As a pioneer in 3D animation and VR/AR simulation, Claudia focuses on adapting virtual simulations to historical subjects. She studied art and architectural history at NYU and Columbia University and now works in New York. Being a feminist artist, her work has huge historical references where she subverts canonical male rulers into something more fantastical with digital technology.
Claudia’s multi-media exhibition, The Dolls House
As a student majoring in architecture, I am interested in the representation of buildings and how it changes their expressions. Her project, THE DOLLS HOUSE, showcases historical empire buildings like The Arch of Labna and the Roman Forum of Caesar being thrown away like toys inside a giant warehouse. She also adds a rotating light source that casts shadows on those buildings, simulating the idea of sunrise and sunset, which showcases the passage of time and the decay of nations. What draws me most is her play with algorithmic flickering patterns on walls filled with symbols of decayed nations and also logos of multinational companies, hinting that nothing could last forever. The result looks surreal and hypnotic, but at the same time refreshing and enlightening, which encourages the audience to contemplate on time.
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
Artifacts project by Christina “Phazero” Curlee which is both an art game and an art piece blending the world of fine arts and game creation.
Refik Anadol is a media artist born in Istanbul, Turkey and holds a master of fine arts degree from UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts, master of fine arts from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design and a bachelors of arts degree in photography and video. Currently situated in Los Angeles, he works in the field of site-specific public art, leveraging data, live audio, and video to produce interactive information visualization. His key works explore the spatial relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence.
The most interesting part is how he visualizes various datasets with relationship to visual and spatial storytelling. I can relate his method of inquiry to critical regionalism or place-making reflecting the memory or history of that context. His final project named WDCH Dreams was the best of all as the presentation format was incremental and progressive.
His presentation for the Eyeo Festival, 2019 begins with his motivation to computational design followed by his capstone project for master of fine arts degree at UCLA. On a larger context, the presentation can be divided into before AI and after. The key feature of the presentation was incorporating his experience with various clients and people he met during this journey through storytelling, which involves the audience into his works.
Chris Barr is the director of arts and technology at Knight Foundation. This is a nonprofit that works with newspapers to support democracy and free speech. Barr is interesting because while he has a background in art, design, and new media, he also works in journalism and civic tech through his non profit work. His art reflects this multi-faceted background, as it is often of landscapes or nature, showcasing his knowledge of the natural world. In his talk for Eyeo in 2019, Chris Barr discusses the art of interactive experiences. He brings up the Muesum of Ice Cream, which is a place widely adored for the way adults get to act like children in it. It has many immersive art exhibits, such as a pit full of sprinkles. He discusses how these companies generate massive amounts of revenue just from cheaply designed exhibits. He helped create Meow Wolf, a company centered around this idea that immersive galleries can become very popular. According to their mission statement, Meow Wolf intends to “inspire creativity through art, exploration, and play so that imagination will transform our worlds”. https://vimeo.com/354276161?embedded=false&source=vimeo_logo&owner=8053320 https://meowwolf.com/about
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.
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.
Using different chocolate fills to show different death cases
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.
Joanie Lemercier is a French artist based in Brussels and principal of studio Joanie Lemercier. None of his profiles online list any institution of education. He desribes himself as a visual artist operating on the mantra: “light as a medium, space as a canvas”, with an interest in playing with light, geometry and human perception to capture the ‘sublime’.
In 2007, he and several other friends started a collective ‘visual label’ called AntiVJ. Until he parted ways with them in 2013 to start his own practice, his body of work consisted of temporary (and then eventually permanent) museum and gallery installations, architectural projections on and inside monuments aroudn the world, live music events and festivals (eg. Mutek) alongside artists such as Flying Lotus and Adrian Utley.
FUJI (不死）(2014)
One major impression the video left on me was how much of Lemercier’s thought process paralleled mine. From the fascination with light and geometry, to our reliance on visual perception, to the ‘sublimity’ of nature, I felt that Lemercier was describing the motivations I was feeling in words even better than I would have. In particular, when he talked about staring into the mountains and feeling this weird indescribable feeling, I remembered how when I lived in Hong Kong, whether it was during the day, or at sunset, or at 2am at night, when I felt restless, I would go to the harbour and stare out at the sea and just get lost in the waves. At the time, my main creative outlet was dance – and similar to how the mountains and topographical patterns influence Lemercier’s work – flow, layers, waves, compression and release inspired by the movement of the sea found themselves in my dance. Another thing I admired the intensity with which he approaches his work – He describes a period of his time at AntiVJ as ‘living inside the computer’ and even ends his talk but reaffirming his desire to continue chasing the representation of the ‘sublime’. I’ve come to realise I also have a tendency to hyperfixate on my passion projects. For instance, I’ve been increasingly interested in filmography and video editing, and every time I start a new project, I am unable to think about or focus on something else for at least 1-2 days. Hearing his words and seeing his body of work felt affirming, almost like he was saying: “This is how I interpreted my feelings [of the sublime] and how they informed my work. .. [If I can do it, so can you]”.
