 for the Game Boy. I admire these games because I grew up playing pokemon and was always around cards, toys, and the games themselves. These games are where pokemon started. These first games were made by a team of 10 people, they split up to design and code the game, 4 of which were programers. The games took about 6 years. The creator Tajiri was inspired by the Game boy allowing players to play together via cables, and by Square’s Game Boy game The Final Fantasy Legend. The games were written in Z80 Assembly, the “off-the-shelf” software as it was introduced in the late 1970s. This game led to interactive game play between players, letting them collect, travel, and battle with each other. The future of these games includes vr, 3D games, and more interaction with the real world. These games were developed by GameFreak, designed by Satoshi Tajiri, and composed by Junichi Masuda.

source of information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Blue

My Inspiration: “Ghost Pole Propagator II”

This project is a digital interactive installation in Houston, for the Day for Night Festival. It projects stick figure visuals onto a large screen that followed human movement. It was mainly created by one person, but the project credited resources and assistance to 6-8 people.

An image processing technique called “skeletonization” was used to generate the stick figures from the human figure. This algorithm is similar to the one used in OCR (optical character recognition), except adjusted for human silhouettes. The art was developed in openFrameworks, which is a free C++ programming toolkit. Laser control and laser path related add-ons were also used. This art was inspired by Ghost Pole Propogator I that was created in 2007, which projected extremely abstract stick figures of observers.

Potential opportunities and futures of this artwork could be projecting more figures of different forms. This could include animals, birds, moving objects, and more.

As someone who had not watched Disney or Pixar movies during my childhood, I was immediately immersed by the Toy Story Series when my friends forced me to watch them in college. By watching Toy Story 1,2,3 back-to-back, I could see an enormous change in the quality and development of the characters and rendering.
Production companies Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures have produced multiple successful films and animations. During this time, production quality and rendering have improved exponentially. Technological improvements in lighting and motions effects have allowed the resulting films to produce more realistic people, toys, and overall graphics.

Pixar created a new software called RenderMan to handle more footage while also working on smoothness for more fully formed characters. Toys were conceived to be more realistic toys in shots using toy hands and feet.

A program called Simulation was also developed to develop fur graphics in Monsters Inc.. Each distinct particle of fur was simulated with acceleration, velocity, and force, using physics for design. This same technological foundation was then used in Monsters University, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, etc.

Watching Toy Story 4 when it came out this summer with my friend, I was very impressed by the development in graphics and rendering, The refining of the materiality of fur for Duck and Bunny, doll effect of Bo Peep, as well as the realness of Forky as a plastic fork upgraded Toy Story 4 into a masterpiece in animation.

The future of animation only progresses with the advances made in both technology and creative design. The animation Onward has become a success in graphic works and computational design. Pixar and Disney’s future has a long way ahead as long as new software development improves production quality.

Two people were involved in making an app called Looom, which is available on iPads. Eran Hilleli worked as an animator-designer and is currently an animation director at Hornet, Art director at Klang games and lecturer at Bezalel academy of art and design. Finn Ericson took the role of an engineer. They worked remotely and took them about a year and a half to complete this project. They were first inspired by the animation technique “weaving loops” and realized how the software stopped the flow of the animators. Then they looked at classic toys like the View-Master discs, Etch A Sketch knobs or Game Boy, which exemplified creative solutions to technological constraints. I wasn’t able to find what exact software or scripts were used to make this app. However, I did find a picture of Eran Hillenli using a software to develop Looom (here).  I really admire this work since I was always interested in animating but was left frustrated working with Adobe CC softwares. Although this program isn’t for professional use, this app found a way for people at any age to animate easily. This digital flip book will allow people to approach animating without any prior experiences and release their creativity.

A programming project that I admire is a project done by my friend, who is a junior in Carnegie Mellon University. He created a system that is based on the concept of revisioning the role of conversational agents in discussion-based contexts. Using the javascript library p5.js and its speech recognition library, he created a live prototype that translates the word a user says on screen. I think it was really cool to see how coding can involve both visual and auditory elements. It was admirable to see how coding could be turned into something personal and intimate like processing the words that come out of someone’s mouth. It took him 7 weeks and the process mostly consisted of experimenting and shifting around the code to match his end goal. He was very inspired by designer and engineer Maurice Conti, who encourages rebuilding the passive technology that are present today.

I’m inspired by the interactive map initiative, Dashilar, created by Hara Design (Kenya Hara, Hiroaki Kawanami, Hiroyuki Saito, Sohei Takimi.) Link to project brief: https://www.ndc.co.jp/hara/en/works/2014/08/dashilar.html.

I’m impressed by the practicality of this product, as it aims to educate and (digitally and physically) guide people about and through the city of Dashilar, the elegant aesthetics, respect to Chinese culture, and also its versatility and lasting potential in the form of physical products like signage and wrapping paper. Coming from a fine arts background, I appreciate traditionally “beautiful” things– however, learning design has made me start to think about how aesthetics can be translated into means of problem-solving, which this interactive map does beautifully and with consideration. I’m not familiar with the process of the creation of this project, but I’m positive complex code was used to create the streamlined zooming in/out function of the map, changing perspectives of the buildings depending on how you pan on the map, etc. The project’s creators may have been inspired by Google Maps for its functionality and traditional Asian maps for its visual language. This project points to even more considerate and useful interactive maps, especially for complex and historical landmarks around the world– aiming to educate visitors thoroughly about the historical significance of different places while effectively guiding them during their trip.

Week 1, 9/5/2020

The project I want to talk about this week is called “the substitute”, by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. The piece is a 2-minute video showing a fully rendered northern white rhino that steadily increases in quality and vividness, from a blocky mass to a full-formed animal, until the video suddenly cuts short. The rendering is not of any particular animal, but a composite made from footage of northern white rhino herds captured by Czech scientist Richard Policht.

Animation company The Mill created the animation and Dr. Andrea Banino from DeepMind, an AI development company, provided data for the rhino’s movement. The Cooper-Hewitt museum commissioned the project and provided the funding.

I really admire how the project attempts to present a stark contradiction to viewers. The last male northern white rhino died in 2018, rendering the breed virtually extinct despite a few surviving females. Despite this disaster, scientists are attempting to revive the species using banked genetic material that might be planted in surrogate mothers artificially. This project dares to ask if there’s any difference between this clearly ‘fake’ rhino and one that had been created in a lab. It also challenges our preconceptions around AI: why are we so eager to create new intelligence (i.e. AI) when we have been such bad shepherds of non-human intelligence on this earth? It asks whether this ‘fake’ rhino, rendered in a white box utterly devoid of context, is so different from the life we are making in our biotech labs or computer labs.

As far as I know, these companies used their own proprietary software for the project. The artist may have been inspired by other uses of AI that relate to art, such as AI that make songs (sweaty machines’ “Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears”, an AI-written eurovision entry, comes to mind), create sports (such as Speedgate), or write scripts (like comedy AI botnik). I hope that other artists see this project and are inspired to create new things that utilize AI to ask important questions about life & the responsibilities we have as the caretakers of our environment.

– Robert