SectionC – Page 10 – [OLD FALL 2020] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Project 9 Portrait

My process for this project was to choose a picture of myself and figure out how to go about the assignment. I was able to combine the letters “nyc” and circles to make the completed picture. This picture was taken in NYC.

sketch Download

//Anthony Prestigiacomo Section C
function preload() {
    var citypic="https://i.imgur.com/q3X1p2I.png";
    photo=loadImage(citypic);    //image variable
}

function setup() {
  createCanvas(456,273);
  background(0);
  photo.resize(456,273);    //resizing the image to fit the canvas
  photo.loadPixels();
  frameRate(400);
}

function draw() {
  var x=random(width);
  var y=random(height);
  var pixelx=constrain(floor(x),0,width);
  var pixely=constrain(floor(y),0,height);
  var pixelcolor=photo.get(pixelx,pixely);    //calling each pixel color
  noStroke();
  fill(pixelcolor);    //fill the circles and words with image pixel colors
  textFont('Veranda',random(0,5));
  text("nyc",x,y);    //nyc text to appear to form the image
  circle(x,y,random(0,5));    //circles that will appear to form the image
}

Looking Outwards 09

I looked through my friend Lucas Bittig’s Looking Outwards posts and the one that I found interesting and different was his week 4 post. This post was on music and art, he talked about a certain art work that sometimes appears like a physical painting and others as a computer generated art work. I agree with my peers assessment of the project, I like how interesting the painting can turn out as some of them can be very realistic looking. I also like the combination of the two art forms into one, “painting” and music. Like Lucas said this art can tend to be beautiful as is incorporates so many mediums and techniques to form a final product. The creator of the arts name is Kynd in collaboration with Yu Miyashita in 2020.

LO 04 – Music and Art

Expressions – Paint and pixel matière at micro-scale

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.

Project 09 Computational Landscape

sketch Download="">

let img;
let smallPoint, largePoint;

function preload() {
  img = loadImage('https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/640666088271839233/OTKlt5pC_400x400.jpg');
}

function setup() {
  createCanvas(300, 300);
  smallPoint = 4;
  largePoint = 40;
  imageMode(CENTER);
  noStroke();
  background(255);
  img.loadPixels();
  //frameRate(20);
}

function draw() {
  let pointillize = map(mouseX, 0, width, smallPoint, largePoint);
  let x = floor(random(img.width));
  let y = floor(random(img.height));
 
  let xx = x;
  let yy = y;
  let count = 0;
  while (xx <img.width & yy 0 && yy>0) {
        let pix = img.get(xx, yy);
        fill(pix);
        ellipse(xx, yy, pointillize, pointillize);

        count = count +1;
        xx = xx+1;
        yy=yy+1;
    }
}

If you move the mouse around, you can alter how the landscape is being drawn.

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.

LO – 9

I chose Hayoon’s 7th Looking Outwards post to examine in greater detail. She highlighted the data visualization“We feel fine” project created by Jonathan Harris. Like Hayoon, I found the subject matter of emotion a really intriguing topic to visualize. I had just watched a lecture about the complexity and necessity of emotion as a consideration in design solutions earlier this semester; this made data visualization of this concept all more important in my eyes. I also took note of the extensive use of color to categorize information. Furthermore, I believe that the use of text and simple shapes was pretty ingenious at representing complex information, especially with a concept as abstract and conventionally-unquantifiable as emotion. It goes to show that smart design does not need to use the most groundbreaking techniques, but can instead solve the problem efficiently using what is available. I also thought it was a good design choice to incorporate photographs as a way to humanize and contextualize the data. In examining Hayoon’s interpretations of her chosen project, I was able to take a different approach to examining Harris’ insightful initiative.

I especially enjoyed Harris’ interpretation of mood swings and how the colors relate 2 data visualizations together.

