October 2022 – Page 3 – [OLD SEMESTER] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Looking Outwards – 08

Jennifer Daniel is a designer and is pursuing a career in illustration. Originally from Kansas, she moved to New York. Since then, her work has been published in a variety of publications. Jennifer has taught visual narratives for SVA’s masters program and recently moved to San Francisco. She was a professional communicator before working at an engineering company and now makes visual art.

In the eyeo festival Jennifer Daniel talks about an app she helped develop called allo. In the app you take a selfie and it makes automated emojis cartoons of your face. Traditional computers utilize mapping on the art to analyze pixels of an image. Algorithmically it examines attribute values to look for shape and colors. A well known problem is the uncanny valley of images. Emojis that look too close to the picture look scary. Machine learning can access and confront people about what they look like. Instead alo produces low resolution emojis which create a less realistic emoji. There is a customization feature of emojis. She talks about how she can as an art director design something for everyone when machine learning can reduce data about unique stories. She is aware of bias in computer algorithms and how it can promote racism and sexism. Art directors who work on these projects can work with artists with many perspectives to articulate their world. Not enough to make an avatar that is a literal representation of you when there are many versions of you.

What I really like about Jennifer Daniel’s app and project is that she takes an approach to illustrating similar to a UI UX designer, which is my dream career. She explains that visual vocabulary online is very vast. There are text, emoticons, emoji, and tiny illustrations. Emojis, gifs, stickers all make up an emergent complexity. Texting is closer to speaking than writing. People spoke first to communicate. Writing only came later. Writing is very different from talking. Writing is a conscious process while Speech is looser, text is like that. No one thinks about capitalization, we text the way we speak. Emoji is a Japanese word which is a combination of emoji and character and a very important form of digital communication in japan. Easy way to apologize or show nuanced communications. Emojis have a problem when trying to communicate something detailed. Automatic emojis can change meanings of texts. I’ve seen this with slack and face messenger. Emojis are not perfectly transferable across mediums. Ios emojis sent to an android emoji may look much different. Important emojis look similar across platforms and are cohesive but she wishes emojis used unicode like type fonts. More styles there are, the more variations can exist. Emojis have broadened the world of communication and it will be interesting to see how it shifts our language in the future.

https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2017

Jake Barton – Local Projects

Jake Barton is the founder of Local Projects, a media and physical design firm which specializes in creating interactive experiences. He is interested in the process of learning and memory: namely, escaping from the typical classroom method of lecture and memorization. Instead, he argues that we learn with our hands. The tools we use don’t just aid us, they inform our learning and actions. How can we engage in storytelling? Can we travel through time? Who tells the story? For example, in the 9-11 museum (designed in part by Local Projects), visitors hear oral histories from a vast array of different people. Visitors can participate by recording their own stories and memories, which are added to the museum archive, then shared and synthesized, thus making the memories more powerful.

Jake Barton presents at Eyeo 2015

In presenting the projects, Jake Barton reviews the core intents of the experience, then demonstrates these in practice by showing clips of people interacting with and reacting to the installation. This solidifies the otherwise lofty goals as educational aims that are truly attainable through great interdisciplinary design and storytelling.

As a student of architecture, learning design, and history, the engaging work of Local Projects fascinates me. Individuals can be active participants both in history and in their own learning process, rather than being silent receptacles of segmented facts.

Local Projects’ work at Cooper Hewitt encourages visitors to become designers. I was lucky enough to visit and design my own “wallpapers” and play with the various interactive interfaces.

Looking-Outwards-08

In this blog, I looked at Adam Harvey’s work and presentation. Harvey is a Interactive Telecommunications graduate of NYU with experiences in engineering and photojournalism at Penn State. In the presentation, he discusses his current projects, frame.io and megapixels.cc. Lots of his work deals with computations that are related to computer vision algorithms. For this specific presentation, it was a lot about the bias involved in surveillance and face recognition. I was really interested in the connection he makes within face recognition. In the lecture, Harvey also makes the unexpected connection between generic heat sensor camera softwares and ITA to aid his introduction. What I found very helpful was the examples he shows, especially short clips that demonstrate how their algorithms work through camera and imaging. Sections of the lecture like the one about the Brainwash Cafe were very helpful in demonstrating the risks in publicizing face recognition datasets and how they can be problematic. I really admired the way he not only showed us precedents of instances of problematic datasets, but he goes beyond to track where these datasets remerges and ends up in, to really demonstrate the risk involved.

