Looking Outwards: Unnumbered Sparks

The project I chose to look at this week was Aaron Koblin’s Unnumbered Sparks, when I first visited his website I was immediately drawn to the striking visuals of the piece. On a surface level, it looks like a massive, ethereal, floating structure reminiscent of a net. But it isn’t just so, as the colors and striking visuals that are displayed across this structure are all controlled in the background by a single website. I really admire how it is an artwork that engages its viewers and promotes interactions between viewers themselves, as well as, between viewers and the artwork. By logging onto a website, people are enabled to draw their own distinct patterns or visuals which are then projected up onto this sculpture.

It was impressive the amount of thought given into the piece, not only from a computational standpoint. There were also considerations of how the sculpture would interact with the environment and environmental factors such as the wind. It also looked at the different experiences it would create for people depending on the distance at which they view the sculpture. Behind all these considerations, is the computational aspect itself which lent itself not only to the aesthetic of the final artwork but also the ideation and planning of the artwork too. Koblin described the process in where they built the whole 3D modeling environment itself directly in Chrome through WebGL, using that as a tool to help them sample light from the virtual sculpture and project that onto the real life object.