Category: SectionD

Iris Van Herpen’s Computational Couture

As a foremost, I admire the aesthetic beauty and its gracefulness of the designs themselves – along with the serenity and eeriness her lines, especially this one, brings out in the show. I have always been interested in fashion and as an architecture major, the two seem to be a great successful collaboration done by Iris Van Herpen.

There were numerous people involved, including the designer herself, cloth makers, computational designers, music artists etc. I assume each piece takes weeks or months to come up with and finish.

I believe this project consists of many different softwares including revit, grasshopper, rhino, javascript, etc. From my research, the designer seems to have created the project using her own creativity and influences from her personal experiences in life.

The designer, mentions, is influenced by little things in life such as umbrella hooks, hair pins, etc.

Here is where you would enter your blog text.

Pixar is where I would work if I didn’t work at CMU.

Espen Kluge , “Alternatives”

During my deep dive into tech artists, I came across a portrait series by Espen Kluge titled, “Alternatives”. The creation process included compiling multiple photographs and reworking them with creative code to arrive at an abstracted portrait. Each portrait uses soft colors which portrays a gentle color scheme to a harsh compilation of lines and geometric shapes. His portraits feel architectural, but are toned down by their muted colors. It’s interesting to note that he experimented with different facial expressions per portrait to arrive at an abstracted face. In an interview, he states,” evolution has trained us to read the nuance of human facial expression with a higher degree of sensitivity than any other visual input.” his focus on the subtle expressions are covered by the multiple generated vectors on his portraits, but still evoke the creases and lines of a facial expression. He used processing and JavaScript to create his colorful portraiture series and explained that the code loops through all the pixels at semi random, and generates lines between the pixels to create the portraiture.

One computational project that I found inspirational was “datum” by Norimichi Hirakawa. This project was an audiovisual installation built through pixels. This project was part of Hirakawa’s residency program at the Kavli IMPU, where he experimented with the boundary between the human’s perceptible and imperceptible beauty. The pixels of the footage is arranged in a 6-dimensional space. Using pictures taken by the artist himself, he turns them into a mathematical analysis of pixels that warps curve, gradiation, motion, and color. This project shows how technology and computational art can be used to challenge concepts such as beauty and the sublime while also bringing together science and art by representing it through the beauty in the nature of data. I find this project to be inspirational through the visual and emotional impact that the project holds to the viewer, leaving them in strict awe. The binary aspect of art and science in his work blends creativity and coding.

Norimichi Hirakawa: http://counteraktiv.com/