Blacki Migliozzi is a programmer, science communicator, experimental biotechnologist, and data visualizer for the New York Times, based out of New York City. They have worked on small-scale biotechnologies involving fungus, tardigrades, and CRISPR. More recently, after joining Bloomberg graphics & the New York Times, he has worked to communicate information – especially about climate change – to the public. Working with data across centuries and from all over the world he has created visualizations that clearly mark the precipice we have launched ourselves towards.
His Eyeo 2018 talk
His visualizations utilize clean, graphic lines and takes advantage of our natural tendency to notice outliers to bring the most alarming data to the forefront. Rather than being lost in a sea of data, his visualizations make the conclusion unquestionable.
Out of all the speakers throughout the Eyeo Series, I was most drawn to Jane Friedhoff and her whimsical works. Jane is an interdisciplinary creative technologist, artist, and independent game developer. Her goal is to “blur the lines between as many media and genres as she can,” which really spoke to my experiences within the School of Art here at CMU. Friedhoff was previously at The New York Times’ Research & Development Lab and The Office for Creative Research, a hybrid research group that studied the intersection of culture, education, and technology to make tools and experiences that humanized data. As of 2018, she’s currenting working with the Google Creative Lab.
I was really drawn to Friedhoff’s work because of how they enable users to see beauty and have fun within every day small spaces, like her AR experiment Hidden World. Her talk about creating games about power fantasies and her deconstruction of that term in relation to game design, worldbuilding, and stepping away from current societal power dynamics was really engaging and added a level of depth and sophistication to her works that I want to emulate when discussing my own works in the future.
Mike Tucker is an interactive designer and developer currently living in London. For the past five years he has worked at Magic Leap, based in Florida, with the official title of Interactive Director, Designer, and Developer. He is somewhat of a quirky guy, who likes to refer to himself in the third person. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphics Design. Mike is working on developing the future of Spatial Computing and hopes the next wave of spatial designers will question expectations of the media, and have the opportunity in designing a mixed reality future.
While initially his art pieces attracted me, learning about how he works inspired me. His search for more reminds me of an entrepreneur I interviewed last year. He has this entrepreneurial spirit, which I admire as I attempt to minor in innovation and entrepreneurship and am very driven to the entrepreneurial world. He started out drawing, but he wanted something more. He was on a quest to find the perfect medium for creating. He went through various platforms, such as websites, mobile apps, etc. until he stumbled upon virtual reality. My favorite piece from him to date is Tónandi, where music and virtual reality interact. With the Icelandic artist Sigur Rod and Magic Leap, he created a work of art where tone spirits (the translation of Tónandi) inhibit your space and together form a music soundscape. You the “player” interact with the virtual creatures to evolve the soundscape. I love this because as I have mentioned in previous looking outwards posts, I am very interested in seeing how the music industry can change with computer interaction.
I will close with highlighting his presentation. I appreciated him starting from the beginning, after giving a general overview, and breaking down what he was going to talk about in his presentation. There were also many visuals, static and moving, to help explain and visualize his work. While he stumbled over his words a bit, I was definitely more engaged by seeing all the images and videos. Even with his being awkward on stage he was very clear and articulate by outlining his talk and providing engaging material to keep the audience from nodding off. I would definitely take these techniques into consideration for future presentations.
This art project of Onuoha, is called The Library of Missing Datasets
Mimi Onuoha is a creative practiioner, whose body of work illustrates her interest and expertise in seeing human patterns in data. She is a part of the Data Humanism movement in Creative Art, that artists Giorgia Lupi and Stephanie Posavec have started. She is interested in looking at how the the way information and data is modelled can reveal patterns about more than the data itself.
The thread that runs in her work is the messiness and unstructured nature of insights that run through standardised methods of measuring and collecting data for statistical methods. For example, in one of her projects she talks about, she tailed a few friends by their locations and was able to see which 2 of the 3 friends were closer to each other. Months after she was tracing patterns of their movement, the two she predicted to be close, moved in together.