LookingOutwards-08

One of the talks I watched for this week’s looking outwards is Adam Harvey’s (link to his site: https://ahprojects.com/) Face Recognition and Datasets (https://vimeo.com/354276111). He is an American artist and researcher who graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and previously studied engineering and photojournalism at Pennsylvania State University. His work involves camouflage from face recognition and camouflage from thermal cameras, and he is based in Berlin. He did a wifi geolocation spoofing project and also used computer vision software for a company called Syrian Archive, to detect illegal ammunition with scannable synthetic data. Another one of his projects is MegaPixels, which uses data sets to build algorithms. One concept he discusses in his talk is “media in the wild” which means that no one knows who’s own facial information is in the data set, and who’s features may be included for facial recognition software. I found that to be interesting and mysterious to think about. Furthermore, the way that Harvey presents is powerful because he uses many visuals and graphics. His pacing is clear and spoken in simple terms for people to understand. In my presentations in the future I want to apply some of these skills of being clear and concise as well.

LO – 8

I found the information designer Stefanie Posavec very inspiring — she spoke at Eyeo in 2018. With roots in communication and graphic design studying in various American colleges, Stefanie is now based in London and is most known for exploring non-traditional representations of data across a variety of mediums. Her ability to translate data (collected from her personal life and for the service of various enterprises who commission her) into consumable visual pieces of art and design is very interesting to me as it is both visually appealing and accessible to more people than traditional fine arts. In this way, she is both an artist and designer, solving problems through translating data while instilling her personal vision and at times, using data from her personal life.

Eyeo Talk 2018

I find all of Stefanie’s work interesting, but I really enjoyed one of her most notable projects Dear Data, where she and English designer Giorgia Lupi sent each other hand-drawn postcards visualizing data collected over their everyday lives, over the course of a year. The analog format of these data visualizations really strip away the complexity that many associate with code. Even without code, information can be communicated in an elegant, concise way. I wish to continue exploring Stefanie’s work to continue incorporating my artistic voice into pragmatic and interesting solutions.

Clever and creative ways to represent data, concisely delivered in a hand-drawn postcard

Looking Outwards 08

The Eyeo Festival is an event that gathers the most creative technology community. This community includes artists, data designers, creative coders, AI & XR explorers, storytellers, researchers, technology, and platform developers. The Eyeo Festival allows this intersection of people to share their passion and inspirations. After browsing through each year, I was very interested in a particular speaker from the Eyeo Festival in 2019.

Refik Anadol is a media artist and director, who was originally from Istanbul, Turkey. In addition to what he does, Anadol is also a spatial thinker and he is fascinated by the ways of transformation within contemporary culture that require one to think of new aesthetic techniques and change within the perception of space. In other words, the media artist combines media arts and architecture. In his lecture, Refik Anadol also presents some of this own work, as well as work from his studio. The work that is produced begins to rethink the possibility of post-digital architecture future by redefining the functionalities of interior and exterior architectural formations. Refik Anadol’s work begins to suggest the possibility that all spaces and their facades have the ability to be used as an artists’ canvas. He asks, “What will happen if the surfaces have this kind of narrative quality, like jumping between different parts of Mars by letting the machine hallucinate. And to create a new meaning. It might not be purposeful but it can be impactful in a way.”

Here is the link to the lecture: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019/page:6

Overall, this lecture has been a very exciting and interesting experience that also makes me think about the possibilities that Refik Anadol suggests within spaces and the function of exterior and interior walls. The relationship between technology and art is constantly transforming and improving. This talk has actually been a reminder of the possibilities that occur within our society and environment through this particular relationship. It also makes me curious about what our world will be like later in time. What will architecture be with the new innovative technology in the next 10 years?

Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who earned her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently working as a professor at Stony Brook University. She started off as a photographer and did not have much experience in coding, however she was interested in the digital world and documentation. Her journey began with the project Bina48, where she had conversations with the robot to explore the possibilities of emotional interaction with a person and an autonomous robot. Then she moved on to her ongoing project, Not The Only One, which attempts to create a multi generational memoir of a black American family told from the perspective of an artificial intelligence. While presenting it was noticeable that she humanizes the projects that she has worked on and has formed a deep connection with them. I’m personally interested in AI, which is why I chose to watch her lecture. However, I was more engaged by her goal, which is to bring diverse perspectives into the AI world. She believes that providing more inclusivity, community engagement, and social equity will significantly broaden the future possibilities of AI. In addition, I also admire her because of her fine arts background and her bravery of diving into the digital coding world.