(videos could not be embedded)

https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2022/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Eyeo-Festival-2019-on-Vimeo.html

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Looking Outwards 08 – aarnavp

Mohit Bhoite is a senior hardware engineer at Particle, where he designs and builds their flagship Internet of Things products, focusing on freeform circuit boards for sculpture and art pieces. He focused his education in robotics, specifically the discipline of modular robotics, which has influenced his art practice of free form kinetic sculptures.

Mohit’s work cleverly approaches the complex field of robotics and circuit board building, which is seen as a very strict practice. In his lecture, Mohit describes the duality behind his practice and traditional circuit board design, where his aligns with the concept of rapid prototyping, and appreciating the artistic intentions that occur when working without the constraints of “industry standards” such as 3D printing/mass production of circuits. I especially liked how he manages to incorporate aesthetic into his design, as he says he drew inspiration from stained glass in his circuit board designs – specifically his Tye Fighter alarm clock.

It’s very interesting how he approaches circuit boards as its own medium, looking at the materiality of them in shaping his practices – this iterative process is often very much used with artists and can definitely be applied to these more formal practices.

https://www.bhoite.com/

Looking Outwards 08: Lucianne Walkowicz

As her biography page stated, Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and the 2017-2018 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/LOC Chair in Astrobiology. She got her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington. Lucianne is a TED Senior Fellow and a practicing artist who works for a variety of media , ranging from performance and sound.

The work I admire about Lucianne is her creation of JustSpace Alliance, a non-profit organization advocating for a more just and inclusive space exploration, because her work attempts to solve threshold problems, relating more ordinary people to space technology. One example of this is when she gives people in the New York Subway the opportunity to ask her questions about astronomy.

One strategy Lucianne used is to tell some jokes about herself to reduce stress from herself and the audience, which, I think, allows her to talk more fluently and casually. She also uses many images to visualize her presentation as she talks about each topic. One thing I learned is that I can add an icebreaker in the beginning to relax myself and the audience when presenting my own work.

Link: Not Not Rocket Science

LO 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual – Mohit Bhoite

Mohit Bhoite creates free-formed circuit sculptures from a workshop in his home in Minneapolis and more recently in San Francisco. His creative practice and art form is inspired by his love of electronics and robotics. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and received his MS in Robotics there. His primary job is as an engineer at Particle where he designs and engineers custom circuit boards for the Internet of Things, IoT.

In his spare time, to wind down, he found a love of creating brass sculptures containing circuit boards. These sculptures are elegant in their simplicity. In his day job Bhoite focuses on utility and efficiency for his boards. In his art he focuses on the joy he finds in creating what he calls “useless” projects. I admire his projects because they bring him joy. Bhoite creates for the joy of it. His brass sculptures are clocks, thermometers, light sources, and games. His aesthetic is streamlined, soldered brass rods that emulate satellites, robots, or simple objects. His circuits and displays are connected to the internet and can convey a large amount of information. He likes to put human emotion into his displays rather than raw data. For example, he has an air monitor that displays a robotic happy face when the air is safe. It gets more distressed as the quality deteriorates.

Bhoite presented his process and work at the 2019 Eyeo Festival. He presents his work mostly through photographs, circuit schematics, and source code. He is inspiring because he shares everything about his process and simply wants to share the joy of creation. My favorite project of his is a sand particle generator. It is an LED emulation of falling sand as it is tilted.

