I like the work of Christina “Phazero” Curlee at Eyeo 2019. She has a degree in fine arts and a traditional art background. Phazero is self taught in 3D design and game creation. She began working in game design then later got serious after discovering her passion for it, which shows through in her presentation and work. Phazero says because she is self taught that gives her an edge in game creation because it teaches her to look at concepts differently, applying fine arts to game development creating a unique style. She thinks deeply about symbols and non-verbal communication. This definitely shows through in Phazero’s work “Art-Nouse” and “Artifacts” which is both an art game and an art piece. She uses stories about her past and her roots and also gives context on the game design industry to help people better understand her work and what is unique. She also shows many photographs and videos to help visualize the project and the progression of the project.

http://www.christinazero.com/artifacts.html

Christina Phazero Curlee is a game designer, specializing in emotional impactful and narrative driven Art Games. She describes herself as a “multi-disciplinary game designer” since she works seamlessly in multiple 3D editors, and does script coding, and uses her traditional art foundation in her game design process. She studied traditional art in college and even formerly worked as painte but also she is self-taught in game design, 3D Art, and programming. Her visual art foundation and self-teaching gave her an unusual framework as a game developer as she blends a principle, techniques, and subject matters found in fine arts with game conventions to create her own design style and language in game development.
Her body of work usually explores emotional experiences, marginalized identities, and digital consciousness. I admire her work “Artifacts II” the most as her passion in emotional storytelling is well brought out in this game. Artifacts II is a surreal narrative game about personal discovery and trauma such as chdildhood neglect; The game is set in a surreal storybook-like series of environments, representing memory spaces in the character’s mind. The character engtangles trauma in the mind and body and go through process of introspection and self evaluation as he/she plays. I admire the way she utilizes symbols to convey her personal experiencs, making an game environment conceptually rich, imaginative, and compelling.
To effectively present her work, she uses symbols such as enemies, scores, and timers to represent the concepts of love, fear, and defense mechanisms. Also, Artifact II uses elements of exploration (walking sims), RPG, and survival MDA (mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics) to effectively reveal the fragments of character’s past memories.

http://www.christinazero.com/

The speaker that I chose is Sasha Constanza-Chock on Design Justice. They are an associate professor at MIT and a non-binary trans-identifying person. Sasha is currently the Head of Research & Sensemaking at OneProject.org and an associate professor at Northeastern for Arts, Media, & Design. Sasha starts off by recounting a story about going through airport security, already apprehensive of what is to come. The TSA scan operator was prompted to choose either “male” or “female” on the UI. While Sasha presents as a woman, the millimeter scan labeled Sasha otherwise. Either way, Sasha is read by the technology as “risky” and is immediately flagged. Sasha’s story leads to design justice and dismantling oppressive design structures. Sasha is an effective communicator for their sincerity and detailed breakdown of topics. They wrote a book called Design Justice, breaking down community-led practices and how they can be reformed to be more inclusive. Sasha’s personal story was very digestible so that the audience can empathize and understand the issue at hand.

https://oneproject.org

https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019

For my Looking Outwards this Week I looked at the 2019 Lecture of the eyeo Festival (The Speaker being Adam Harvey). His previous work includes CV Dazzle (camouflage from face detection) and the anti-drone Burqa (camouflage from thermal cameras). I was interested in his work because I personally find face recognition kind of creepy. Personally I don’t use it on my phone, and I was interested to learn more. Adam Harvey breaks the face recognition tools by deconstructing them, and makes art, by constructing visuals on top of faces to make them unrecognizable. I learned to admire this project more as he talked about how easy it is for someone to use visual surveillance to watch you. His project is a rebellion against military or corporate use of surveillance and their  abuse of face recognition.   

Where do people get their data sets of people’s faces to study? Are these methods ethical? 

This talk overall made me afraid for the future. I don’t want to get my face scanned and then analyzed and I’m sure other people don’t want to either. I would see surveillance through face recognition as a breach of my freedom. And if Microsoft included my face in a database I would not be exactly thrilled, even if I had just done something as simple as post to social media. 

I am inspired by this talk because of the use of art and coding to be able to fight back or find out more about a very prevalent problem that needs to gain more recognition.

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

Deray Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe start their talk talking about police violence. Before Twitter, no one was really aware of the police violence in America, and even if they were aware, there was lack of information as to where the police violence was happening as well as how the police were targeting certain individuals. These graphs and collective information wasn’t available to the public and when Twitter came out, certain protesters including Deray Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe started to use this to this platform to their advantage and answer these questions using “crowd – sourced” data. They start talking about how there is a strategy to convince people there’s a crisis is different than the strategy to solve the crisis. There is also a difference between being awoke and staying awoke. They called that the Prepared to Win. I admire their awareness on the issue and how they continue trying to fight for what they believe in. Their short quotes begin to help me understand the issue at a small scale but begin to understand what they are really trying to say. 

Link to Website (Deray Mckesson)

Link to Website (Samuel Sinyangwe)

Alexander Chen

https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2017

Ths speaker is a musician and father and works at google. He talked a lot about how his children have influenced his work and the way he views music. His work mostly includes music and how we interact with it. He became fascinated by the way music works and was concieved. He made a ton of interactive visual instruments for people to use. He creates a very interesting interaction between graphic design, music theory and does it in a very “engineery” way. He analyzes music in a very technical way and I thought he was pretty unique.

Their name is Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz, they are an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the co founder of the JustSpace Alliance, an organization focused on making learning about, studying, and the exploration of space a more equitable and “just” field.

Dr. Walkowicz is also an artist, and they have a pretty large range of art styles and media. I admire in particular the work which connects with their astronomical background, as when I was little I was obsessed with the stars and wanted desperately to know about them, the people who might live around them, and what their stories might be. That another artist has pondered these questions from the perspective of actual astrophysics is really cool!

They often use humor and comedy in their presentations, keeping everything relatively lighthearted even when talking about difficult or serious subjects. It helps maintain their flow and character.

Sara Schnadt is an artist who also works in a variety of different fields mainly as a UX designer and software systems architect. She is currently a designer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is mostly focusing on software human interface design and different types of system architecture for machine learning for the Europa Clipper mission.

Personally, I was very intrigued by her work primarily because of the perspective, scale, and ambitious nature of the projects she creates and is heavily involved in. Sara Schnadt talks about how her work in NASA inspires the majority of her installation works and vice versa because she finds numerous similarities between the creative processes of both practices. Schnadt also discusses that although space projects involve an abundance of technological skills and an engineering mindset,
the projects should also be thought of as also creative projects and design problems, which opens up endless possibilities and complexities.

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.