Mimi Onuoha is an alum of the renowned NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, that prides itself as being “an art school for engineers” and an “engineering school for artists”. This illustrates her creative practice very well, because her work is about unravelling the disorganization among data that seems crisp and clean, with a creative muscle for patterns.
Creative Interrogations:
Mimi calls her work during ITP as ‘creative interrogations’. These were experiments that combined research, coding, writing to dive into ideas of how data was forming the world and ideas of the individual at the same time.
Personal Stories → Creative Interrogation → Building of a Database or Dataset
The Point of Collection
She says that if as a professional, you have not looked at how data is collected, you have not entirely understood the data itself. Through that statement, she illustrates how data collection and personal lives are entangled. And it gets harder to question the methods of data collection as the data points become more and more.
In this way, her artwork is not only data visualisation, but it is also a commentary on bringing to our notice the biases, ease and ethical questions of data collection
For this looking outward, I watched a talk by Manuel Lima called “Why Circles” from his 2017 talk at the Eyeo Festival. Lima is a designer who operates in the margins between data and art. He has written three books, the most recent of which is his book on circles, and the subject of the lecture. All of his books are studies of network mapping, first of general mapping, then of network trees, and then of circles representing networks. I am very interested in networks and how they operate, and I think that people like Lima who are not only interested in the vast array of network types, but also the history of these networks can create meaningful parallels between current and previous human ideas and connections. In the book, he is able to generalize all circular networks and diagrams into 21 different types, and then abstract the 21 types into 7 categories. This level of abstraction among the variety of diagrams shown is really helpful for understanding how each diagram is meant to be read. When presenting, Lima began by giving a history of the topic, from ancient to present, while describing how these diagrams were categorized in parallel. He then moved on to interesting juxtapositions between many of the examples that he collected in his research. I think that these juxtapositions were very powerful for better understanding the similarities between previous and current ideas of networking, as well as the similarities between visualization of different professions and areas of study. From this, I think I am first more willing to use circles when presenting my ideas in the future, but also much more open to looking towards different fields and areas of study when thinking about how I visually represent my projects and ideas.
Adam graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU in 2010. He also studied engineering and photojournalism at PSU. Currently, he is based in Berlin as a digital fellow at Weizenbaum Institut and a research fellow at Karlsruhe HfG. Adam’s work revolves around themes of privacy and surveillance technologies.
In Adam’s Eyeo talk, he walked us through two large projects: frame.io and megapixels.cc. In this talk, Adam broke down what facial recognition and facial detection mean and the deeply rooted flaws in these concepts. He repeatedly asked the question, “What is a face?” When breaking down this question, Adam said, “The face of today is not the face of tomorrow because the very word “face” is abstract, unstable, and inflationary.” There is no universal definition of what particular aspects define a “face” and because of this, facial detection technologies are vastly different and vastly inaccurate. Biometrics are not absolute yet technology is, so this creates a strong mismatch when it comes to these technologies.
Through walking us through megapixels, Adam shared different datasets of facial images that are being used by defense institutions for research. One dataset was of students at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs in which they specifically documented that they did not request permission nor inform students of their involvement in this project. Learning about these datasets made me increasingly more weary of my privacy than I already was.
A big part of Adam’s work is bringing transparency to the ways people are being surveilled and breaking down the technologies for how it’s done. This is something I strongly admire and appreciate. A presenting tactic that Adam used that I found quite successful was presenting all the facts in a strictly formal way and then letting the viewers come to their own conclusion about what it all meant. I think we all came to the same conclusion, but by doing this instead of him explaining what his conclusion was, the conclusion felt genuine and accurate. I also appreciated how he asked questions throughout the presentation. This forced me to stop and think and really be involved in what he was talking about.
