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Ron Morrison, an interdisciplinary artist with degrees from universities all over the globe including Parsons and University of Ghana-Legon, is currently a PhD fellow at USC and continues to build a body of work that is inherently personal to them. Their pieces seek to understand and represent “residual black data,” meaning the pieces of black history that have been erased through data visualizations that, though correct, do not encapsulate the experience of what is shown. For exmaple, their map piece, which uses glasses you might get at a 3-D movie showing, uses blue and red linework as a way of showing people how information is filtered for data visulization. Their Eyeo 2019 presentation uses 20th century U.S. river cartography to express the difference between viewing a river as a boundary or object used for transportation and using a different visual representation to see it as a meaningful form to represent change overtime. I thought this was especially effective in getting their point across that, depending on how you view things, you might see them entirely differently, and I will certainly use this to guide my work in architecture. Morrison’s work, especially their pieces focusing on redlining and slow violence in black communities are incredibly powerful and show new ways that we can view information with the tenderness that is necessary when dealing with difficult issues.
Category: LookingOutwards-08
Looking Outwards-08
The artist I choose is Helena Sarin, a visual artist and software engineer. She is not only skilled with computing and software design, but also moonlighted in applied arts like fashion design. Her core art work with GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), which provides her probability to create and try new model and new data, also giving unpredictability inspirations.
Her artwork has am interesting art philosophy, that seeing the world in a different way. The research GAN in her project firstly record the object without any emotional stuff, than the art GAN get rid of useless details in the recording and guide people to the essence by training data. And algorithm complexity, data ownership and idea all play important roles in her process of creating art.
The aesthetic value of GAN art is also need to be notice. Her work usually contains collaging different things together, fracturing images and recombining elements through algorithms to form new scene structure.
Link to her own website: https://aiartists.org/helena-sarin
Link to her speech: https://vimeo.com/354276365
Looking Outwards 08
Eyeo 2018 – Jane Friedhoff
Jane Friedhoff is an intellectual researcher and game developer. She focuses on exploring new mediums and creating new and usual relationships between people.She creates power fantasy games that give power to those who are not powerful. All her games give power to groups that were not typically powerful in power fantasies. Her inspiration came from the era of riot girl and riot girl games which use rules to and mechanics to value what the rest of the world doesn’t. Jane focuses on creating a desired world and internal catharsis or emotional experience rather than education.
She presents in a very engaging and captivating way; she shows her games as images and videos of gameplay while she describes her concepts. Her presentation was interesting to me because after hearing her concept, her games had a new meaning and connected in a storyline that made a lot of sense.
Food as data
Moritz Stefaner is a data visualizer focusing on UI design. He aims to create unique data representations to raise people’s awareness of problems and encourage them to develop solutions. In the lecture, he mentioned the concept of a hyperobject, an entity that challenges people’s traditional way of thinking. A dataset could similarly be viewed differently from not just pie charts or bar charts. For example, a heat map is not the only option to show a range of temperatures. This revolutionary mindset makes me interested in his work that reflects hyperobject.
To achieve this, he tried to make the data more tangible and experiential. One of his projects involved using food as a tool to represent data. The information was revealed through the recipe, the layout, and the flavor, which was a more effective way to understand the data. One of the dishes was a series of coffins made of chocolate with different fills inside. Each fill represented a cause of death. It humorously referred to the line, “Life is a bottle of chocolate; you never know what you get.”. I never realized that taste could reflect data. In my work, I will try to break the conventions of traditional representation and link the data to something unexpected but exciting.
LookingOutward-08 Adam Harvey
Link to his Website (MegaPixel): https://ahprojects.com/megapixels-glassroom/
Link to his Lecture: https://vimeo.com/354276111?embedded=false&source=video_title&owner=8053320
I investigated the lecture by Adam Harvey, an American artist based in Germany.
His research focuses on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance
technologies. After finishing his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn
State, Harvey then pursued a master’s in interactive telecommunications at NYU.
Adam Harvey’s current works include MegaPixel, a facial recognition software
that compares the user’s facial qualities with a database and returns a face
from the database that has the highest similarities. This project mainly
creates awareness of the normalization of databasing people’s faces without
regulation. In many of his other works, such as DFACE, a face
recognition algorithm that redacts faces in images to protect the privacy of
protestors and other individuals. This is especially important in the fast
digitalization society, with more and more algorithms that detect faces and
uploads them to further databases like MegaPixel, it would be crucial for
researchers like Adam Harvey to create apps that help protect people’s privacies.
protestors and other individuals. This is especially important in the fast
digitalization society, with more and more algorithms that detect faces and
uploads them to further databases like MegaPixel, it would be crucial for
researchers like Adam Harvey to create apps that help protect people’s privacies.
Harvey’s strategy in his speech is in a continuous fashion, where he starts with
the previous project, explains details that lead to his current assignment, and
then starts giving an overview of his current projects. This gives the
audience a complete understanding of the process that led to the conclusion. He
also does a good job of simplifying the concept of his projects, making
it, making it easier for the audience to understand the final concept.
Blog 08 – The Creative Practice of an Individual – srauch
I watched Deb Chachra’s talk on architectural biology and biological architecture. Chachra considers herself an engineer rather than an artist; she’s a professor of engineering at Olin College in Massachusetts. While her primary focus is on making engineering more accessible and inclusive, particularly in the realm of where engineering and gender intersect, she also has an interest in where material science and biology intersect. This talk was about the overlaps between biological structures and architectural engineering. As she explains, with architectural calculation and fabrication techniques evolving as they are, we’re approaching being able to create structures that imitate bone that provide the highest possible strength to weight ratio and can “heal” themselves.
