Author: Midori

blog 11

   This week’s reading was related to AI. Something interesting that is arising from assistive technology based on AI is the influence of our biases. Because AI is fed on data that we give the programs, both the data and the process used to determine which data should be used allows for biases to seep in. An upsetting example I remember was from a few years ago, a black couple had taken a picture and had their image brought up when people were searching for gorilla pictures. Another example is that security cameras and face detection technology have far more errors when needing to identify the faces of people of color. These weren’t intention choices made by some asshole in some random cubicle but were instead a combination of numerous errors and biases baked into our society that we then fed to the algorithm. In one of my design classes we learned about how even cameras themselves were made to make and replicate lighter skin better, resulting in needing for overcorrection of darker skin tones and difficulty capturing faces etc. While it’s easy to be upset at Google, the algorithm, or technology for having these “biases” just from a simple glance it becomes obvious that they are only reflecting what we as a society have already created and enforced. AI is almost like a child, we teach it everything by feeding it what we know, yet when it comes out a certain way we get mad even though we were the direct creators.

Blog 9

This week’s emphasis was on women, non binary, and underrepresented people in computational art. A lot of the work was really cool and the artists were all people with diverse paths and specialties. The person I chose to focus on was Kate Hollenbach, I really enjoyed her work because her art is really focused around the relationship between the user and the thing or algorithm or whatever. Phonelovesyoutoo was a project I found hilarious. The premise was pretty simple, we spend time looking at our phones, what if our phones spent time looking at us. Hollenbach programmed her phone to record a video every time she unlocked it and was using it. 30 to 90 minutes of footage a day for a month. What came out was a collection of videos of staring blankly at the screen almost always in that double chin craneing the neck at an unhealthy angle. Pure relatable gold.

Blog 8

The person that I chose was Mike Tucker who presented during the 2019 Eyeo Festival. He is an artist that is involved in virtual reality and creating different ways of perceiving our surroundings. He has done work for  a good amount of big and small companies, some of which include Apple, Kanye’s video game, and Radiohead. His work is interesting because it allows people to experience art by being part of it. In one of his projects he has people touch and interact with the world and it creates a string of music notes which then play. These notes continue to exist but move around like real animals in an environment. 6DofControl is another project that demonstrates the way people interact with their surroundings and as a result of certain actions a collection of sounds would be played in the user’s ears. From looking into his work it seems that his biggest interests lie within VR and music, how do we make things that change based on the way we interact with them or their surroundings. What then do these changes make us do as a result, how would a distorted song make us react to a certain action? The videos of his work are necessary in order to understand because what he makes is so sensory based.

week 7 blog

Kim Rees visualizes data related to the black lives matters movement. Some of their work includes showing statistics about economic inequality as a city with differently sized sky scrapers and data laid out in the form of the periodic table. Other topics Reez covers include environmental, education, government, health, politics, and technological data and statistics. Most of the work is in an attempt to invoke a feeling for the need to change our current capitalistic and exploitative system. After stalking Kim’s twitter you can really see how decade they are to their work and continuing the thought provoking work they create. One of my favorite projects was about health and the increase in the lifespan of people but the disparity between how accessible health care is and as a result the difference in economic status and health. I don’t know, it’s nice seeing the data visualized, it give it more of an understandable and easier was of being digested.

week 6 blog

The article I ended up finding the most interesting wasn’t about a particular artist, it instead talked a bit about the history of randomness and then the application of randomness in art among other things now. One example that was given was in the field of architecture, randomness is used for things that are unimportant like blades of grass. But in other cases the randomness can be used to reveal patterns that were previously unnoticed or not given enough attention. Another example uses randomness to generate randomness which creates intrigue and surprise in designs. An example that I can think of is a website called coloors which uses random generation to create color palettes and when you save a color you like it bases the next colors off of that one. Although it isn’t completely random, it still is to some extent even if it does have limitations. I guess it’s more like a gaussian random function because it has some limitations that can be incorporated.

Week 5 blog

Roger Magrini is an artist that uses programs as well as manual correction to generate human faces that look insanely realistic. I was first introduced to his work by one of my friends in high school when they asked me to guess which of the people out of a set of pictures was a real person. The people are so fully rendered that it’s impossible to tell the difference between them and an actual person’s picture. I assume that the programs he runs have something to do with facial proportions and to get the final result he runs randomizers to combine traits, coloring, and proportions. I’m not sure how he is able to make the people look like people and take into account traits that usually come together like pale skin and freckles with lighter eyes etc because there are obviously exceptions to these groupings but I guess that’s all stuff that is much more complicated and stuff that is learned later on if I choose to continue to pursuing computing stuff related to rendering.

https://www.artstation.com/rogermagrini

Wallpaper/fabric

fabric sketch
function setup() {
    createCanvas(620, 600);
    background('skyblue');
}

function draw() {
    //blue patches
    for(let x=10; x<width; x+=240){
        for(let y=0; y<height; y+=240){
            patch(x,y);
        }
    }

    //other blue lol
    for(let x=130; x<width; x+=240){
        for(let y=120; y<height; y+=240){
            patchtw(x,y);
        }
    }

    //pig moving etc
    for(let x=70; x<width; x+=120){
        for(let y=50; y<height-50; y+= 120){
            pigg(x, y);       
        }
    }

    //rows of stitch up and down
    for(let x=10; x<width; x+=120){
        for(let y = 10; y<height; y+=20){
            cross(x, y);
        }
    }

