LookingOutwards-11

Looking Outwards 11:

I’ve seen Angela Washko’s work before, and I find her exploration of feminism through interactive alternative video games. One such game I found interesting was The Game: The Game, a project that presents an exploration of consent and politics. The game is presented in the format of a dating simulator, where players experience the tactics and practices of male pick-up artists and “the seduction community”. These pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player, providing and in-depth look into the specific social behaviors around dating, giving insight on the experiences many women have in the real world.

Angela Washko is a visiting assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, a small University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (often mistaken for Central Michigan University). She was known for creating performances and “social stunts” in the game World Of Warcraft, where she discusses feminism and toxic masculinity in video games. Having attended a few of her classes, I find her style of critiquing patriarchal systems and toxic-masculinity online very amusing.

https://angelawashko.com/section/437138-The-Game-The-Game.html

LO 11 – A Focus on Women Practitioners

Claudia Hart

The Dolls House (2016)

For my female artist I chose to learn about Claudia Hart, a computational fine artist of interactive imagery. Her work features topics such as issues of the body, perception, the real vs. unreal, and the relationship between nature and technology. Hart’s work is “symbolist and poetic” (from her website bio), and can be described as mesmerizing and hypnotic. She describes her work as “post photography” —her pieces are generated from computer models instead of captured with a camera.

I examined her piece The Dolls House—a special series of video, drawing and sculpture inspired by the media ballet The Dolls, based in the philosophical idea that history forever renews itself through “a process of decadence, decay and rebirth” (https://claudiahart.com/The-Dolls-House-2016). In this piece, Hart molded mathematical cycles into visual form: a figurative flicker film created with rhythmic animations and pulsing patterns. The passage of time is defined by a cyclical animation where a light moves around the virtual set, casting shadows to mimic sunrise and sunset.

Looking Outwards 11

A project that I found interesting was Text Rain by Camille Utterback. I found this interesting because the piece was permanently installed in 2000, very early for graphic art that works with human motions. I like this project because it allows people to manipulate fake words with their motions. The creator of this piece, Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in the field of digital and interactive art. Utterback earned her BA in Art from Williams College, and her Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has many pieces in private and public collections, including The Smithsonian and Hewlett Packard.

Text Rain

Looking Outwards 11

For this week’s blog post, I decided to write about Tina Frank, a graphic designer who focuses mainly on interaction and music within her work. Tina Frank is an Austrian designer, artist and professor at the University of Art and Design. As a designer, she collaborates with musicians to incorporate sound into her work. Within the years, her work has shifted from data visualizations for scientific projects. One work that I will be discussing today is a project called “What if.” This project is an interactive light installation in a building that raises the question of what our world would be like if XYZ was in action. For example, what if the world was inhabited by mosses and ferns? What if feminists ruled the world? The thing I admire the most about this project is how the one lighting installation changed completely the mood of a space. In the video included below, the lighting installation as well as the sound and the music gives the whole project a very surrealistic feeling.

Looking Outwards 11: A Focus on Women Practitioners

The artist I chose to research this week is Karolina Sobecka. Sobecka was born in Warsaw, Poland and has been known to work across many disciplines, specifically synthesizing art and science. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts. Much of her work is interventionist or interactive in nature, serving to promote environmental and social activism. One project of hers I focused on was entitled “Cloud Machine.” This is a small device sent into the atmosphere to develop and disperse miniature clouds in our atmosphere.

Karolina Sobecka’s “Cloud Machine” as it creates clouds through water vapor dispersal (2014).

This project is quite interesting to me and it creates a unique juxtaposition between manmade and natural processes in a way that is almost performative. Further, it is a also a legitimate response to a climate issue, as scientists have proposed developing larger-scale, but conceptually similar devices to achieve the same effect of global cooling. I appreciate how Sobecka uses her artistic and engineering skills to address a relevant issue.

