LookingOutwards-09

LO 9

This week I am going to look at my good pal Jubbies’ blog post on Chris Harrison’s “Clusterball”. This data visualization uses the connections between different Wikipedia pages through a common denominator to create an almost woven ball of links. I too played many rounds of “Wikiracing” as a kid, so I can easily connect to Jubbies’ outlook on this project. I enjoy seeing the ways in which these structures of interconnections have been made and where these lines are drawn. While taking part in “Wikiracing” I never truly paused to think about what connects various words and articles (as my only care at that time was winning the game). I agree with Jubbies’ statement on how amazing it is to see how every word does its part to add to this organic system. I would be interested to see this directly applied to “wikiracing” and be able to give two wikipedia pages as inputs and see how you could navigate from one page to the other.

https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/ClusterBall

For today’s looking outwards, I’ve selected tian’s LO 4, Sound Art. It was a new approach for me to see how technology can collaborate and create musical interactions with people. As it allows people to interact with musical notes with their bodies, it was interesting, as a person who’s interested in music, to watch a video of creating a musical composition on the spot. Just like tian said, I also think it is such a great project(LINES) that people with no musical experiences can also participate and “bring novelty and inspiration” to the new world of music(using a very engaging method). By exploring this project, I also realized that people can find/learn new forms of musical interactions and expand the exploration of new artistic expressions.

LO 09 – on Looking Outwards

Bone Chair (2006)

Joris Laarman

For this looking outwards post, I took a look at Jubbies’ post on Generative Art regarding Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair. In reading her response to Laarman’s work, I agree with what she said – As a design student myself, I find meaning and great appreciation for beautiful things, but something that embodies both form and function. As stated in her post, Laarman uses algorithms to mimic the natural growth of bones and trees to create a chair that has the most minimal structure to support the human body. I found this very intriguing because this piece represents the patterns of nature through a physical object that we interact with on a daily basis, yet still considering the form and function of the said object. From afar, this piece may seem like a “cool” surface level chair but the process of discovery and learning is required thus appreciating the chair even more.

View original LO here

View portfolio here

Looking Outwards 09: On Looking Outwards

For this week’s Looking Outwards, I looked at Shaun’s (I worked with him in lab) LO for week 7 on Information Visualization. Shaun talked about Stefanie Posavec’s collaboration project with Greg McInerny titled, “(En)tangled Word Bank.” I agree with Shaun that this project is a very cool way to portray evolution, and I think that the six different editions of the project show how Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” One thing I would add is that Posavec is very interested in wearable art/art that can be interacted with and utilized in common settings, so it makes sense that she’s interested in evolution and the study of biological life.

(En)tangled Word Bank
Greg McInerny (British, born 1977) of Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK, est. 1997) Stefanie Posavec (American, born 1981)
2009

LO-09 (on looking outwards)

For this LO, I am looking at Bennett’s entry for the sound art LO-04. I agree with him in the sense that one of the more interesting parts of this project is the sound that is created, a smooth earthy tone that changes mildly or drastically depending on the external environments. However, I don’t quite agree with the amount of creator input that Bennett implies in this LO. The creator passes through the micro-voltage fluctuations into a oscillator that reads the frequency of the waves thus creating the sounds generated, so I personally think that the sounds generated reflect the “true tones” of the plant. Perhaps the creator intended this to be a single item project, I wonder what the tones created from various types of plants could differ from one another.

Bennett’s post: https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2020/2020/09/28/looking-outwards-04-4/

“Plant sounds”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvWPT4VhKTk&ab_channel=TomuTomu

Looking Outwards 09: Eggdog

This looking outward is to honor and spread awareness of Eggdog, a CG character based off of a real Pomeranian that was groomed to look like an egg. Personally I find this 3D-model-turned-meme a very interesting, intriguing, and very relevant to Week 5’s Looking Outwards topic of 3D Computer Graphics. Eggdog’s prevalence on social media shows how 3D modeling, rendering, and animation has become so accessible over just the past decade. Almost anyone can download free 3D modeling software like Blender and learn how to create something as simple, elegant, and beautiful as Eggdog. This point was also made by the student who wrote about Eggdog.

Eggdog represents both today’s widespread availability and accessibility to 3D modeling software, and today’s ease of transferring information through social media. Any individual in the world can create anything, from Eggdogs, to feature films, to hit video games, all by themselves, and share it with the rest of the world. Eggdog, at its very core, represents the creative power of technology in the hands of everyday citizens.

eggdog quarantine pic.twitter.com/g1ulBxPwp1
— zamsire✨ (@zotakufilms) March 25, 2020

Looking Outwards 9

For this looking outwards assignment, I chose to look at Sarah’s LO-7 on data visualization. What really caught my eye about the visualization of color themes in Pixar films is that it was essentially showing non-numerical data about movies that we watched growing up. Although it seems like non-numerical data, Sarah’s description got in detail as to how they extracted the color themes using python. I agree with what Sarah said about each of the color wheels closely resembling a disc that the movies would normally be played on.

Something relevant that came to mind when I saw this project is how nowadays there are branding consultants that look at everything about a brand and design logos, office color schemes, and website color in order to convey a certain story or emotion. Here, we know what the general theme of each movie is and seeing the color wheel is still able to transfer some of those emotions as well.

Looking Outwards 09: on Looking Outwards

I chose to look at yoli’s Week 03 post about computational fabrication used in Iris Van Herpen’s fashion pieces. I love yoli’s commentary about the fashion industry, pointing out how fashion is always pushing the “cutting edge” while also repeating itself in many ways. I find this repetition as a mechanism for forward-thinking to be really profound and perfectly exemplified by Van Herpen’s work. While Van Herpen is pushing the field forward in her forms and novel fabrication methods, she also references traditional fashion with the soft sculpture elements and dress bases of her looks.

Iris Van Herpen’s Sensory Seas collection shown at Cirque d’hiver Bouglione on January 20, 2020.

I find that not only are fashion professionals repeating themselves in their methods and designs, but repetition, as in Van Herpen’s work, has become a central principle to the designs themselves. For instance, in her “Sensory Seas” collection, she references human anatomy systems through repetition of physiological shapes.

Look 4 from Iris Van Herpen’s couture collection, Sensory Seas (2020)

Looking Outwards-09

I looked at Hayoon’s Looking Outwards 07: information Visualization post on Jonathan Harris’ work “We feel fine”. I think the work is very well presented and visually stunning, but I question the artistic decision for how the algorithm attributes emotions to the text strings. I think more nuanced aspects of speech inflection (like sarcasm) and other semantics are lost when converted to text, especially in different contexts. I think Hayoon does a good job of addressing the complexity of the topic and admiring the creators’ sensibilities. I think she could’ve gone more into speculating the algorithmic or functional aspects of the project, but she captures and describes the project and the artistic influences well.

Looking Outwards 07: Information Visualization

“We feel fine” by Jonathan Harris, 2009, c/o Seth Kamvar
http://number27.org/wffbook

LO-09

This post is a response to Xander’s Looking Outwards post on randomness, about the website thispersondoesnotexist.com. This website generates hyper-realistic photographs of people that do not exist. It is powered by AI and GAN (generative adverbial network).

To some degree, I agree with Xander’s post and find it really cool and inspiring that AI and technology is able to create such realistic looking faces. I am really interested to learn how this program works and how it is able to create such realistic faces with so much detail.

However, this website is also scary because the power of this technology can have many positive and negative implications. If this type of software can alter the face so realistically, any portrait photo can easily be edited to a “non-existing person’ without anyone noticing the difference. This could be really dangerous if mugshot photos or criminal photos were altered, or any important photo identification was altered.