Refik Anadol’s ‘Living Architecture: Casa Batlló’ For a long time, works of Refik Anadol has inspired me and makes one think beyond the world of reality. The specific project developed by him named – Living Architecture: Casa Batlló, uses data collected from the environment around Casa Batlló, an architectural masterpiece designed by Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona, Spain. Usually, immersive art is projected to the walls within a building, but in this case the artwork I projected on the exterior, bringing life to the built environment. The artwork itself uses machine learning and Artificial intelligence to replicate the city’s mood by real-time data gathering such as climate or local festival.
In one of Refik’s projects named – Machine Hallucinations: Moma, he uses StyleGAN2 ADA to capture the machine’s hallucinations of modern art in multidimensional space. Looking forward towards the future, such techniques and technologies can provide advanced design synthesis in the field of architecture.
I am highly inspired by the 3D rendered designs made by @cyborgypo (on instagram). This artist brings collages to a whole new level and dimension, and I love the whimsical and cyber contrasting notes they include in their pieces. Although I am not entirely sure what specific softwares and platforms they used, I can assume they used something like Adobe Illustrator to create svgs (scalable vector graphics) and imported them into an 3D rendering platform like Blender. This artist may have been inspired by the melting/blob chrome effects that are taking over recent design trends, and also the cyber/ digital archive aesthetic. Their projects point to editorial graphics, or even fashion or magazine design and marketing. Unfortunately, the artist does not provide their name, nor do they officially title their pieces, but their profile and works can be found via the links provided.
one of @cybergypo ‘s works; an amalgamation of textures, shapes, and multi-dimensional layers.
The interactive piece that I picked is “untitled” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The basis of the art piece is that it is a spilled pile of candy that weighs about 175 pounds. The weight of the colorful candy represents the artist’s partner that died of AIDS. The concept of the project is that when people view the installation, they are able to take a piece of candy with them and it is supposed to be reminiscent of the way that his partner slowly diminished before he died. The project was an interactive piece in the media of candy so it did not use any software or scripts to create. This interactive piece was one of the first of quite a few that were also interactive pieces surrounding the love and loss themes that surrounded the AIDS epidemic and how it ravaged the LGBTQ community specifically gay men. In my opinion, it points toward other interactive pieces that allow for the viewers to step into a new perspective whether it is the perpetrator, like in the case of the piece by Gonzalez-Torres, or into the shoes of those affected by it.
This is a link to some descriptions of his pieces that were installed in museums around the country.
‘landscapes of love’ is a webzine culmination of the work of participants in [digital love languages], a class about building software upon the assumption of shared love and communality in online spaces. this project rests under the umbrella of the school for poetic computation (sfpc), a new york-based experimental school of interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware, and critical theory.
as a humanities student at one of the most prominent preprofessional and technical schools in the country, I really admire the marriage of humanistic and innovative research and teaching that this project represents. no idea how long it took them to make, but the class took place over the course of summer 2020, so I can’t imagine any single contribution to the zine required more than 3 or 4 months of work.
creating this project likely required some combination of custom and existent software. ‘landscapes of love’ and the sfpc in general may have been inspired by or working in close conjunction with thinkers and makers in design justice, radical information architecture, generative / game artists like everest pipkin, etc.
I am inspired by the software used to create the water in Moana, my favorite Disney movie. The water is animated in an incredibly realistic way, causing viewers to feel Moana’s longing for the ocean. Disney’s software team created a program called Splash, which works in tandem with a 3D animation software called Houdini (third party software) in order to show how water reacts to different settings and objects. The creators were inspired by the largely unrealistic looking water in The Little Mermaid, wanting to animate water in a more detailed way than they had before. The effects lead, Ramos, said the team spent over a year and a half working on getting the water to match the Pacific Ocean, where the film is set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo Animated by Ron Clements and Jon Musker LaFrance, Adrienne. “The Algorithms behind Moana’s Gorgeously Animated Ocean.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 6 June 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/the-algorithms-behind-moanas-gorgeously-animated-pacific-ocean/528645/.
1: The project that I admire a lot is an architecture project called The Morpheus Hotel. Its logic of generating the building and using computer science to help create the building shape is very interesting. 2: Zaha Hadid Architects and Front Architecture created this project. The project started in 2017 and finished designing in 2018. 3: I’m not very sure about the software they are using, but BIM technology is the main technology they used to generate the building shape. 4: Zaha Hadid is an architect that’s famous for creating nature-inspired and organic buildings. The Morpheus Hotel has corridors connecting the middle part of the building, which looks very organic and imaginative, so I think Zaha might get the inspiration from trees in nature, water, and stuff like that. 5: This project points out a way for Architecture to collaborate with computer science, and it creates a lot of possibilities for architecture to be more organic, has more dramatic shapes, and look more unique. 6: link to text here.