I was interested in this lecture because of the rise in talk about facial recognition and spoofing these technologies related to the BLM protests that have been ongoing for the past several months. I had actually heard about Adam’s project CV Dazzle on twitter a few months ago to help protestors avoid being recognized and eventually going to jail. This project was about adding specific shapes and elements to your face to spoof the technology.
I’m curious to see how these technologies evolve and how we can increase people’s privacy. I understand the desire for technological advancement, but at what cost.
Ariel Waldman is a graphic designer who has focused her efforts on space exploration and space in general. She has created Science Hack Day, as well as her own website detailing how people can get involved with space exploration without needing to go into a STEM field directly related to space. Personally, I admire her work on Science Hack Day, as it’s a way for those not in STEM fields to get involved with things that they are interested in without the need for specializing in the related fields. Ariel uses humor to her benefit during presentations. She will make jokes to keep audience engagement high while staying relevant to her topic. Humor is a common strategy to increase engagement, but Ariel’s use of humor is skillful in her incorporation of it into her presentation.
Gilberto Esparza, who graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico and spent one year on exchange at the Faculty of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia, Spain, is an globally renowned artist and a member of the National System of Art Creators in Mexico, having participated in solo and group exhibitions in many different countries, including Mexico, the US, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, South Korea, etc.
“Parsley Looking For the Sun”, Gilberto Esparza, 2007
Esparza’s work focuses on electronics and robots to investigate the impact of new technologies on everyday life, social relationships, urban spaces and the environment, primarily employing recycling consumer technology and biotechnology experiments.
“Urban Cancer”, Gilberto Esparza, 2016 The deformation of a white line on the pavement of a street caused by the exaggerated increase in its length.
At Eyeo 2018, Esparza explains his process for learning more about environmental problems in Mexico and how as his technological beings developed, he developed not only in working with them but also in working in collaboration with other people.
By visually showing the progress of development through each stage, how he directly placed his creations in locations around the city where industrial technological garbage can be found, and the obstacles that he faced with particular methods, Esparza effectively portrays the purpose of his work, as well as his goal for society.
Lauren McCarthy is an American artist and computer programmer whose work focuses on the impact of surveillance, automation, and network culture on social relationships. She is known for her performance, artificial intelligence, and programming/computer-based interaction work. McCarthy created p5.js, the version of JavaScript that we work with in class. She graduated from MIT, where she studied computer science and art and design.
McCarthy asks deep, thought-provoking questions in her work, such as “What is the purpose of art?” and “What is the relationship between attention and surveillance?” One of her projects that I find most intriguing, which I learned about in her Eyeo talk, was “Follower.” “Follower” is a service that provides a real-life follower for a day; you sign up, get an app, and wait to be matched, not knowing what will happen. Your assigned follower tracks you for a day (out of sight, but within your awareness) and takes a photo of you. While it seems very intrusive and scary to have a real-life follower, I think that this project raises some interesting questions and points to the complexities of human connection and desires.
Below I have included McCarthy’s Eyeo talk from 2019 as well as a video/images of her project “Follower.”
Jennifer Daniel has extensive work experience. She was a graphic designer for many well-known newspapers like the New York Times. Presently, she works as the creative director for Google and Android. She is also a chairperson for Unicode. She lives in San Francisco and has a formal background in graphic design. She described her profession as converting speech and emotions to visual representations. She believes that communication must evolve over time which is where emojis and animations are headed. I was most interested in talking about how different forms of communication relate to others. For example, her discussion of how texting is more similar to speaking than it is to writing. I was also interested in seeing how humans and computers see information differently so for customizable stickers you must have computers use neural networks to generalize aspects of people, then an artist must create a visualization that is most accepting of differences. She used a lot of humor and visualizations in her talk. Humor always makes talks more entertaining, but I would most like to incorporate her visual display techniques into my own presentations.
Jennifer Daniel’s Talk on Emojis An Unrelated Piece, but Interesting
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