BUFU (which stands for By Us, For Us) is a group from NYC that works to facilitate conversations surrounding the cultural and political relationship between black and Asian diasporas. The four members, Jazmin Jones, Tsige Tafesse, Katherine Tom, and Sonia Choi, choose to explore this through a documentary and community events. In June 2016, the group transformed a warehouse into a space in which they held events for a “month for black and Asian futurity.” In this venue, they gave workshops, had dinners, and discussed important topics regarding social issues. With their work, the group hopes to promote POC solidarity, finding ways for both communities to come together. As someone from a mixed black-Asian household, I was really interested in learning more about this project and their use of art to explore solidity.
Here is their presentation below. They make use of images, videos, and quotes to deliver their presentation and explain ideas important to them.
Blacki Migliozzi is a programmer, science communicator, experimental biotechnologist, and data visualizer for the New York Times, based out of New York City. They have worked on small-scale biotechnologies involving fungus, tardigrades, and CRISPR. More recently, after joining Bloomberg graphics & the New York Times, he has worked to communicate information – especially about climate change – to the public. Working with data across centuries and from all over the world he has created visualizations that clearly mark the precipice we have launched ourselves towards.
His Eyeo 2018 talk
His visualizations utilize clean, graphic lines and takes advantage of our natural tendency to notice outliers to bring the most alarming data to the forefront. Rather than being lost in a sea of data, his visualizations make the conclusion unquestionable.
Jennifer Daniel has extensive work experience. She was a graphic designer for many well-known newspapers like the New York Times. Presently, she works as the creative director for Google and Android. She is also a chairperson for Unicode. She lives in San Francisco and has a formal background in graphic design. She described her profession as converting speech and emotions to visual representations. She believes that communication must evolve over time which is where emojis and animations are headed. I was most interested in talking about how different forms of communication relate to others. For example, her discussion of how texting is more similar to speaking than it is to writing. I was also interested in seeing how humans and computers see information differently so for customizable stickers you must have computers use neural networks to generalize aspects of people, then an artist must create a visualization that is most accepting of differences. She used a lot of humor and visualizations in her talk. Humor always makes talks more entertaining, but I would most like to incorporate her visual display techniques into my own presentations.
Jennifer Daniel’s Talk on Emojis An Unrelated Piece, but Interesting
Mike Tucker is an Interactive Director at Magic Leap, a company focused on creating the future of Spatial Computing. Before he dived into the field of augmented reality, his focus of work moved from graphic design, website, mobile apps, media installation, and so on. He said in the speech that he always aspires to break the expectation of how medium should be experienced in general. In his day-to-day work, he mainly works on prototyping, designing, and shipping Spatial Computing projects alongside the new platform.
One of the Spatial Computing projects-“Tónandi”
Mike Tucker worked with different teams like the hand-tracking team, graphic team, and so on. I admire how they would prototype a lot before finally reaching a final result and they are willing to give up a concept that has been put a lot of work into if there is potentially a better one. I want to talk about the project “Tónandi” that he worked on together with Sigur Rós. This project explores the future of music through this interactive audio-visual experience in mixed reality. I admire how the team he directed experimented with a variety of ways to interact with virtual content and ways that music could be delivered. I especially admire how they make this design helpful to blind people. Users with visual disabilities could mark a specific spot in the space with a music note, which helps them to find the spot later on.
Eyes for the Blind
They started off presenting a video of the final work. It is not the most impressive version, but good enough to keep the audience engaged. Then, they went through a different phase of prototyping and what small elements they achieve at each stage. Finally, they present the most impressive version of the final work and left the audience admire how worthwhile those efforts put into this project are.
Link to the speech: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019/page:4
Mike Tucker is the Interactive Director at Magic Leap, a company that focuses on Mixed Reality and Spatial computing. Before he started at Magic Leap, Mike was the Interactive Director at Universal Everything, where he created his most famous project. One that I will touch on later as one of the works I admire most from him. Before he launched his career as a designer/developer, he attended Virginia Commonwealth University where he received a BFA in Graphic Design.
