Category: LookingOutwards-09

Looking Outwards 09: Amanda Ghassei

Amanda Ghassei https://amandaghassaei.com/ 

This week, I looked at the work of Amanda Ghassei, an engineer and computational artist. Initially, I was drawn to her work due to the way she took real, tangible, and usually historical art forms and found ways to work with those concepts computationally. Her work includes algorithms about folding origami, explorations of the historical process of locked letters, and creating a simulation based off of the process of water-marbling. The project that I chose to examine more closely was her water-marbling work, mostly because of my aesthetic attraction to the vibrant palette she uses. This work connects to other work of hers which simulates fluids, which is impressive, but I find the conceptual act of digitally recreating a historical process to be more interesting. The past is so intangible and hard to access, so the act of computationally recreating the past, in a sense, is pretty intriguing.

Water Marbling Simulation, 2022

looking outwards 9

Text Rain

I chose Camille Utterback for this weeks looking outwards. She’s an american artist and mostly works in instilation and interactive art using computational and generative methods. She’s very interested in how the human body moves and gestures and how that motion can be translated into digital images. The work I looked at specifically was called text rain, which was an interactive projection of people in the exibit with text falling down onto their body like rain and resting. You can push them around and play with them, and it looked quite fun actually. I thought it was a great exploration of the human aspect of typography and text and how we can connect to something as lifeless as letters.

LookingOutward 09

Heather’s Website: https://www.perfectplum.com/

Game Design: https://www.perfectplum.com/portfolio_category/gamedesign/

For this week I looked at the game developed by Heather Kelly. Specifically, I looked into her project SUPERHYPERCUBE, a VR first-person puzzler where the player controls a group of cubes to fit through holes in the wall, and the game increases in difficulty by increasing the block complexity. I really the game’s aesthetics, where the games take inspiration from retro arcade gaming aesthetics and transform them into 3D space. The animation of passing through the holes and rotation also feels dynamic and matches the aesthetics of the entire game.

Heather Kelly is an associate teaching professor at ETC CMU, where her work mainly focuses on underexplored aesthetic experiences and sensory interactions. She is the co-founder of kokoromi, where her works focus on experimental game collection. Throughout her career, she has worked on a broad variety of topics in the game industry, including AAA console games, smart toys, and web communities for girls.

Throughout her career, she has also produced many sex-inspired sensory designs, such as the game concept “Our first time”, “Lapis”, the game concept based on female orgasm, and her newest mobile application “OhMiBod”, an application controlling the OhMiBod brand vibrator.

Looking Outwards 9 – Emily Gobeille

One project that stood out to me was Emily Gobeille’s Night Bright. Andrea is the cofounder of Design I/O, which specializes in immersive spaces and interactions for museums to create new modes of learning and storytelling. Emily primarily studied motion, graphics, print, and game design, disciplines that all solidified her ability to reimagine how information can be conveyed within a space. Her focus on meaningful interactions is something that especially resonates with me, as I’m pursuing environments concentration in the School of Design, which looks at the same key concepts she focuses on of interaction and immersive hybrid spaces.

What’s especially interesting about Gobeille’s work, is her emphasis on children as an audience. Working with such an audience requires a lot of creativity on meaningful interactions – how do children interact with a space? What sparks curiosity within a child/encourages them to further interact with a space? Moreover, how can the content displayed be effectively used to immerse the child beyond just the “viewing” experience.

Website: http://zanyparade.com/
Night Bright Project: https://www.design-io.com/projects/nightbright

Looking Outwards 09

Work Title: Skataviz

Artist: Emily Gobeille, creator of high-end interactive installations for children

https://www.design-io.com/projects/skataviz

Emily is an artist and designer who specializes in the disciplines of installations, motion graphics, and web design. She is enthusiastic about employing technology and art combined to tell stories and create playful moments for people. As a designer for a segmented group, Emily has to spend a lot of time studying that user group’s behavioral characteristics and preferences in order to make effective designs. The Skataviz is an experimental project by Design I/O that uses interactive elements of an iPhone/iPod to record the motion of a skateboard. The motion is then visualized in 3D presentation through a video. The designer applies features of the gyroscope and accelerometer sensors of the mobile device to construct data on rotation, velocity changes, angles, and the board’s movement. In this project, openFrameworks is the primary tool used for both sensor recording and desktop visualization.

