LookingOutwards-08 – [OLD SEMESTER] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

LO 8

Adam Harvey is an artist based in Berlin. He graduated from the ITP program at NYU and before that, he majored in engineering and photojournalism at Penn State. His work focuses on computer vision, digital imaging technologies and he often gives talks about data and computer vision. Many of his works center around the idea that the collection of images of people has become normalized, however it is still largely unregulated and problematic because they may not know what their images are being used for or even if images of them are being captured. I find his works interesting because they explore implications of invasions of privacy and with his work, how visualizations and reports can allow people to understand how images are being used to power the facial recognition industry. One project in particular, Researchers Gone Wild, showcases discoveries made during his other research project, MegaPixels, but it makes the information more visual. Additionally, when looking at how he presents his research projects, I noticed that there was not a lot of text on the screen and was more visual which is something that I could incorporate into my presentations because it is more engaging for viewers.

LO 08

Mike Tucker is an interactive director, designer, and developer who has been working at Magic Leap for the past 5 years. I was inspired by his spatial computing projects and even more so after his lecture at EYEO. I am personally very interested in the fields of AR and VR and how they can change the human experience. While he started his career with graphic design, he seems to be more interested in combining music with interactive digital environments. The project he presented at EYEO 2019: Tonandi, was especially interesting to me because of all the different senses incorporated into it. Including sight, sound, and motion, it is amazing how immersive digital environments can be designed nowadays. The lecture itself was effective in showing the actual experience of using the headset Magic Leap designed. Tucker presented videos showing live demos of the VR projects and how the user can interact with the virtual environment. The videos are also shot from a first-person perspective so the viewer can see the project as if they are using the VR headset themselves.

Tonandi project

LO8: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Lecturer: Sasha Costanza-Chock
https://www.schock.cc/

Eyeo 2019 – Sasha Costanza-Chock on Vimeo

Sasha Constanza-Chock (they/she) is a design researcher who works in the field of design justice through community-led processes. They focus on dismantling the matrix of domination and oppression through design processes. Constanza-Chock is the Director of Research and Design at the Algorithmic Justice League and is a associate professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I really admire their work in using the power of design thinking and solutions to dismantle the systems of oppression of white
supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settle colonialism. I’m really passionate about inclusive design, where co-designing with actual communities involved in the problems are given an opportunity to be involved in a fair and meaningful design process. In terms of the presentation itself, I really appreciated the way that Constanza-Chock broke down their topics into easily digestible and understandable segments.

Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

The artist I chose to learn about this week is Alexander Chen, a Creative Director at Google Creative Lab who focuses primarily on music visualization. He has contributed to a plethora of tools and gadgets that bring a new perspective to sound. One of his projects, the Spectrogram, is probably the most visually appealing spectrogram widely used on the internet. In his Eyeo Festival presentation, he demonstrated how different types of sounds look on the spectrogram and how harmonies can be easier to conceptualize when the frequencies are mapped out spatially. Other projects of his, like a string instrumental version of the New York City subway system and its real-time schedule, bring together many abstract ideas into one cohesive work. I personally love the simple style of his pieces and the way he chooses to follow curiosity to create unique experiences. As a musician working in production and engineering, it is exciting to see new ways of experiencing music and to think about sound through a brand new lens.

Alexander Chen

MTA.ME transformes a New York subway map into a string instrument

LO-08 Creative Practice of an Individual

Alexander Chen is an artist and creative director at Google. He specializes in music visualization and experimentation in Cambridge, MA.
His educational background is focused in Engineering and Digital Media Design at UPenn.
He has worked on a number of fascinating projects as a freelancer, including a program that turns NYC’s subway system into a musical instrument.
His experience playing viola also inspired him to examine classical music such as the Bach Cello Suite and visualize it using string physics.
At Google, Chen has contributed to the Les Paul Google Doodle as well as the Chrome Music Lab.
I found Chen a very relatable and open speaker, and I think I share a similar connection to music, as I feel like visual art and music have strong ties to one another.
As a classically trained pianist/violinist, his Baroque.me project was particularly meaningful to me and opened my eyes to the possibilities of music visualization.
It changed the way I listened to a piece I’d listened to probably a hundred times before.
In terms of strategy, I was particularly impressed with the number of demos Chen had to offer the audience, which kept them engaged and entertained.
https://www.chenalexander.com/Bio
https://vimeo.com/232541082 embedding is not working 🙁

Looking Outwards – Adam Harvey

My speaker was Adam Harvey, who is an American artist and researcher based in Berlin. For college, he studied at Penn State for his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, and at NYU for his master’s in computational photography and technology. Currently, he works in computer vision, digital imaging, facial recognition, and counter surveillance. His main work involves finding biases in facial recognition algorithms and working backwards to discover flaws in those various algorithms. While it sounds very simple, Adam’s work is incredibly important for our digital safety. Facial recognition is becoming extremely cheap to implement and combining that with the digital world producing so much free information, there is a wealth of data that is at the access of anyone at any time. Through Adam’s work, if he is able to better control and predict the way in which facial recognition will act, it will better protect us in the digital world.

