Heather Kelley is one of the five most powerful women in gaming and the most influential women in technology. She holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin and is an Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Her works as Perfect Plum focus on under-explored aesthetic experiences and sensory interactions.
In particular, I admire her creative expression and how she creates interactive pieces that relate to society and individuals. Specifically, I admire these aspects because they enhance the person’s experience and interaction with the work. To elaborate, I want to highlight her work in interaction design. Specifically, the “Tre Pas (Version Musicale),” creates an interactive piece where it can be described as an extremely long hopscotch as each series triggers an interactive musical composition. This is one of the many examples of her work where she cleverly creates a piece that is not only intriguing but also captures the individual’s attention by having them interact with it.
Overall, Heather Kelley has an impressive background and I would highly recommend taking a look into the work she has done as it’s something work interacting with and experiencing.
The artist Chloe Varelidi, usually creates games, toys, and unique products. She worked for different organizations for ten years before she founded a company called “humans who play”. Humans who play is a company who works with organizations on human-centric design. They aim to tackle problems and questions through design. Each of her projects uses different mediums to resolve the challenge. One of her projects is called Animal Badges. She created different badges that had different animals. The badges were given out to kids after they learned a new skill related to emotional learning. Each of the different animals represents a different skill like empathy, curiosity, perseverance, and compassion. I admire this project because it is helping kids learn more about their emotions. Education about emotions should be taught in school because it helps people understand what they are going through and feeling and communicate that to other people so others understand as well. It is one of the most important life skills that someone needs, not only to understand themselves better but to also interact with different people.
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.
Nathalie Miebach is an artist and musician who translates scientific data related to meteorology, ecology, and oceanography into sculptures and music scores. Her project, The Sandy Rides, is a woven sculpture. The project is inspired by Hurricane Sandy and the data from the storm. This data is used to build the amusement park rides in the sculpture. The project questions what living along the coast might look like in the future with climate change and how an amusement park ride might adapt to these new conditions. Miebach constructed a series of these sculptures that take influence from various ride destroyed during the storm. These sculptures are really interesting from an architectural perspective on how they build using data. While they use data, which can seem very methodical, they have a chaotic nature to them. They describe the storm in a visual and mathematical way.
Allison Parish is a programmer, poet, and an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU. She creates projects that combine language with software and machine learning. She has written multiple books and articles, created a card game called Rewordable, and presented at Eyeo 2015. Her body of work spans writing multiple pieces of custom software that generate poetry or manipulate language. For example, she has written a Nonsense Laboratory tool which allows users to manipulate words in both how they are spelled and how they sound. The goal is to allow users to play with spelling the same way people play musical instruments or play with modeling clay. The project evokes linguistic creativity and explores machine learning.
To create her projects, Parish accesses large language datasets found in the open source Gutenberg Project and in online movie databases. The project I enjoyed most was her Semantic Similarity Chatbot. This chatbot accesses several movie dialog datasets available through Google. The project is written in Python and uses the spaCy add-on library. It builds word vectors to generate a list of possible responses to a chat. The delivered response then is randomly chosen from the possible vectors. All of the code is available on github and there is a google colab page setup to download and run the chatbot. I had several conversations with the chatbot. The responses are somewhat random and don’t seem very relevant; however, the project remains very interesting and is important as a foundation for machine learning and future chatbots. One of my chats is included below. My entries are shown next to the happy face emoji. The chatbot responses are next to the robot emoji.
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!
For this week’s looking outwards, I would like to focus on Korean female artist Mimi Son. She is a creator of interactive artworks and displays. Together with Elliot Woods, they created a Seoul-based art collective called kimchi and chips. Their thoughtful works are mostly a combination of arts, sciences, and philosophy. Son has an obsession with geometry and Buddhist philosophy and that inspires her to document time and space in her own unique ways. She experiments frequently with her installations with the theme of art and technology, material and immaterial, real and virtual, presence and absence. The specific artwork I want to focus on is her 2018 project Halo. This project consists of 99 robotic mirrors that continuously move throughout the day to follow the sun like sunflowers. These mirrors reflect a beam of sunlight into a cloud of water mist and they are computationally aligned so that together they draw a bright circle in the air. I admire this project because she was able to capture something so intangible by combining technology with nature.
Her Halo Project at Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court Somerset House. June. 2018
Link to Project: https://kimchiandchips.com/works/halo/
Link to Kimchi and chips: https://kimchiandchips.com/works/
Creator’s Name: Toni Dove Title of Work: The Dress That Eats Souls Year of Creation: Feb 2018
This eerie yet beautiful piece of art is incredible to look at and the experience of interacting with it seems to be quite as impressive. While many concepts are spoken about through this dress with a robotic bodice, it explores our interaction with technology, so powerful, it has the potential to consume us and our experiences. When an individual stands in front of this dress, it mimics their motion, and POV video allows the person to watch through the eyes of those who have worn the dress and hear their inner thoughts. To create this dress it must not only be built physically to make certain movements but programmed to replicate the movements of others which is quite impressive.
