LookingOutwards-11 – Page 6 – [OLD FALL 2020] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

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Emily Gobeille is an artist and the founder of “Design I/O”, a studio specializing in the creation of interactive storytelling installations and programs for children. As one of the head Partners and Creative Directors, she specializes in “concept development, visual design, interaction design and creative direction” throughout the company, and is said to have a playful approach to her projects. While I was unable to find her past education and work experience details, she has worked in the fields of web, print, and motion graphics, game design, and various installation art.

The project I chose to investigate was “The Pack”, a game aimed at teaching computational thinking to a younger audience. Created as both a iOS application and computer game, the game revolves around the world of “Algos”, in which the user needs to find the missing seeds of Algos and restore its habitats to bring balance back into its world. Along the users journey, they encounter creatures and work on algorithms together, with the game getting progressively harder with more algorithms as the user advances. I especially found this project interesting, as the process of creating it combined both the visual interest of a designed game with the computational knowledge, both within the game and in the game’s creation, together to create a user friendly end product.

Looking Outwards 11: A Focus on Woman Practitioners

Andrea Ackerman is an American artist who specializes in New Media artworks. She graduated from Harvard Medical School and teaches 3D computer modeling at Pratt Institute. She is also a co-director of ISEA2011, an international nonprofit that combines art, technology and science, where she is the associate editor of Uncontainable, the catalog of the electronic art exhibition. The piece I’m going to be looking at is called “Momentum: an experiment in the unexpected” which was showcased in the San Jose Museum of Art. I admire her artwork because she was one of the first to integrated digital technology and art and her piece fabricates a synthetic nature by manipulating human facial features.

Momentum: an experiment in the unexpected - San Jose Museum of Art — Momentum: an experiment in the unexpected

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Caroline Record is a designer who uses computer art to create interactive experiences. She is currently the Computer Analyst and Programmer for Antimodular Research and a Creative Technologist for the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. According to her Linkedin profile, she has held multiple positions in museums and as an educator. Record graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BFA in Electronic Time Based Art and Human Computer Interaction, then also completed an MS in Human Computer Interaction from CMU.
One of Record’s projects that I enjoy is “She.” The project is a sculpture of a printer that prints text on a long roll of paper. The text includes every sentence (614) in “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy (1878) that begin with the word “she.” The paper prints continuously through these sentences, resulting in a disorganized pile on the floor. Mounted on the wall behind the printer sculpture is a screen of a woman, who Record aims to show in “a haze of authorship.” The woman is singing and typing, which lines up with the printer’s rhythm. I found this project interesting because it combines audio and visual elements and incorporates classic literature to provide commentary on women at the corporate level.

She by Caroline Record (uploaded to YouTube in 2015)

Looking Outwards 11 : A Focus on Women Practitioners

Janet Echelman is an artist who creates sculptures at an architectural scale. Her work consists of Architecture, Urban Design, Sculpture, Material Science, Structural & Aeronautical Engineering, and Computer Science. Echelman’s work has also been presented or permanently showcased all around the world. Janet Echelman uses materials such as atomized water particles and engineered fibers. With those materials, she utilizes computational design software and “ancient” craft. The Bending Arc is a monumental sculpture located on St. Petersburg in Florida. It consists of 1,662,528 knots and 180 miles of twine. The sculpture is also 424 feet wide and 72 feet tall. This piece finds its form through the choreography of the wind. The top of the Bending Arc actually looks like a landscape design that has a pentagonal pattern. Echelman was inspired by historical postcards, hence the blue and white colors. Depending on the wind, the form of the sculpture constantly changes. This art piece certainly goes along with her statement of how her art transforms with wind and light, from being “an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in.”

LO 11 – A Focus on Women Practitioners

When looking at the list of women in new media arts, I came across Camille Utterback and was intrigued by her project Text Rain (1990), which I remembered seeing last year at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. It is an interactive installation where participants use physical movement to play with digital falling letters. Participants stand in front of a large projection screen where they see a mirrored video projection of themselves, combined with an animation of falling letters. Similar to rain and snow, the falling letters land/accumulate on participant’s heads and arms as well as respond to their motions. I find it fascinating how this hybrid installation transforms the museum experience, inviting visitors to engage with the work in an immersive, thoughtful way.