The reason why I chose to highlight Mike Tucker and Magic Leap’s work is that interactive art is amazing already, but it just becomes even more captivating when it is immersive and interactive. The projects he describes in the presentation show the prototypes where the art work changes at the literal touch of your fingertips. This leads me to what I admired about how he presented his work. Such complex technologies are difficult to explain, but I found it easy to follow along since he showed so many graphics and “behind the scenes” work. He gave us a glimpse into every step in the process which I hope to try implementing in the future when describing my own work.
Now to discuss Mike Tucker’s art installation in San Francisco, the infinity room. It’s something that I’ve seen a lot on social media but finally being able to see the purpose behind it was amazing. The Microsoft Infinity Room was created as a visualization of big data as explained by a quarter. We have worked on projects that touch on data visualization so I found the room to be such a fascinating way of presenting complex data.
Catherine D’Ignazio at Eyeo 2019, Feminist Data, Feminist Futures
Catherine D’Ignazio is the director of the Data + Feminism Lab and an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She also goes by “Kanarinka.”
Before MIT, D’Ignazio was an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media at Emerson College in the Journalism Department, and was teaching in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design. She has also done freelance software development for over 10 years. She holds an MS from the MIT Media Lab, an MFA from Maine College of Art, and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.
Catherine is very passionate about social justice. One project I really admire is her creation of “DataBasic.io,” which simplifies data analysis for policymakers, journalists, and people who are unfamiliar with advanced data analysis tools. I admire how the program automatically finds patterns in data that people can incorporate into their storytelling. I think there is great potential for creating change and creates equity for people that are less familiar with code, computer science, and data analytics.
Data basic.io is a simplified data analysis tool for people unfamiliar with little coding experience.
Another project I admire is Catherine’s book called “Data Feminism,” which discusses the importance and power of data in today’s society. Most of the discourse about data is dominated by white men, and are often used for militaries, war, and Catherine gives a feminist perspective on the topic, like incorporating emotion into data, and using data to further social justice causes for female equity.
Some strategies Catherine uses to present her work is the use of statistics and data to support her point. For example, she uses statistics of the percentage of white men who work in data analysis, to demonstrate how there is a need for more women in the data analytics field so there is less bias. I can learn from Catherine by using statistics to tell a story and support why there is a need for my work and why it is important.
Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual
Catherine D’Ignazio’s Feminist Data, Feminist Futures lecture was interesting to me. Catherine is a professor at MIT, artist, and software developer who focuses on feminism and data literacy. She is from North Carolina and studied International Relations at Tufts University and received master degree in Studio Art, Design and Theory from Maine College of Art and a Master degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. She has a variety of Art and Science background. In the beginning of her talk at Eyeo 2019, she talks about how “we often our work is looking 20 or 30 years into the future, what relationship between the human and technology will look like.” Her works embrace this idea. Her work “Data Feminism” was particularly interesting. Is is very interesting how she takes a feminist approach to data science. She focuses on how to put the data in the service of justice. I think this idea is admirable and fascinating that she is intersecting a humanities principle, feminism, with data science. I like how her work takes an approach in which to be more inclusive. Her other work, DataBasic.io is interesting too. One of the tools included in DataBasic.io is the WTFcsv, which is a web application that returns a summary of the fields, data type, range, and basic descriptive statistics of a CSV file. This tool helps to fill the significant gaps for people who do not know how to code and to help them understand data more easily. I like how she approaches the data science with humanitatrian view to make it more accessible to more people. I would like to create a work like hers, incorporating different aspects and perspectives to the data science.