Bone-like building structures would be a spectacular example of biomimicry, a branch of design I find fascinating. Biomimicry is the practice of imitating nature to create the most efficient design possible – after all, there’s no better designer than 3.7 billion years of evolution. Because biology and engineering don’t traditionally intersect, it takes someone who is interested in both to ideate such solutions, which is why I admire Chachra’s ingenuity to be crossing fields and embracing the emergent potential. Beyond her work itself, I admired her presentation. She gave a very comprehensive but brief history of architecture, and gave an easy-to-understand but not infantilizing explanation of some of the basic biological processes of bones.
Looking Outwards 08
Paul Soulellis
An artist and professor at RISD interested in the meaning of crisis and Urgent Craft, as well as permanence, Paul Soulellis introduces himself as a queer artist and educator. As a child and young adult, Soulellis grappled with the self-hatred that came with being gay in the 70s and 80s as the AIDS crisis swept the nation. Since then, his queerness has deeply impacted his artistic practice. Although he recognizes his privileges, the difficult process of becoming secure in his sexuality was deeply entwined with a sense of urgency. Yet, Soulellis argues that slowing down in today’s society is inherently queer because it goes against the cultural fixation with acceleration. In response to this idea, he created the body of work: QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK (2013-2018), which is a vast series of printed web publications from queer artists, aiming to immortalize the fast-paced culture of internet art. Since this first foray into printing websites, Soulellis has created many collections of printed internet images, published books of redacted tweets from politicians, zines of digital protests, and many other examples of printed literature. Although the digital world is ever-expansive, I greatly admire that Soulellis continues to create physical copies of the art and protest material that is so indicative of our generation.
Looking Outwards 08
The Hyphen Labs: In Emergency Break Glass
Eyeo (2018)
Hyphen labs, run by Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, is a lab whose projects have a wide range of qualities– from ‘translating between realities’, to experimentation, aesthetics, empowerment, and speculative. They describe themselves to still not have a super definite style and identity, especially since they started recently in 2014.
They introduced a kinetic light installation that they had been working on called Pragmatic in New York City. I thought their thought process and the relationship that was created between intention and form– especially in terms of how the form of the piece was influenced by the mood they wanted to create– was really cool. The concept of bringing the outside in is something I am curious about, especially when thinking about emerging spaces in AR/VR and even just the general advancements in technology. I think the project was a nice balance between mood and rhythms from the outside in without trying too hard to replace the experience of being outside.
Their project visualizing deaths from the opioid crisis was also one that really caught my eye. The detail that went to crafting every pill is mind-blowing. I think it was really engaging to see their projects all presented primarily in video format– it was really effective in quickly and holistically communicating big ideas.
https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2018/287093806http://hyphen-labs.com/prismatic.html
Looking Outward – 08
Refik Anadol is a Turkish media artist based in LA that creates huge environmental art pieces driven by data. He operates Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB which both focus on “discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives and artificial intelligence”. He has a background in fine art. As an aspiring environmental and experience designer, I really loved being able to see how his work embodies the environments that they are in and connected to. A lot of his pieces are public art which adds another fun layer of defining space and giving people a new experience. He is able to take both architecture and open space and embed more meaning using data. For example, he created an installation in Boston that took data of the ocean breeze to visualize the connection of the city to the sea. Some of his other work utilizes invisible signals like LTE and bluetooth within spaces to create data visualizations and again visualize parts of those spaces that otherwise wouldn’t be seen or recognized. That is so cool! Another amazing project he shared was called “Archive Dreaming” in which archives turned into a data driven, visual experience. The computer almost becomes a living thing that processes your request and shares history in a new, beautiful way. Upon watching Anadol’s presentation, his imagery and videos in general were very successful in capturing your attention, but I also enjoyed how he integrated humor and light-heartedness into his talk, especially when talking about his past and moving forward with his work in cutting edge technology.
Artist: Refik Anadol
Website: https://refikanadol.com
https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019/355843371
“Archive Dreaming” -> https://player.vimeo.com/video/218573298?autoplay=0&color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&muted=1
Looking Outwards 08 : Jane Freidhoff
Jane Freidhoff https://janefriedhoff.com/
Studying at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design, and working at places like Google and New York University, Jane Freidhoff is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily makes small-scale video games. These games tend to explore power fantasies, specifically for marginalized groups who have historically (and even now) find disempowered in comparison to the archetypical straight white man. While violence, crime, and outrage are used to punctuate this power grab, the overall aesthetics of Freidhoff’s games are far less dark and intense. That is to say, the intensity within her games are usually found in the bright color palettes and oversaturated imagery, an aesthetic that I was immediately drawn to. This immediate juxtaposition is already quite funny, but that is not where Freidhoff’s sense of humor ends. Whether in scenarios (girls destroying a mall via car), game control (screaming to shoot a gun), or display (being able to win numbers so large that scientific notation is required), Freidhoff brings absurdity and fun to a need for power. That being said, there is a real layer of anger that sits beneath the surface of her work. Heavily inspired by Riot Grrrl, Freidhoff touches greatly on female rage, in addition to her struggles related to her queer and Jewish identities. I think I’m most drawn to Freidhoff’s aesthetics, sense of humor, and ability to tackle issues that I similarly face. The casual, funny, and relatable way she speaks about her work is also appealing to me.
Lecture: https://vimeo.com/287093861?embedded=false&source=video_title&owner=8053320