Toni Dove works in New York to make interface technologies that create interactive performances. She has worked on many installations and she describes The Dress That Eats Souls as “an interactive cinema and robotics installation”
Caroline is a UI/UX designer, machine learning design researcher and artist concerned about consent in technology. She is the founder of convocation design and research agency which focuses on machine learning and ux design that is for public good. As a ux designer and ux researcher she worked with Intel, IBM Watson, Wikimedia Foundation, Amnesty Foundation, and more. She additionally has partnered with Harvard Kennedy School and the Mozilla Foundation.
What I admire about Caroline is that she is a UX/UI designer which is the job I aspire to have. Her work focusing on public good also inspires me to learn more about social issues related to technology rather than just aesthetics. In her project, “How to Explain a Hurricane to an Algorithm,” Caroline explains that when her grandmother’s home was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, she found a bunch of personal and private objects that belong to the family. She spent her last 12 years photographing and looking at archives. Using an algorithm Caroline was able to represent a documentation of loss, anxiety, grief, and post trauma culture at home.
Title: REAL/RAW/FAST Identity System Artist: adidas x FIELD.IO (Commissioned by: adidas Global Brand Design, Generative System Design: FIELD.IO, Motion & Identity Design: DIA, Media Asset Production: Stink, Creative Lead: Fleur Isbell, Xander Marritt, Lead Developer: Bruno Imbrizi Developer: Seph Li, Riccardo Cambiassi, Samuel Honigstein, Documentation: Kosuke, Chris Dumon, Executive Creative Direction: Marcus Wendt, Creative Director: Mile Hughes, Motion Design: Julien Bauzin, Producer: Alice Shaughnessy, Motion Design: Xavier Boivin, Strategy + Consulting: Vera-Maria Glahn)
The project I’ve chosen to discuss is the REAL/RAW/FAST Identity System designed by FIELD.IO (in collaboration with DIA) for sportwear brand adidas. According to the project description, the REAL/RAW/FAST Identity System is the “new face of adidas flagship stores: A Generative Identity System for Retail Screens – bespoke, dynamic, scalable.” Essentially, the system pulls from a pool of kinetic typefaces, procedural animations and local elements that move and change compositions on a series of screens in real time, to create a visual storefront with a bold and unique brand identity. One thing I admire is how it can be adapted from “a plug-and-play rollout to a bespoke flagship version, the Generative System provides solutions for any scale and use case”. The encoded flexibility of the system allows it to be adapted to different campaigns, regardless of content, and to different storefronts, regardless of scale/ screen arrangement. By designing a system, the same elements within a single campaign can be reconfigured and remixed to remain fresh and engaging to the consumer’s eyes. Not only is this project aesthetically simple and clean, the compositions generated and the transitions between such compositions feel seamless, effortless and very satisfying. For me, it is the perfect example of how systems design can integrate digital art into marketing without feeling awkward or clumsy like most digital art campaigns tend to, but also how basic coding and illustration skills can be leveraged to serve a large scale, lucrative project.
Of the members of the team that worked on the REAL/RAW/FAST Identity System, the creator I’ve decided to focus on is Vera-Maria Glahn. She is the managing director for FIELD.io, a digital art studio based in London, UK. She completed her undergraduate education in Arbitur, Arts, German, English and Philosophy at the Gymnasium Theodorianum in 2003, going on to receive a Masters in Art in Visual Communication with Distinction from the Kinsthochschule Kassel (School of Arts & Design in Kassel) in 2009. She started her career in the media arts industry in 2003 as a producer and curator, notably for the Kassel Documentary Film & Video Festival in Germany and the V2_Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She co-founded FIELD.io with Creative Director Marcus Wendt in 2009 following her postgraduate studies and currently manages and produces independent and commissioned digital art for various brand and cultural institutions around the world. I’ve chosen to focus on Vera-Maria because as a co-founder of FIELD.io, her ethics and approach to computational art is reflected in the brand’s direction, allowing me to discuss the brand’s values as a whole. Some of the brand’s core tenants include:
Imagination (new forms of brand experience, storytelling, creative expression)
Innovation (developing new forms of interaction, products and services)
Technology (deep engagement + understanding for technically rich content)
Relationships (establishing deep + long term connections with brands + people) In particular, I really like how the brand (and likely due to Vera-Maria’s founding vision) have positioned themselves as pioneers of digital art and design strategies for major brands, and how everything – from their website UI to their projects to their team portraits on the website – serve to reinforce this vision.
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