Category: LookingOutwards-08

Sara Hendren is an artist, researcher, and professor based in Cambridge, Massachussetsin Colledge of Engineering. She is a self-described “humanist in tech” who focuses on the human body and the politics of disability.
My interest in Hendren was spark because of my current studies in design; the major requires us to take design theory/research classes that include design for equity and inclusivity. Design for disability is something that has been discussed in passing and seeing Hendren’s work focused on research and design for disability is a wonderful way to see disability-focused work outside of the classroom.
I particularly enjoyed seeing her project on dancing wheelchair ramps, a project constructing a series of ramps into a stage for Alice Sheppard to dance on. The project was worked on in collaboration with a physics class to study and work with the ramp’s affordances for choreography.
Sara’s presentation takes us not from an idea to a finished product, but the opposite, showing us the final project, and slowly working backward to its inception.

For this week’s topic, I watched the talk of Christina “Phazero”Curlee about “ from Video Art to Video Game”.
Christina is from a self-taught traditional fine art background and put her interest in art, interaction, game design and programming. She blends different principles of game and art in order to find her own vision in game style. Her work heavily demonstrates symbol and non-verbal experiences.
The purposes of her art mainly focus on communicating with people and facilitate interactions. During her art journey, she tried many things, like painting, installation art, photography, video art and video games.
The way I admire her is about her way to treat her anxiety, depression and stress. She uses video games as a way to communicate with others and she describes game design as setting a room and welcoming people to start a conversation.
She uses video game or video game media to discuss some serious topics which are hard to describe in some other situations, like multisensory interactive experiences, space and human bilateral influences, etc.
Even during the recent day, the game industry, especially the indie game area, has witnessed huge change and improvement. A lot of people still tend to think video games are undesirable things for humans, especially for kids. I would like to see more artists to use video game as a tool to prompt active communication and use the trait of video games in a positive way to inspire other people.

Eyeo 2019 – Christina Phazero Curlee from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

I watched the video of Lauren McCarthy, a Los Angeles artist who explores ideas around social relationships, surveillance, and the rapidly changing technological field that is our modern world. She has created numerous art pieces looking into the intricate and ever developing relationship between social and technological systems.

What interested me most about Lauren’s talk is her exploration into the constant surveillance that modern citizens live with. Through her projects, she begins to ask questions about how changing technology has affected what it means to be “followed” or “watched.” My favorite work that she talked about was called “Follower,” and it was a conceptual “social media” app in which the user signs up to be silently and invisibly followed for a full day. This piece explores the relationship we have with technology by using an analogy with romantic human relationships, bringing to the surface the root of the conflicting comfort and discomfort we feel as we play the role of an actor in an everyday performance.

Sara Schnadt is an artist who also works in multiple other fields as UX designer and software systems architect. She currently is a designer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is working for the software human interface design and system architecture for machine learning for the Europa Clipper mission. I was intrigued by her work primarily because of the scope, scale, and ambitiousness of the projects she is involved in. Sara Schnadt talks about how her work NASA inspires her installation works and vice versa because she finds many similarities between the creative processes of both practices. Schnadt emphasizes that although space projects involve a lot of technological skills and are more engineer based, when the projects are thought of as also creative projects and design problems, it opens up more possibilities and complexities.