Eyeo 2019 – Mohit Bhoite from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

The work I chose to look into for this week is from Mike Tucker. Specifically the project he did at Magic Leap. Mike Tucker describes himself as an interactive director, designer & developer. The project was an interactive an immersive space that combined art and music. More specifically, Mike teamed up with Sigur Ros to manifest the DNA of a new sound in a new reality. The website write, “Tónandi, which translates to sound spirit in Icelandic, is an interactive audio-visual exploration of the sounds and spirit of Sigur Rós.” What I admire most about Tucker’s project is that it combines art from three different sensory fields. As art and music can be seen as forms that fill and take up space, using touch to generate and change that space makes this project both complex but also grounded in the everyday. Although it is taking a big step into a world that is heavily based on computer generated data, the way the work is both immersive and grounded in the human experiences of the senses makes the piece feel more real then a lot of the other VR projects I’ve seen and read about. Mike Tucker, seen in his lecture, presented his work very pragmatically. He first begun by explaining the ‘why’ in his project followed by the ‘how’. Making sure every detail of the work was explained including the specifics of the technology. What I think made his presentation effective was the way he reached into the world of possibilities within the listener’s mind. He combined visual “proof” that essentially backed up what he was trying o achieve on the philosophical level. In addition, Tucker used key words such as “new reality” and “tomorrow” which hint at this sense of reachability and accessibility to the everyday person. Almost as if he was saying that dreams do come true. Making his work that much more appealing to the public.

Website link: https://mike-tucker.com/

Project link: https://world.magicleap.com/en-us/details/com.magicleapstudios.tonandi

Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Hyphen-Labs is an international community of women of color who are involved in the fields of design, art, and technology to produce works together. The interdisciplinary nature of the group allows them to focus on design processes through evolving discussions and the collective consciousness of social challenges in the community.

Work title: Prismatic_NYC

Link: http://hyphen-labs.com/prismatic.html

The Prismatic project is a kinetic sculpture located above the high line in NYC. The sculpture is constructed with 66 individual prisms that have integrated LED lights to create interesting forms of light beams. The rotation and translation of the prisms ‘design’ the behavior of lightning through space. I am amazed by this project because the designers are able to handle each prism’s rotation/speed/form differently to create a cohesive artwork. This requires meticulous planning beforehand in determining the algorithm of each prism, the direction of their rotations, and the interaction between every prism altogether. The team reimagined a new system to create this unique experience: tapering each prism and alternating their orientation. This strategy lets them control the visual vertices of one pair of prisms. The final product is an animated undulating wave of light concurrently achieving lateral translations of the 2D curve, which flows volumetrically through the space.

Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Nicole Aptekar

http://nicolation.net/

Nicole Aptekar is a paper sculptor and technologist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her works aim to turn basic digital forms into sophisticated, intricate, and elegant physical forms through technologies like “custom software” and “contemporary CNC fabrication methods”. Her works can be considered representations of the transition between the digital and physical forms as well as the transition between the virtual and the real world.

The works of Nicole Aptekar show high delicacy in structures and high craftmanship in the eventual prevented outcome. Her works mainly use the technique of overlay to overlay dozens of papers on top of each other. She makes each piece of paper slightly different than another, thus creating the eventual works not only amazing two-dimensionally but also three-dimensionally. I admire the series “METAFLUX” the most. Because for this series of works, the artist applies the color of black and white to create a marvelous color contrast effect as well.

To present her works, Nicole Aptekar includes high-resolution images to present her work not only two-dimensionally (showing how the works look from the top view) but also three-dimensionally (showing the works from an angle slightly above). She also included zoomed images to show the details. These are very effective strategies that I can learn from when presenting my own work.

For once in your life you have to pause. January, 2018. 40 sheets of paper.

Continuation/325. April, 2018. 40 sheets of paper.

Video

Looking Outwards – 08

This week I watched the lecture of Jennifer Daniel, who is an American designer, editor, and illustrator, and she also leads the Emoji Subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium, while working for The New York Times and The New Yorker. What people might not know is that Jennifer initiated the gender-inclusive representation movement for the emoji creation group around the globe that shares the same sets of Unicodes for emojis. Among the new gender-inclusive emojis that she created, Mrs. Claus, Woman in Tuxedo, and Man in Veil are the most famous ones. I admire the movement because I think as we develop, we should make all aspects of our modern technology more inclusive for more and more people, to further facilitate our advances. To do this, she believes that we need more and more emojis that can better represent individuals, thus she and her team developed several emoji-related apps such as Emoji Kitchen. While introducing those emoji-related apps during her lecture, she started with the very core and basic definition and evolutions of emoji, then explained every issue of the emojis that we are using and why we should improve them, eventually demonstrating how her works can solve those problems. I enjoy watching her lecture because of how direct her approach to the topic is and how simple she made her works look to non-programmers.