The piece if work I selected is “Body Sketches” by Molmol Kuo. Molmol Kuo is a Taiwanese artist and educator. Kuo works closely with NYU’s Tisch school of the Arts’ graduate student program consulting students on projects which combines the arts, augmented reality and technology. Kuo is also a partner at YesYesNo Studio, a multimedia design and arts studio. The work was at the Brooklyn Academy of Museum and uses computation and a screen to extend the user/observer’s body into a variety of dynamic costumes. The base of the project is three individuals projections, each of which then use the human form as a starting point and transform it through different geometric and physical changes.
For my portrait, I decided to do something similar to pointillism but instead of dots, I used words. I made a list of words that are about my passions/ideal career choices and then loaded a word randomly from the list to take place of each pixel in my image. Each word matches the color of the pixel in its respective x and y location. The words are all a pretty small font so they can pick up the details of the pixels well.
sketchScreenshot of image 10 minutes inImage 5 minutes inImage about 30 seconds in
// SRISHTY BHAVSAR
// PROJECT 9
// SECTION C 15-104
/*
let img;
let smallPoint, largePoint;
function preload() {
img = loadImage('nameofimage');
}
*/
var srishty;
var passions;
function preload() {
srishty = loadImage("https://i.imgur.com/kczcnA1.jpg"); // image of me, srishty
passions = ["designer", "artist", "UI","UX", "researcher", "HCI", "architecture",
"color", "painting", 'music', "running", "singing"]; // list of my passions and career interests
print(passions);
}
function setup() {
createCanvas(480,480);
srishty.resize(480,480); // resizes the ima2ge upload to imgur to be 480 by 480
background('white');
imageMode(CENTER); // centers image
srishty.loadPixels();
//noLoop();
}
function draw() {
var x = floor(random(srishty.width));
var y = floor(random(srishty.height));
var c = srishty.get(x,y); // identifies the color of each pixels
fill(c,255);
textSize(8);
textFont('Helvetica')
text(passions[Math.floor((Math.random() * passions.length))] , x, y); // takes a random word from the list of passions and places it to be in the position of the image pixel
}
Angela Washko’s The Game: The Game is a feminist computational video game that explores the politics and tactics of the pick-up “artist” through the form of a dating simulator. As the player, you encounter several major “seduction coaches” who attempt to woo you through an array of techniques and practices taken from their instructional material – which range from cheesy and uncomfortable to out-right violent. In creating The Game: The Game, Washko essentially allows the player to understand and, in turn, expose and defuse the manipulative and disturbing practices of these pick-up artists. That’s also what I admire most about it; on the surface, it’s a strange, funny, and disorienting game; dig a little deeper, however, you’ll have a nuanced view of the social implications and power dynamics in the world of contemporary sex.
An associate professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Angela Washko is a politically-active media artist working in a variety of mediums – namely, film, virtual environments, and interactive video games – with the aim of conveying unconventional stories from unusual perspectives in media. I’ve personally attended one of Washko’s lectures and, needless to say, I’m elated to have the opportunity to write about them.
Vera-Maria Glahn’s work “OPPO Unseen X” is compelling to me in that it evokes emotion through a non-traditional medium of digital texturing art. Each aspect of the campaign addresses a question:
UNSEEN SKY:What if the rays of light followed curves?
UNSEEN EARTH:What if we could zoom into Earth’s abundance of minerals?
UNSEEN SEA: What if we could capture the infinite power of flowing water?
“Unseen Sky”
Through analyzing varying layers of texture, and creating 3D interactive environments, Glahn hopes to achieve goals of mindfulness and self-reflection. I enjoy Glahn’s combination of organic patterns in nature with computer-generated designs, and personally, I believe pieces were very calming/introspective. Vera-Maria Glahn currently resides in Germany, employed as managing director/founding partner of FIELD.SYSTEMS, a studio for digital arts and future aesthetics. She primarily focuses on immersive motion graphic art with a cross-media approach, in the metaverse, interactive displays, and collaborating with brands such as Adidas and Ikea.