Camille Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential potential of connecting computational systems to human movement. Utterback combines sensing and display technologies with the custom software she writes to produce her work. Architectural-scale projections, custom LED lighting, and intimate sculptures with embedded screens are just a few examples of the broad range of media which Utterback works with. Camille Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

video about Text Rain

LO 11 – A Focus on Women Practitioners

Reality Reduction

Lorna Barnshaw

For this Looking Outwards post, I will be talking about Lorna Barnshaw’s project called Reality Reduction (2013). Lorna Barnshaw is a 3D designer from London, United Kingdom, with a bachelor’s degree of Fine Arts from Winchester School Of Art. She works as a freelance designer, creating 3D designs during her free time. Her project, Reality Reduction consists of random people 3D scanned in 360 views and using computation to reduce their features to low-poly shapes. She simplifies the person’s features and pixels to visualize what a person may look like after reduction. This project is really interesting to me because it uses advanced technology to effectively communicate her concept. It is both eerie and interesting at the same time, captivating the viewer by its realistic scans.

View her portfolio here

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Camille Utterback is from Bloomington, Indiana and attend Williams College for undergrad and NYU for a master’s within the school of art. She is known as an interactive installation artist, and has worked as a contractor for many art exhibits.

Camille Utterback’s piece, “Precarious”, utilizes a ceiling mounted camera with KinectV2 camera tracking to draw silhouettes on a backlit screen. Her work was created for and installed in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Black Out:Silhouettes Then and Now that opened on May 18, 2018. The Gallery and Raphael Palefsky-Smith, developer of the cameras, helped Utterback create this work of art.

Precarious was built on the algorithmically generated visual language that she has spent many years refining with her custom coded interactive drawing system. While not much is spoken about her custom software it creates very cool and interactive artwork for others to enjoy. This piece, specifically, does more than just trace those who visit the installation on the backlit screen. As people play with the piece more and more they realize that when more than one person is present each person can alter the other’s silhouette by pushing it and manipulating it with their own outline. Additionally, past outlines erase after one leaves and others join.

I found this to be a funky and inspiring way to represent history as it both represents and deviates from the popularity of silhouettes back in the day. While silhouettes were a form of art, they generally only had one person in the frame. This piece makes that impossible, but aligns with how important relationships are versus back then, as in more and more people care about each other and the future of the World.

Here’s a video representation of the piece:

You can check out a more complete story on the piece here:

Precarious

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For this week’s Looking Outwards, I looked at the CAre BOt by Caroline Sinders. The project is an interface bot that is concerned with helping victims of Social Media Break Up. It provides counsel and advice for users undergoing social media harassment, but it doesn’t replace therapy. It highlights inequities and failures in harassment policies and procedures for victims by using an empathetic and artistic interface.

Caroline Sinders is a computational designer and artist, and her work focuses on abuse, interaction, society, A.I., and conversation. She operates a studio that uses machine learning to design for public good and solve problems through user research. She received a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University.

https://carolinesinders.com/care-b0t/
CAre B0t, Caroline Sinders 2019

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Mouna Andras studied film, digital media, and storytelling. She met up with Melissa Mongiat in Montreal, where they decided to start working on projects together due to their complementary backgrounds. Together, they co-founded Daily Tous Les Joures, which aims to create collective experiences for public spaces. In other words, they use physical spaces to create something meaningful for the public people.

One project, in particular, is called Musical Swings. Musical Swings are swings that start playing musical pieces when people interact, even transforming when people swing in synochrony. Whle this was meant to be a one-off project, the artists ended up building the swings in a multitude of public areas. This is because they saw the people’s positive reactions and interactions with the project. I admire their project because it invites people to use their imagination again and feel enchanted when they interact with the piece. Being able to garner those reactions from people who consume their art is definitely not an easy feat.

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Making of the Tree of Changes

Yael Braha is a large-scale dynamic display designer. Braha combines traditional and non-traditional art to creates pieces that combine fine arts and digital fabrication. Braha studied Graphic Design at the European Institute of Design in Rome. After immigrating to the US, she got a Masters of Fine Arts in Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her work has been displayed all across the world for 20 years and is currently based out of Canada.

Braha and her team created Tree of Changes, using 3d-modeling, custom machine learning programs, and fabrication, for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the 2015 Market Street Prototyping Festival. This piece is an interactive sculpture that creates light patterns based on the viewers voice. I admire how this piece speaks to people of all ages because it highlights how Braha’s artistic sensibilities show up in her work. Braha notes her work is inspired by her roots as the daughter of refugees which taught her to value knowledge over belongings. With this piece she not only creates universal interest but also provides them with insight on how cutting-edge technology is being used to create art today. I also admire the aesthetic of the piece in contrast with the night sky.