Looking Outwards-09

One work I found really inspirational this week is Anouk Wipprecht’s fashion design. She focuses on “Fashion-Tech”, which is a combination of fashion design with engineering and computational technology. And one interesting point about her work is that fashion is not only providing a visual and tactile experience to people, her work embedded artificial intelligence and projected as a ‘host’ system on the human body. Her design has body sensors that check the user’s stress levels and comfort levels.

I specifically admire her “Spider Dress” design. This project successfully connects the human body with technology. Some part of the collar extrudes out just like a spider, and the body part design uses plastic as materials, creating a futuristic weave pattern that cannot be achieved by traditional fashion techniques. Besides, there are sensors and moveable arms to create a boundary of personal space. These embedded sensors might play an important role in future technology development, creating an exciting transformation in how people communicate with others and with the environment.

link to her website: http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl/#intro-1

Blog 09

Camille Utterback is an artist focusing on interaction between humans and technology. Using software she writes herself, she aims to capture human movement as it is – ever-changing – through technology. With a degree from Williams College in Massachusetts, she continues to develop her body of work while teaching at schools like Stanford, Parsons, and even CMU. Her work Precarious, I think, is an incredible example of what she sets out to do. Exhibited in 2018 at the Smithsonian, Precarious is an interactive installation that translates human movement and silhouettes into continuous lines that never create a closed shape, to replicate the living, breathing, moving nature of viewers through technology. Being that the digital drawings are never fixed, the work continues to grow and change with every person that interacts with the artwork, making each viewer seem to become apart of the artwork themselves. I think this work by Utterback specifically finds the qualities that make people human and tries to reimagine it using technology that changes with the humans that view the installation. Her work begins to connect humans with technology, making technology something almost human itself. Eerie.

Camille Utterback

Precarious

Looking Outwards 09

Vera-Maria Glahn

Vera-Maria Glahn, manager of FIELD, a studio focused on the development of art and technology represented in innovative formats. The project IBM is especially interesting to me because it is a graphical system that helps one visualize music with dynamic and expressive shapes. Different graphical elements represent different instruments, some including melody, drums, bass, etc. 

These shapes are both shaped and behave in a way that is representative of the music and how the instruments interact. This project is almost like a visual music piece or a personification of the instruments. The forms of these instruments were derived through many iterations, including technical mappings to free and organic forms. I think this type of project is extremely captivating because of this process. Through the creative process, the team learned not only how to create expressive art, but also engineered their own unique set of tools and a whole new set of opportunities for creativity. 

https://field.io/work/ibm-think-2020

Looking Outwards Week 09

https://sofiacrespo.com/

Based in Lisbon Portugal, Sofia Crespo is an accomplished artist and curator who primarily focuses on creating biologically inspired artificial intelligence-generated videos and images. The images are bizarre and ethereal, yet are rooted in familiar systems such as neural pathways, sea creatures, human organs, fungi, and animals. She programs her own project-specific custom AI software through which she runs her base images, using the AI to draw otherworldly connections between the earthly base images, which is incredibly admirable because she is able to seamlessly blend the computer-generated aspects of her work with a more analog process of physically retouching the images. While studying at Miami Art Direction School, she developed her love for AI generative art practices, and combined this passion with her interest in biology, resulting in her current technique. She no teaches workshops, gives talks, and does residencies in addition to making her own artistic works.

LO Week 09:

I looked at LIA, specifically their ‘ ProximityOfNeeds 20210428 ’ (2021) project that is now on auction at a curated NFT collection. I thought it was especially cool how they incorporated sound like we are learning in class, to match the visuals being created on screen. It’s quite a satisfying change in pitch as the shapes are being drawn and the control of them stopping in such a natural clunking way when the spirals come together is really nice too. I really like how the form of the shape in the different versions changes the tone and feel of the sound too.

LIA is a Software Art Company established in 1995 run by Lia who “focuses on the translation of certain experienced principles into abstract forms, movements, and colors in order to allow the viewer to explore the same on a subconscious level” (source: LIA About Page) which is a really fascinating way of thinking about how we experience the digital world and is something that is only going to be more relevant with the rise of AR/VR.