I read the article “Women in Media Arts: Does AI think like a (white) man?” by Anna Grubenar. The societal issue that was discussed was the absence of diversity in supposedly objective algorithms, which produces biased data sets. These biased sets are fueled by not only the underrepresentation of women in tech but also the lack of minorities in the tech field. Furthermore, discrimination and racist/sexist tendencies are common in AI algorithms. For instance, AI facial recognition algorithms tend to make many more mistakes when analyzing women, and even more mistakes when analyzing women of color. The article also gave many pieces of artwork that were created to encourage diversity and inclusivity in tech such as “Gender Shades”, “Help me know the truth”, “Feminist Data Set”, and “Women Reclaiming AI”.

https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2020/04/10/women-in-media-arts-ai/

The work of Phoenix Perry most inspires me. She is an indie game developer and educator who is based in the United Kingdom. She went to the University of Tennessee and later to NYU for her master’s. On her website, she describes herself as “an artist and activist who often uses culture as a medium.” She also loves experimenting with social engagement through graph theory, mesh networks, and emergent systems. One of her works that stood out to me was Bot Party, which is a game that explores intimacy through physical play using sound. Essentially, when the game is played the 3 bots use bot-to-skin, skin-to-skin, and skin-to-bot communication and send encoded secret messages to each other. These secret messages are then relayed to the player in the form of sounds. Perry created this game because she saw the social phobia that exists involving holding hands and being friendly with one another. Check it out below!

http://playbotparty.com/2018/01/24/WhatIsBotPartyl-prep/

http://phoenixperry.com

By: Katie Makarska

The work of Jane Freidhoff most inspires me. She is an interdisciplinary creative researcher, artist, and game developer from New York. She loves to mix genres and types of media in her projects to create a socially impactful work of art that leaves people thinking. Her work is largely exploratory and her goal is to push boundaries both artistically and socially. One of my favorite works of hers is a game that she designed called Lost Wage Rampage which is a fast arcade driving game where two girls find out their male coworkers have been paid more than them so they decide to steal back what they feel is rightfully theirs. I like the concept of this game because it takes a social topic (unequal wages based on gender discrimination), and brings awareness to the subject in an entertaining light through an interactive game. Friedhoff now works as a senior UX engineer at Google, but she continues to add to her artwork and expand boundaries!

By: Katie Makarska

https://janefriedhoff.com

The work of Jonathan Jennings Harris most inspires me. He is an artist and technologist who often works with data. One piece of work that I found particularly interesting was “I Want You To Want Me” which he created in 2008. It is an interactive portrait illustrating the search for love(and self) through online dating. In this project, Harris and his team gathered data from hundreds of dating sites and displayed them in a series of interactive ways. On a touchscreen panel, many balloons are displayed in various colors. Pink for women and blue for men. The balloons also vary in value, with younger people having lighter-colored balloons and older people having darker-colored balloons. Inside the balloons lie animated silhouettes of people trapped inside looking for love. These balloons are then algorithmically matched on the screen based on what people said in their profiles. The user is able to click on a balloon to learn more about each person.

https://jjh.org

The work of Katharina Brunner most inspires me. She is an artist and data scientist from Germany that often uses randomness in her artwork. She also is involved in the fields of technical writing and research. Recently, she created a software package in R called generative art. She publicly posted this package on GitHub so that people can access and experiment with randomly generated art. According to her website, she says that her package allows for the creation of images based on thousands of points. Additionally, the position of every single point in the picture is calculated by a formula that takes in random parameters. Thus, every image looks different due to the built-in randomness. Her work stands out to me because she is creating her own artwork while simultaneously working to inspire others by giving them the initial tools to learn about the field of generative art. Check out her work below!

By: Katie Makarska

https://katharinabrunner.de/generativeart/

I tried to recreate a cable-knit sweater material!

I am most inspired by the work of Thomas Mangold. He is an artist from Dortmund, Germany that uses variations of shape, colors and dimensions in all of his work. He works with various mediums but most recently he has experimented with computational art. He makes all sorts of 3D art, but my favorite is his animal combinations where he combines two or more animals to create a very interesting and memorable final product. For example, he has combined a shark and a panda called Bluefin Tuna, and an elephant with a mouse called Mosquitofant. Mangold’s work is so unique that companies like WWF, Syfy channel, and Playstation reached out and partnered with him. He was also recently named on a list of the 30 best 3D digital artists of 2022. Although I am not familiar with the methods he used to create the artwork, I know that the overall concepts and levels of detail are very impressive.

By: Katie Makarska

I am most inspired by the work of ‘FORMS – String Quartet’. They are a live multimedia performance for a string quartet, electronic music, and panoramic visuals. Their project resides in the field of visual sonification, which means making sound through visual elements. I admire their work because it not only includes shapes, colors, and movement but also includes sound. When all of those elements come together it creates a completely immersive and engaging experience. Their project uses a real-time visual music score generator that is designed with a set of rules using graphic generation, driven by randomness and probability. On their website, they claim to use spectral synthesis algorithms to transform sound into graphics. These graphics are very interesting because they change shape, size, and color, and differ depending on if the music is transformed into bass or treble. For instance, if the notes are bass the graphic prints at the bottom of the screen, whereas if the notes are treble the graphics are printed towards the top of the screen.

https://www.creativeapplications.net/maxmsp/forms-string-quartet/ (2021)

By: Katie Makarska