In his presentation, he does a great job of connecting his pictures with his speech so that it doesn’t overload the listener with information. In addition, he does a great job of simplifying the content he is explaining, that makes it clear that he deeply understands what he is talking about, but he is giving just enough information to not overcomplicate it but make it simple enough to understand.

Link to the speaker’s website: https://ahprojects.com/

Lecture video: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019

One of their projects that I admire: https://ahprojects.com/megapixels/

Looking Outward – 08

Quote from Molly Steenson Presentation at2017 Eyeo Festival

Molly Wright Steenson has studied artificial intelligence and its relation to architecture. In her talk at Eyeo in 2017 she goes back to the origins of artificial intelligence and explains how this process is new at all. She’s a professor here at CMU in the School of Design. She studied Architecture at Princeton and then got a master’s in environmental design at Yale. As a historian she studied artificial intelligence and traced how it’s poured over into various aspects over the last 50 years. She describes herself as a writer, professor, historian, and designer. Most recently she works as a professor researching the “history of design, architecture, computation and artificial intelligence.” Steenson studies the past very deeply in order to understand how the topic will affect the future. Specifically, in her Eyeo talk she highlights the importance of the history of artificial intelligence by understanding the ideas of influential people within the field since the beginning. She looks at three architects, Cedric Price, Nicholas Negroponte, and Christopher Alexander, that connect to artificial intelligence. One more recent project that’s interested me is her connection of the internet to the pneumatic postal service starting in the late 19th century. In her essay, “A Series of Tubes”, she goes into depth about the history of the internet and computation, going as far back in time to the beginnings of the postal service. The way she presents her ideas is really effective because she shifts people’s perspective from all the things they presently hear on the topic and boils it down to the history of her ideas. In this way she connects the audience to a larger context of the topic and creates a base understanding that supports her beliefs. I could learn from this on my own projects by digging deep into the roots of my topic or issue, understanding the complexities within the history to see the underlying connections that would help reach an audience, giving them a larger outlook before going into specifics.

Vimeo 2017 Eyeo Festival

Website Link: http://www.girlwonder.com/

Essay Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/780725

Looking Outwards 08

For this Looking outwards I selected Hyphen-Labs 2018 lecture.

They are small company that started in 2014. The company is ran internationally by a team of women of color. They like to transition in-between realities and push the envelope with design, science, and conceptual art to address problems and make aesthetically pleasing things.

One of their projects that I enjoyed was their products that they created to help protect protestors. The first product was an earring that would film police brutality and automatically upload to a cloud or a cop watch. The second product was a scarf that would cause technology to detect faces on the scarf and the thought behind this is to possibly overload a system that may be trying to detect protestors faces in the future.

Hyphen-Labs Prismatic Light Project

During their lecture, I really liked how they presented their light project because they had a close up video of the gear turning. I am not sure if it was CAD or a real video but it gave a lot of visual explanation of how the piece worked with just that one video. Also their overall cinematography of all their pieces was beautiful and made it all look so cool and professional and I think that can really make a design even better then it is.

Eyeo 2018 – Hyphen Labs

Link to their website: hyphen-labs.com

LO: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Meow Wolf’s Eyeo 2019 Festival presentation

Meow Wolf is an art collective that specializes in, and is best known for, creating large-scale immersive art installations, although they also produce streaming content, music videos, and arts and music festivals. They formed in February of 2008 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and presented their first large-scale installation, House of Eternal Return, in the same year. They have since expanded to several permanent installation exhibits across the nation, including Omega Mart in Las Vegas and Convergence Station in Denver. I was initially drawn towards watching Meow Wolf’s lecture simply because I had heard of them from a friend, but their work is so much more interesting now that I know more about it. It’s incredibly admirable how much attention to detail there is and there has to be. To have such an interactive exhibit that people can go as far as to climb on it, the entire installation has to be incredibly well built and well thought out. This became even more clear through Meow Wolf’s presentation. They had a very casual presentation, but they were also able to show how passionate they were about the art installations. I can tell that they care a lot about what they do, but they know that their work also speaks for itself.

House of Eternal Return, 2008-Present

https://meowwolf.com/

LO 8

https://meowwolf.com/

Meow Wolf is a group of artists in Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Denver that emphasize on experiences that are magical, surreal, playful, and transformative. Their mediums include installation, video, music production, and extended reality content. Something that I’ve noticed about their work is the vibrancy and color. They use UV lights, neon colors, and colored LEDs to create a dream-like atmosphere. People have described it as multidimensional, “a Salvador dali painting”, and a real-life video game. In the Santa Fe exhibit, you enter through normal rooms in a grand way: from a fridge in a kitchen setting, fireplace in a living room, and washer in a laundry room. After entering, each room in the exhibit has a different atmosphere, from space-like rooms to a magical treehouse.