Constellations (2018)
When presenting his work, he kept it simple and light, starting with a introduction of where he had gone and the relevant concept (ie. pantheism/ the sublime), moving onto a brief overview of the project (ie. where + when it was) and wrapping it up with 1 – 2 sentences offering an insight from behind the scenes. Because his work with projection is interactive and time based, when presenting his work, he included numerous videos or gifs of the places he visited and the at pieces in motion, and you were able to easily keep up and understand what he was talking about. For instance, I found it difficult to connect when he was describing the FUJI installation purely through words and still images. However, once he showed the video of the installation in motion, his process and his motivations became clear. The seeming effortlessness with which he was able to communicate the large breadth of his work, in my opinion, was facilitated by how directly he correlated his inspirations and his ideas to the resultant projects and will definitely be something I keep in mind in future projects.
Abstract roses using astroids and astroid evolutes. Astroids rotate using mouseX and scale using the minimum of mouseX and mouse Y. Random astroids are added to the canvas. The color of these depends on the mouse’s position on the canvas. If left on canvas they are red, and if on right of canvas they are black. Moving mouse along diagonals creates and in bottom right corner creates best shapes.
// Ana Furtado
// Section E
// Project 7 Composition with Curves
var nPoints = 100;
function setup() {
createCanvas(480, 480);
background(255);
frameRate(10);
}
function draw() {
strokeWeight(3);
//rotates and scales by mouse at top right
//brown/red at left and bottom
push();
translate(width/4, height/4);
scale(mouseX/width);
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
if (mouseX < width/2) {
stroke('brown');
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
}
pop();
//rotates and scales by mouse at bottom left
//brown/red at left and bottom
push();
//translate(width/2, height/2)
translate(width/4 * 3, height/4 * 3);
scale(mouseX/width);
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
if (mouseX < width/2) {
stroke('brown');
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
} if (mouseY > height/2) {
stroke('brown');
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
}
pop();
//rotates and scales by mouse at random location
//move/leve mouse to left of canvas for red atroids
//move/leave mouse to right of canvas for black atroids
//move/leave in top right of canvas to fill with more black atroids
push();
translate(random(0,480), random(0,480));
scale(0.5);
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
if ( mouseX < width/2) {
stroke('brown');
rotate(radians(min(mouseX,mouseY)));
drawAstroid();
}
pop();
//originals that stay in splace
//only show in beginning
//scaled and rotated turns the astroid into an atroid evolute
push();
translate(width/2, height/2);
drawAstroid();
pop();
//stays in place scale 0.5
push();
translate(width/2, height/2);
scale(0.5);
rotate(radians(45));
drawAstroid();
pop();
//stays in place scale 0.25
push();
translate(width/2, height/2);
scale(0.25);
rotate(radians(45));
drawAstroid();
pop();
}
function drawAstroid() {
//Astroid
//https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AstroidEvolute.html
var x;
var y;
var a = 300;
//fill('pink');
noFill();
beginShape();
for (var i = 0; i < nPoints; i++) {
var t = map(i, 0, nPoints, 0, TWO_PI);
//angleMode(DEGREES);
x = a * (cos(t) * cos(t) * cos(t));
y = a * (sin(t) * sin(t) * sin(t));
vertex(x, y);
}
endShape(CLOSE);
constrain(a, 0, 325);
}
I think the most difficult part of this was getting the shape to be represented properly.
I admire the phone-Call Cartography project by the New York Times in 2011. The aggregate cell phone traffic data from the United States in July of 2010 was analyzed by researchers from M.I.T., AT&T and I.B.M. It shows how cities have become hubs and connect to other parts of the country. These communities shown by different colors on the map have little to do with geographic boundaries. I admire it because it shows patterns of how people are brought together over long or short distances. I think the creators’ artistic sensibilities are shown in the way this enormous amount of data is visualized. For example, the colors used, the areas drawn together, and the focus of the maps. Although, I think it could have been clearer in the second map which lines are connecting different places. Many of the lines are lost because they are too thin, or the colors blend together. Also, it is different to tell where they end because of the angle of the map and because there is no real map underneath, the reader is left with minimal text and shapes as reference.
Phone-call Cartography Map of the US from July of 2010. Many cities are connected together by arcs of different colors and heights, representing different areas and amounts.
I find this project extremely intriguing because of the many uses it provides that even the creators themselves have not anticipated. The Wind Map, created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, shows real time wind data that comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. The technique includes using “comet-like trails to show motion”, and is derived from Edmund Halley in 1686. The project itself is entirely implemented in HTML and JavaScript.
The creators intended this project to be an emotional approach and artistic exploration that shows people where and when hurricanes and wind storms happen. I think it is fascinating that such a beautifully crafted project is constantly updating so people can relate and send hopes to areas with dangerous wind activity. The aesthetics of this project are extremely captivating: during times when the wind is calm, the make also looks serene and meditative. However, when there are severe hurricanes, large white strokes illustrate very scary movement that resembles lightning and chaos.
Furthermore, I am more fascinated that people have found unique ways to utilize this map. For example, bird watchers have used it to examine bird migration and cyclist have used it to plan for their trips. The use of a project like this can vary from the research level (ex. Architects studying site conditions), to a local or personal level (ex. Planning for a family trip). This is extremely captivating for me.
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