Sara Schnadt is an artist who also works in multiple other fields as UX designer and software systems architect. She currently is a designer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is working for the software human interface design and system architecture for machine learning for the Europa Clipper mission. I was intrigued by her work primarily because of the scope, scale, and ambitiousness of the projects she is involved in. Sara Schnadt talks about how her work NASA inspires her installation works and vice versa because she finds many similarities between the creative processes of both practices. Schnadt emphasizes that although space projects involve a lot of technological skills and are more engineer based, when the projects are thought of as also creative projects and design problems, it opens up more possibilities and complexities.
The artist I will be looking at is Alexander Chen. His artistic mission is to illustrate the correlations between visual art, music, and life. He creates visualizations of music he loves, and conversely, he turns visual images (like the subway map of NYC) into music. He is currently located in Massachusetts and working as a creative director at Google. I admire the subjectivity of his work, and his clear love for both mediums. I agree that visual and audial experiences go hand in hand, and it’s always amazing to me to see how other people interact with the same music differently from me. I particularly love his project turning the NYC subway into a string instrument because I’m from New York and it brings me close to home. Alexander is a capable speaker because he plays to his audience, he uses pauses and silence to pace his speech in a palatable way, and he is confident in and passionate about the work he’s speaking about.
Mariana Santos is a co-founder and CEO of Unicorn Interactive, an independent startup that focuses on storytelling through digital media. She worked as a director of animation and interactive at Fusion Media until 2016. She graduated from JSK Journalism Knight Fellowship at Stanford, working in major newsrooms across Latin America as a 2014 Knight International Journalism Fellow. Mariana Santos is a visual storyteller and a trained animator. She worked with a lot of newsrooms to create projects that convey datas as compelling stories through motion graphics. What I admire about Mariana Santos the most is that she leads design thinking in a multidisciplinary approach to storytelling. As a design major, I always realize how difficult it is to incorporate stories I want to convey visually. The way she combines design and storytelling into her work really shows not only what kind of designer and storyteller she is, but also shows who she is as an individual. Olympics 2012 in Numbers is an animation Mariana Santos worked on for theGuardian. For six months right until the Olympic Games arrived in London 2012, this video explores statistics and results about the Olympics and UK through data visualization. It’s interesting to see how numbers of statistics can be visually represented in such a way that it amazes me this animation was produced in 2012. She uses effective illustrations in parts that are necessary to enhance the quality of her storytelling, and her transitions are smooth so that it makes it easy for the audiences to read and understand the video. Also, she designed for a mobile first experience with responsive user design. This interactive design has all available information that can be seen and enjoyed in London during the Olympics Summer 2012. The fascinating part of this project is that it is an extension of storytelling and interactive design. Through her works, I learned the power of storytelling through visuals, and I hope to convey strong stories into my designs as well.
Christina “Phazero” Curlee is an anti-disciplinary artist that focuses on game level and narrative design. She has a traditional arts background and almost two (one and 3/4ths) of degrees in fine arts. She is started primarily as a painter and installation artist and began working with video games around 2015. It is inspiring that she is self-taught in game design, 3-D art, and programming. She combines the elements from fine arts with game elements to develop her own style of game. Her art practice focuses a lot on participation and design in which games really aid in those elements. I think it is amazing how she represents the minority in the game industry, especially when it is a very masculine driven industry. She reaches out to those who are afraid of their own works are valid in the game world. It is inspiring for me to see that type of representation as I also want to pursue something in game design. She has the ability to communicate with her audience well and speaks to them almost as a friend. She reinforces the idea that the game industry is very young and there’s so much more in the game frontier that has not been reached. There is no limit and anything can be valid.
Hyphen-Labs is an international team of women of color working at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Through their global vision and unique perspectives, they are driven to create meaningful and engaging ways to explore emotional, human-centered, and speculative design. In the process they challenge conventions and stimulate conversations, placing collective needs and experiences at the center of evolving narratives. It was interesting for me to learn that Hyphen-Labs experiments in immersive, computationally-driven, large scale installations that combine conceptual art, design, and science. Because I was able to discuss about virtual reality from my other design course too, this team’s work caught my attention. I admire that they listen to their co-collaborators and use emerging technology in their recent projects, highlighting themes of privacy and surveillance through the lens of speculative design, objects, neuroscience, architecture, and virtual reality.
NSAF and HyperFace project
I especially liked their NSAF project because it wasn’t just about 3D but included everything like product design, virtual reality (VR), and social-psychological/cognitive impact/biometric/fMRI research. This was a project that showed me how different parts of the design can collaborate together. When creating this, they were inspired by the lack of multidimensional representations of black women in technology.
