LookingOutwards-11

Amber Vittoria’s illustration for Gucci Knitwear

use of soft and blurred colors, rounded body features

Amber Vittoria is a New York based artist and illustrator who is skillfully good at combing the analog and the digital in illustration. I came across an illustration project from her that is a commission for Gucci’s DIY knitwear collection. Exclusively working with female form and body parts in his drawing, she visualizes all kinds of stylized bodies into fashion campaign. The beginning of this practice is because of she recognizes that most of women cannot relate to the unrealistic image of women being used in fashion content and she hope to create these unique characters in a storytelling way. The soft and blurred colors portraits non-traditional, or non-idealised, representations of the female form with rounded body features and colorful flowers. Besides the visuals, I also admire how she take advantage of her creative experience to discuss these topics with the public.

Artist Website: https://www.ambervittoria.com/

LO 11 – Female Practitioners

Creator: Allison Parrish
Piece: Semantic Similarity Chatbot
Date: 2018

Allison Parrish is a programmer and a linguist. Allison currently works at NYU as a faculty member. She also graduated from NYU with her master’s degree. A lot of her projects involve bots and poetry as these are the topics she is most interested in. All of her projects that I have seen mix language and coding to create unique tools and artwork. The Semantic Similarity Chatbot is a creation of hers which allows people to text with historical figures of their choice. She wrote programs that dissected the way that different characters wrote and then added AI that could replicate similar patterns. One of the coolest aspects of this project in my opinion is that fact that it was created for her students to modify. She started with a few people from history, but as a project, she had her students write more code to add even more unique figures. I really enjoy the concept of this and love that she taught her students through such an interesting project.

https://gist.github.com/aparrish/114dd7018134c5da80bae0a101866581

LO-11

Eva Schindling explores the boundaries of technology, science, design, and art through her large collection of projects. Her projects include sculptures, digital imagings, and software systems. I was particularly interested in her work that involves physics and science that affects our daily lives such as sound, light, and motion. Schindling demonstrates superb data visualization skills in her project, Liquid Sound Collision. The software uses fluid dynamic qualities to visualize and mix sound. The relationship between the amplitude of the music and the velocity of the water creates a visually and auditory stunning piece of work. I found her other project, “Ana + Kata”, very interesting. She explores 4-dimensional relationships and represents them as solid volumes. The resulting solids resemble ghosted volumes that feel like an optical illusion. It feels intuitive at first to understand the shape, but upon careful inspection, some lines don’t match up and create a very interesting illusion. I feel that this piece of work has really captivated me with how I could interpret the work.

http://www.evsc.net/category/home

LO – 11

For this week’s looking outwards focusing on Women Practitioners, I decided to research into Angela Washko, who ‘is an artist, writer, and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it.’ I thought that because she purposefully works in realms and topics of feminism and is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, it would be especially appropriate for this week’s prompt.

I looked at her project The Game: The Game, which explores and presents the issues and circumstances present around the practices of male pickup artists, which is then presented in the format of a dating simulator. It provides an interesting and female centric look at the social constructs of dating and the systematically dangerous and manipulative implications of the culture. It provides a very interesting look into the language and social formalities of ‘pick-up’ culture and its psychological/predatory implications.

I really liked the way she chose the explore the topic through a somewhat morbid lens without holding back or romanticizing the issue, particularly because dating simulators tend to over-romanticize certain behaviors that the audience as a whole could do to become more critical of. The interactive quality of the game brings another layer of immersion into the game as well, illustrating how well the medium supports the topic/issue that is being presented.

Looking Outward-11

This project is called Botanicals. It was created by Kate Hartman as a way to form a stronger connection between humans and plants. This project uses Arduino and other software to read what a plant needs and then communicate that to its human. I love that this project plays on something light and funny, but also very relevant and useful. Kate Hartman is based in Toronto and teaches at OCAD University about Wearable and Mobile Technology.