The artist I want to talk about is Milica Zec. She is a New York City-based film and virtual reality director, editor, and screenwriter. One of her projects in the virtual reality medium was a short narrative piece called, “Giant,” which is a VR immersive experience based on true events during a war. “Giant” transports the viewer into a bomb shelter in an active war zone, where two parents are trying to distract their children from the war by telling a story. I admire how powerful and influential her work is in creating empathy. Many viewers indicated that they felt strongly connected to the refugees. I like how she used VR as a tool of storytelling, and the story she told is very meaningful.

Before entering the field of virtual reality, Milica has been collaborating for 9-years with the performance artist Marina Abramovic. Specifically, Milica has been Marina’s filmmaker, editor, and video-installation designer. As for her educational background, Milica is a graduate of The University of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Serbia, and SCPS NYU.

LO-11 (focus on women practitioners)

Karolina Sobecka is an artist, and researcher that operates in the intersection of art, science, technology, and activism. Her most recent work is a series called ‘Matter of Air’ in which she explores environmental activism through art and technology, including a project in which she creates, with a group of folks, a pseudo weather controlling machine. However, for this LO I’ll be discussing one of her older interactive installations. This project is called stability. The project entails having a user interact with a cube and a screen that supposedly shows a small room with a person inside the cube. Every time you shake up the room, the person rearranges the room and records the “disaster” in its disaster journal. The interesting thing is that every single arrangement created by this person is unique. This perhaps can be interpreted as pseudo Automated Intelligence, as the person is actively “creating” a new layout every time. But, this could perhaps just an illusion coded by the creator.

http://cargocollective.com/karolinasobecka/Stability

LO-11: Women in Computational Design

The project I chose for this week is SOMEONE by Lauren Lee McCarthy. This project interested me since its focus was on reimagining home intelligence systems as actual people rather than AI. SOMEONE is primarily a human version of Amazon Alexa. For 2 months, the homes of 4 participants had custom-designed smart devices installed. A command center was installed in NYC where visitors were able to look into the participants’ homes through laptops and control their networked devices. Participants would call out for “someone” in which the visitors respond to their needs as Alexa does.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist whose work focuses on social relationships in the era of surveillance, automatic, and algorithmic living. She received a BS in Computer Science and Art and Design from MIT and an MFA from UCLA. She is also the creator of p5.js!

Command Center at 205 Hudson Gallery in NYC

Example view of visitors at Command Center

Looking Outwards – 11

One project that I admire is “Bot Party,” helmed by Phoenix Perry and aided by Freida Abtan, both women artists. The project is a game that requires the players to help the robots communicate with each other through audio interaction. They utilize a ‘bot to skin and skin to bot’ communication protocol – the user physically connects the bots so that they may send encoded messages to each other. I admire that the project is both thoughtful in its simplistic message, while simultaneously is efficient as well as aesthetically pleasing. It also utilizes robots for a considerably unique purpose. Phoenix Perry amusingly calls herself a cultural engineer, game designer, instigator, as well as “feminist killjoy.” She was educated at NYU Tandon. I admire her in that while she has evidently found personal success, she has used that success to help others – she founded the Code Liberation Institute, which teaches women how to program games, as well as Dozen Eyes Games, a studio aimed at games and installations that generate social change. She also gives lectures, and in general, her active pursuit of positive change in the world of a male dominated profession is really inspiring.

LookingOutwards-11

For this Looking Outwards, I’ve decided to look into Lauren. I first got interested in her because I saw this description saying, creator/lead-developer of p5.js. One of her works that caught my eye was the LAUREN, in which she attempted to become a human version of Amazon Alexa. It is an installation of a series of custom-designed networked smart devices like camera, door locks, electronic functions, switches, and etc. She claimed that her performance was better than an AI because she can understand the user as a person and anticipate their needs. It was interesting for me because recently there’s a lot of tryout going on to create AI devices to make people’s life easier. LAUREN was an improved version of current AIs except for empathy, that only humans can do.