The person I will be writing about today is named Nadieh Bremer. She is a graduated astronomer, turned data scientist, and now data visualization designer. She creates unique interactive data visualizations for press releases, data driven reports, and data art. After reading her “about” tab on her website, I learned that she is very passionate about what she does. She left the world of academia to pursue data science and once she learned that she really enjoyed visualizing analysis, she started creating personal projects. She describes her work as the following, “My projects include both web-based interactive visualizations, frequently using a storytelling technique to show insights into complex data and static visualizations that typically allow a bit more freedom in their design.” After looking through her work, I noticed that although her work is based on real information and a collection of facts, the visual aesthetic of her visualizations is art itself. It is something that can be seen hanging off a wall as an art piece itself. Her use of color is captivating in all her data visualizations and she uses many different forms to express information. One thing about her work that I want to reflect in mine is how playful it is. There was a project that had graphics of cats and dogs that I really enjoyed. It really opened up the range of how playful data visualization can be and that really inspired me to take risks with my work and include my personality in it.
The person who’s video I watched was Neil Mendoza. Neil is from London, UK, and is based in California. His artwork is him “combining sculpture, electronics and software to bring inanimate objects and spaces to life.”. Neil presents in a fun and funny way. He tries to compare himself to comedic things and tries to show off serious work with a fun presentation. Neil uses digital and mechanical technologies to bring inanimate objects and spaces to life. Using this medium, he explores the absurd, the humorous, the futile and the surreal. I admire that he likes to create “useless” machines, like teaching a fish to use hand tools or using hamsters as an art tool, as shown in his video. I really admired the hamster art that he presented about. I like this piece because it was a hamster running on a wheel that ended up moving an arm to draw itself on the wheel. I also admired his fish piece where a fish was able to make a hammer move and smash down, I admire this because it is such a unique concept I never would have thought of.
var nPoints = 600;
function setup(){
createCanvas(480, 480);
}
function draw(){
background(0);
//calling functions
hypotrochoid();
epicycloid();
}
function hypotrochoid(){
//drawing hypotrochoid
//https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Hypotrochoid.html
push();
noFill();
stroke(57, 139, 173)
translate(width / 2, height / 2);
var x = constrain(mouseX, 0, width);
var y = constrain(mouseY, 0, height);
var a = map(x, 0, width, 70, 150);
var b = map(y, 0, height, 0.5, 4);
var h = constrain(a/2, 100, 200);
beginShape();
for (var i = 0; i < nPoints; i++) {
var t = map(i, 0, nPoints, 0, TWO_PI);
x = (a - b) * cos(t) + h * cos(((a - b) / b) * t);
y = (a - b) * sin(t) - h * sin(((a - b) / b) * t );
vertex(x, y);
}
endShape();
pop();
}
function epicycloid(){
//drawing epicycloid
//https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Epicycloid.html
push();
translate(width / 2, height / 2)
var x = constrain(mouseX, 0, width);
var y;
var a = map(x, 0, width, 10, 20);
var b = a / 30;
var h = constrain(mouseY / 9, 0, 0.7 * height);
var ph = mouseX / 25;
fill(202, 223, 232, 70);
stroke(90 + 98 * sin(millis() / 500), 174, 200); //making the color change smoothly
beginShape();
for (var i = 0; i < nPoints; i++) {
var t = map(i, 0, nPoints, 0, TWO_PI);
x = (a + b) * cos(t) - h * cos(ph + t * (a + b) / b);
y = (a + b) * sin(t) - h * sin(ph + t * (a + b) / b);
vertex(x, y);
}
endShape(CLOSE);
pop();
}
At first, I wasn’t really sure how I was supposed to do the project since it looked complex. I also didn’t know what type of shapes I should create either. However, using the mathematical formula turned out to be not as overwhelming as I thought it would be since they created the shapes for me. I tried doing this project by exploring different types of curves and ended up choosing hypotrochoid and epicycloid. I began by drawing the hypotrochoid first by plugging in different numbers. Once I got that in place, I thought it looked empty in the middle so I then added an epicycloid curve. Although it was challenging to figure out which variable controls what, it was satisfying to see the end result.
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