Botanicalls

Looking Outwards 11: A Focus on Women Practitioners

Emily Gobeille is a designer who specializes in merging technology and design to create an immersive design experience. She spent her years studying many disciplines, including web, prints, motion graphics, games, and installations. She also is one of the founders of Designer I/O, which specializes in the design and development of interactive installations. The company’s clients and partners usually include children museums.

I decided to look at one of her Designer I/O projects called Mimic. It is an “interactive installation that allows visitors to engage in a dialogue with a robot arm through gesture.” The robot can track the people’s movements and also has the ability to react to individuals actions accordingly. The robot can break down its impressions into three feelings: trust, curiosity, and interest, which will affect the robot’s responses. Depending on the individual’s movement and emotions, Mimic will react to many people simultaneously, changing its behavior. I personally find this interactive robot interesting for its skill to acknowledge the viewer’s reactions.

Looking Outwards 11 – A Focus on Women Practitioners

Camille Utterback is an artist who creates digital and interactive art. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art Practice in the Department of Art & Art History, as well as Computer Science in the Department of Engineering at Stanford University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Utterback’s works explore the different possibilities of relation between computational systems and human movement. She focuses and studies the beauty of body and physicality into her works. In this Looking Outwards, I want to talk about Utterback’s interactive installation called Entangled. This artwork encourages audiences to interact with slightly translucent screens that project images on both sides. Body movements of the audiences cause images of computer cables, earbuds, ropes, and other different types of cords to form and disappear on the corresponding side’s projection. What I really admire about this installation is that it not only allows an interaction between the installation and audience, but also allows interaction between the audience and audience. The fact people can see other people’s body movements through the translucent screens amazes me that a single installation can show many different explorations like embodied relationships, depth, and volumetric complexity.

Website: http://camilleutterback.com/projects/entangled/

Video of Camille Utterback’s Entangled

LO: Stephanie Dinkins

I first found Stephanie Dinkins while doing research for one of our previous Looking Outwards assignments and found that her work was very inspirational. As a Black woman transmedia (computational) artist, Dinkins explores the intersection between storytelling, treasured history, and the amplification of voices through her art. Her work often circles around topics of gender (in both culture-specific and broader societal contexts), being a Black person in America, and equity for communities of color.

One of her most recent works, #SayItAloud, is a WebXR experience driven by motivations of fighting injustices in the world but at the same time, creating things to solidify those impacts. The user is led through this experience by a central persona, Professor Commander Justice and the interaction is enhanced by the ability for viewers to add their own thoughts and experiences through the form of video submissions.

LO: A Focus on Women Practitioners

As a fellow female, I love how this week’s LO is focused on women. While I was looking through the list, Camille Utterback caught my eye because she creates interactive artworks and installations. Utterback has a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently an Assistant Professor of the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University. This one project by Utterback, Flourish, particularly got my attention. It is a 70-foot long site-specific artwork commissioned by the Liberty Mutual Group. Flourish combines interactive installation through the projection onto multiple layers of glass. It consists of seven, double-layered five by eight-foot glass panels. It has three interactive panels in which it reacts to a viewer’s position in front of the glass. Flourish represents how fluidity can flow through a linear composition and its references to life, creativity, and growth. Working with different glass techniques, the glass reflects and interacts with one another to create a special experience that can only be experienced in-person. The colors are so bright and playful and the shapes have such fluidity.

Camille Utterback: http://camilleutterback.com/

Flourish (2013): http://camilleutterback.com/projects/flourish/

Looking Outwards 11

A project that I find inspiring is the Ideogenetic Machine (2011) by Nova Jiang. The project is an installation that uses a custom software to combine the artist’s drawings with portraits of people interacting with the installation. The installation features a camera that captures images of the people and draws them into panels of the comic. I admire this installation because it elevates any person into the hero of a unique story. With this installation, anybody can be the protagonist of an epic tale.

Nova Jiang is an artist that creates sculptures and installations, many of which are interactive. She studied at UCLA to get her Master of Fine Arts in Media Art. She currently works in Los Angeles, but has exhibited her work throughout the world.