Video games have always fascinated me. It is a testament to their function as an art form when people such as myself can derive enjoyment from titles in the medium without having ever played them. One in particular, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, has been a dream of mine to play. I am enamored by its aesthetics and by what I imagine its gameplay to be. The game was developed by Nintendo in the span of about two and a half years using a custom game engine. It was an artistic departure from previous entries in the series, utilizing a technique known as cell shading on its 3D models in order to give the game the appearance of a cartoon. This was initially a very controversial decision, but the game is now a beloved title for how well its graphics have stood the test of time. It goes to show the importance of strong, intentional art direction above pure realism in game design.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, developed by Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development Division under the direction of Eiji Aonuma.
The project I’d like to talk about is Supergiant Games’ Hades, a video game where you play as Zagreus, Prince of the Underworld, on a quest to battle his way out of the Underworld and meet his mother. It was named the 2020 Game of the Year, and is a rogue-like dungeon crawler meaning principally 2 things: 1. Progress is reset when you die, 2. Each run is different because the sequence of rooms you go through is randomized.
Rogue-likes are notorious for being mechanically difficult and requiring alot of repetition to master and ultimately enjoy. Despite this, Supergiant managed to implement a rather sophisticated and intricate dialogue tier system a involving a cast of 29 characters and 20000 unique lines of voiced dialogue. The integrated storytelling, beautiful art style, atmospheric soundtrack, combined with the baseline permanent progression and customizable build systems, bolster the games’ replayability such that even 2 years later people are still playing and producing content centered around Hades’.
The development time for Hades was 3 years, which is standard for the video game industry. Supergiant is a small independent indie game company based in San Francisco, comprised of around 20 people.
The thing that is astounding about the Supergiant team is that they do not ‘crunch’, or undergo compulsory overtime during game development, which is another industry standard. Their approach to project management and internal team relations are well planned out, flexible and healthy, resulting in a high employee retention rate, which is incredibly rare.
Almost all notable assets are either custom or created in-house, from the art to the music to even the game engine which is based on the Microsoft XNA framework, written in C# and was rewritten for better game performance and cross platform support during the development of Hades.
Hades is described as “a reaction to Pyre, which was a reaction to Transistor, which was a reaction to Bastion”, all of which are the studio’s previous games and inform different aspects of the game, from overall workflow and anti-burnout failsafes, to the top-down isometric camera position, to the idea of continuing narration and story across multiple attempts, to offering different abilities.
Given the way the team approaches games and game design, the next game Supergiant will release will develop on the themes, mechanics and storytelling devices explored in Hades and their previous projects, such as dungeon-crawlers and procedural room generation, or non-linear storytelling. Which one exactly that will be, is difficult to say, as Supergiant have yet to release any details on their blog.
Authors: Supergiant Games (Amir Rao, Gavin Simon, Darren Korb, Jen Zee, Greg Kasavin, Andrew Wang, Logan Cunningham, Josh Barnett, John-Paul Gabler, Dexter Friedman, Eduardo Gorinstein, Alice Lai, Joanne Tran, Caitlin Sales, Will Turnbull, Nikola Sobajic, Devansh Maheshwari, James Auck, Allison Rassmann, Ellis Powell, Morgane Malville, Craig Harris)
This summer, I watched a YouTube video about creating animation inside Minecraft. Usually, when making Minecraft animations, people can make it inside Minecraft by recording interactions between players. Or they make it in 3D animation software like Blender or C4D. However, the author introduced a new method by combining the previous two. He first made an animation in Blender. Then he converted the objects into voxels (pixels in 3D), so Minecraft could recognize them. Finally, the voxels were imported into Minecraft frame by frame, where he took screenshots of each frame. The author used python to write the plugins for converting and importing objects.
Explosion simulation finished in Blender and imported in Minecraft
This project opens up a new creative approach to creating more challenging animations like explosions and fluid simulations inside Minecraft that can only be made in professional 3D software. I admire this project as it combines two software in a completely new way and provides new inspirations for 3D animators. Besides, the author developed genius solutions in converting smooth objects into voxels and assigning Minecraft texture for each voxel according to its color. His way of analyzing and troubleshooting the problem is what I can learn from.
I like the interactive art exhibit for Claude Monet that I once visited. It was designed by Associate Director of Exhibits Jordyn Melino. It took several months to put together. I believe the project took custom software because it involves the use of motion detectors to set off different sounds and images as one goes through the exhibit. The different sounds are supposed to make you believe that you are outside Monet’s studio hearing him paint. The images that show up as one walks around are his paintings and other images of materials and other things depending on what buttons you touch or things that you walk past. I believe this project is inspired by Claude Monet’s artworks and other interactive art exhibits. Possibly even the ones in children’s museums that involve even more sense. This project points to more interactive art exhibits in the future. Possibly involving even more sense next time.
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