Lauren McCarthy is a computer programmer and artist who often uses her knowledge of coding and computers to pose interesting interactions with both entities as they intersect. I admire the way that she uses her knowledge of two different worlds to create a valuable commentary on both of them. She actually created P5.JS, which I didn’t know until after that I watched her lecture. I found her work very admirable because she knows enough about both human behavior and computer behavior to push both to their boundaries of discomfort. I love how with her project ‘Follower’, she creates an almost-normal service that has just enough dissonance from an acceptable service to allow for unexpected discoveries.
Her work always depends heavily on the pragmatism of computers in order to contrast the fickle nature of humans. I admire how there seems to be a whimsical element to her work, it is almost as if her experience with computers has taught her to embrace her human volatility. Ultimately, I admire how she uses technology to create socially, emotionally, and even physically uncomfortable situations that challenge conventional ideas of how computers and humans exist beside one another.
Iris Yip 15-104 Section D Looking-Outwards VIMEO VIDEO: UNEXPECTED SPACE EXPLORATION
For this week, I looked at Ariel Waldman’s works, the founder of Spacehack.org, and a multidisciplinary artist who works as the chair of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program council. A lot of her work explores the creative side of science and advocates for accessibility on the topic of space exploration and other interesting scientific topics.
The thing I personally admire about her most is her background as an art student and her continued mission to bridge the gap between more stem-oriented and artistically oriented practices in her work.
She also intentionally portrays herself as more approachable, especially seen in her youtube videos (which are done professionally but also with a casual tone) that fall in line with her general philosophy of making a traditionally more serious topic more whimsical and less rigid. One of the works of hers that caught my eye was her 2018 EYEO presentation, UNEXPECTED SPACE EXPLORATION. She goes into depth to take about her work at NASA that specifically works to foster more creative and “sci-fi-esque” ideas that could potentially work to transform future missions.
This art project of Onuoha, is called The Library of Missing Datasets
Mimi Onuoha is a creative practiioner, whose body of work illustrates her interest and expertise in seeing human patterns in data. She is a part of the Data Humanism movement in Creative Art, that artists Giorgia Lupi and Stephanie Posavec have started. She is interested in looking at how the the way information and data is modelled can reveal patterns about more than the data itself.
The thread that runs in her work is the messiness and unstructured nature of insights that run through standardised methods of measuring and collecting data for statistical methods. For example, in one of her projects she talks about, she tailed a few friends by their locations and was able to see which 2 of the 3 friends were closer to each other. Months after she was tracing patterns of their movement, the two she predicted to be close, moved in together.
Mimi Onuoha is an alum of the renowned NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, that prides itself as being “an art school for engineers” and an “engineering school for artists”. This illustrates her creative practice very well, because her work is about unravelling the disorganization among data that seems crisp and clean, with a creative muscle for patterns.
Creative Interrogations:
Mimi calls her work during ITP as ‘creative interrogations’. These were experiments that combined research, coding, writing to dive into ideas of how data was forming the world and ideas of the individual at the same time.
Personal Stories → Creative Interrogation → Building of a Database or Dataset
The Point of Collection
She says that if as a professional, you have not looked at how data is collected, you have not entirely understood the data itself. Through that statement, she illustrates how data collection and personal lives are entangled. And it gets harder to question the methods of data collection as the data points become more and more.
In this way, her artwork is not only data visualisation, but it is also a commentary on bringing to our notice the biases, ease and ethical questions of data collection
Ariel Waldman is a graphic designer who has focused her efforts on space exploration and space in general. She has created Science Hack Day, as well as her own website detailing how people can get involved with space exploration without needing to go into a STEM field directly related to space. Personally, I admire her work on Science Hack Day, as it’s a way for those not in STEM fields to get involved with things that they are interested in without the need for specializing in the related fields. Ariel uses humor to her benefit during presentations. She will make jokes to keep audience engagement high while staying relevant to her topic. Humor is a common strategy to increase engagement, but Ariel’s use of humor is skillful in her incorporation of it into her presentation.
Lauren McCarthy is an American artist and computer programmer whose work focuses on the impact of surveillance, automation, and network culture on social relationships. She is known for her performance, artificial intelligence, and programming/computer-based interaction work. McCarthy created p5.js, the version of JavaScript that we work with in class. She graduated from MIT, where she studied computer science and art and design.
McCarthy asks deep, thought-provoking questions in her work, such as “What is the purpose of art?” and “What is the relationship between attention and surveillance?” One of her projects that I find most intriguing, which I learned about in her Eyeo talk, was “Follower.” “Follower” is a service that provides a real-life follower for a day; you sign up, get an app, and wait to be matched, not knowing what will happen. Your assigned follower tracks you for a day (out of sight, but within your awareness) and takes a photo of you. While it seems very intrusive and scary to have a real-life follower, I think that this project raises some interesting questions and points to the complexities of human connection and desires.
Below I have included McCarthy’s Eyeo talk from 2019 as well as a video/images of her project “Follower.”
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