    //row of stitch across
    for(let y =120; y<height; y+=120){
        for(let x=10; x<width; x+=20){
        cross(x,y);
        }
    }

}



function pigg (x, y){
    strokeWeight(1);
    stroke('black');
    fill('pink');
    //legs
    rect(x - 30, y, 10, 60);
    rect(x + 20, y, 10, 60);
    //bod
    ellipse(x, y, 100, 80);
    //ears
    triangle(x-10, y-20, x-20, y-15, x-20, y-30);
    triangle(x+10, y-20, x+20, y-15, x+20, y-30);
    //head
    ellipse(x, y, 50);
    //snout
    push();
    fill('plum');
    ellipse(x, y+10, 20, 10); 
    pop();
    //eyes
    push();
    fill('black');
    ellipse(x-10, y-5, 5);
    ellipse(x+10, y-5, 5);
    //nose hole
    ellipse(x-5, y+10, 2);
    ellipse(x+5, y+10, 2); 
    pop(); 
 
}


function cross(x,y){
    strokeWeight(1);
    stroke('yellow');
    line(x-10, y-10, x+10, y+10);
    line(x-10, y+10, x+10, y-10);
}

function patch(x,y){
    noStroke();
    fill('darkcyan');
    rect(x, y, 120, 120);
}

function patchtw(x,y){
    noStroke();
    fill('lightseagreen');
    rect(x, y, 120, 120);
}

week 4 blog

https://sonami.net/portfolio/items/ladys-glove/

One of the people listed in the suggestions was Laetitia Sonami. From a brief glance at her website it seemed like she used motion and other changing factors to produce music. I looked her up on Spotify and found her music kind of haunting but also intriguing. Usually I go through a couple of the people on the list before deciding to commit to one and research their work but I immediately was interested in her work. One of her main projects is something called lady’s glove. Originally it started as a simple mockup only using a kitchen glove and some wires and sensors but overtime Sonami has edited and improved the quality both visually and functionally. The basics are that the glove has sensors on the fingers that detect movement and a magnet which is used to ground/track the movement. These movements are then translated which allows then the sound to change and match movements. The glove became part of the performance, and instrument used to change the feeling of the music while also adding to the performative and mystical aspects that are woven into the style of music. 

string art

islandd sketch
function setup() {
    createCanvas(400, 300);
    background("lightsteelblue");
}

function draw() {
    strokeWeight(0.5);
    numLines = 30;

    //sun beams
    strt(-width, 0, width, 2*height, 0, 0, width, 0, 20, "yellow");
    fill("yellow");
    ellipse(width, 0, 100);  //sun

    //mountains
    fill("green");
    triangle(90, 150, 20, 250, 390, 250);
    triangle(290, 150, 390, 250, 20, 250);
    stroke("green");
    line(90, 150, 20, 250);    //left mountain
    line(290, 150, 390, 250);   //right mountain
    crshtch(90, 150, 20, 250, 290, 150, 390, 250, numLines, "palegreen");
    crshtch(290, 150, 390, 250, 90, 150, 20, 250, numLines, "palegreen");

    //water
    fill("lightseagreen");
    rect(0, 250, 400, 50);
    lne(0, 250, 0, 300, 400, 250, 400, 300, 30, "blue");

}


//diag crosshatch
function crshtch(x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3, x4, y4, numLines, colour){
    stroke(colour);
    dx3 = (x4-x3)/numLines;
    dy3 = (y4-y3)/numLines;
    dx1 = (x2-x1)/numLines;
    dy1 = (y2-y1)/numLines;
    dx2 = (x4-x3)/numLines;
    dy2 = (y4-y3)/numLines;
    for(var i = 0; i <= numLines; i ++){
            line(x1, y1, x4, y4);

            x1 += dx1;
            y1 += dy1;
            x2 += dx2;
            y2 += dy2;
            x3 += dx3;
            y3 += dy3;
    }
}

//light lines
function strt(a1, b1, a2, b2, a3, b3, a4, b4, numLines, colour){
    stroke(colour);
    dx3 = (a4-a3)/numLines;
    dy3 = (b4-b3)/numLines;
    dx1 = (a2-a1)/numLines;
    dy1 = (b2-b1)/numLines;
    dx2 = (a4-a3)/numLines;
    dy2 = (b4-b3)/numLines;
    for(var i = 0; i <= numLines; i ++){
            line(a1, b1, a4, b4);
            a1 += dx1;
            b1 += dy1;
    }

}

//straight lines
function lne(x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3, x4, y4, numLines, colour){
    stroke(colour);
    dy1 = (y2-y1)/numLines;
    dy3 = (y4-y3)/numLines;
    for(var i = 0; i <= numLines; i ++){
            line(x1, y1, x3, y3);

            y1 += dy1;
            y3 += dy2;
    }
}

Blog 3

Computational Design
Looking at the link to the pinterest board titled “computational design”, a lot of interesting and unique patterns are saved onto the board. Some are more geometric while others are more organic but they all seem to fit together as a whole. I often am pretty pessimistic and feel like I don’t learn as much as I would like to in classes and moments like these are nice because they show that I actually have. If you asked me three weeks ago how I thought that these patterns were created I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but after learning the random line generation code I have a simplified idea of how they were made. It seems like a lot of interesting and efficient patterns can be made this way. Unlike people the computer can consider and compute an answer while considering tons of variables. For example structure, weight, direction, etc can all become complex variables that are called upon while creating a pattern like the ones we saw. A lot of these kind of look like those “futuristic” ultra light shoes that companies love making renderings of.