Look, I’m a sucker for space exploration. Ariel Waldman is an art school graduate who pivoted to scientific communications & research, with an aim to make science & space exploration “disruptively accessible”. Spacehack.org is an online directory that she maintains of ‘citizen science’ projects, ways that anyone can participate in scientific research and projects relating to space exploration and space travel. As someone incredibly interested in this, but 1/2″ too short to be an astronaut and also a Drama major, this is super exciting and inspiring to me. I’ve taken up rocket launch photography in the past 2 years, which has been my way of documenting and exploring the vehicles that take people and things into orbit and beyond. The projects listed on SpaceHack generally ask you to donate either your time or your computer processing to further the research being done by professionals at a university or other institution.
As her biography page stated, Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and the 2017-2018 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/LOC Chair in Astrobiology. She got her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington. Lucianne is a TED Senior Fellow and a practicing artist who works for a variety of media , ranging from performance and sound.
The work I admire about Lucianne is her creation of JustSpace Alliance, a non-profit organization advocating for a more just and inclusive space exploration, because her work attempts to solve threshold problems, relating more ordinary people to space technology. One example of this is when she gives people in the New York Subway the opportunity to ask her questions about astronomy.
One strategy Lucianne used is to tell some jokes about herself to reduce stress from herself and the audience, which, I think, allows her to talk more fluently and casually. She also uses many images to visualize her presentation as she talks about each topic. One thing I learned is that I can add an icebreaker in the beginning to relax myself and the audience when presenting my own work.
Mohit Bhoite creates free-formed circuit sculptures from a workshop in his home in Minneapolis and more recently in San Francisco. His creative practice and art form is inspired by his love of electronics and robotics. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and received his MS in Robotics there. His primary job is as an engineer at Particle where he designs and engineers custom circuit boards for the Internet of Things, IoT.
In his spare time, to wind down, he found a love of creating brass sculptures containing circuit boards. These sculptures are elegant in their simplicity. In his day job Bhoite focuses on utility and efficiency for his boards. In his art he focuses on the joy he finds in creating what he calls “useless” projects. I admire his projects because they bring him joy. Bhoite creates for the joy of it. His brass sculptures are clocks, thermometers, light sources, and games. His aesthetic is streamlined, soldered brass rods that emulate satellites, robots, or simple objects. His circuits and displays are connected to the internet and can convey a large amount of information. He likes to put human emotion into his displays rather than raw data. For example, he has an air monitor that displays a robotic happy face when the air is safe. It gets more distressed as the quality deteriorates.
Bhoite presented his process and work at the 2019 Eyeo Festival. He presents his work mostly through photographs, circuit schematics, and source code. He is inspiring because he shares everything about his process and simply wants to share the joy of creation. My favorite project of his is a sand particle generator. It is an LED emulation of falling sand as it is tilted.
Sands fish is an Experience Designer that integrates technology to design services, interfaces, and experiences. He has previously worked with Nike to design an interactive game installation names the Joyride Experience along with MIT’s “Space Exploration Initiative”, working with NASA astronauts to design a musical instrument made to work in zero-gravity environments. Sands uses quotes, storytelling, and many visuals, other’s work that he admires, and transitions smoothly from one topic to another to present his work. Sands discusses a Futures thinking approach of thinking beyond the present and instead contemplating the possible, potential, and probable. A large emphasis of his lecture is discussing speculative design which is the idea of thinking beyond the systems, objects, etc. that already exist and asking questions. Sand’s presentation style is very effective and engaging due to the many visuals and examples he incorporated within his lecture. Since I want to be an Industrial designer, the concepts he raised and provoking design exercises, especially within the future of police are very intriguing to me and got me to think about design from a different approach.
This is one of the projects Sands discussed during his lecture. It is a speculative design concept probing the question “What if citizens designed the police?”
The individual I selected is Catherine D’Ignazio. D’Ignazio is an associate professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT. She is also the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, also at MIT. Her work focuses on using data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equality through the lense of urban design and architecture. She also authored the book Data Feminism that she published through MIT Press. A project of D’Ignazio’s that I was particularly interested in was her creation of the reproductive justice hackathon. The hackathon pushed individuals to come up with solutions to the issues that arise with finding a secure place to pump breast milk as well as finding better solutions to current pumping devices. Currently, a big focus of her work is discovering and elevating “hidden data.” This includes data such as how many women have died during childbirth in countries where that data is rarely recorded. D’Ignazio’s presentation style is very engaging and personable. She started her presentation with her own experience pumping in the MIT Media Lab as way to engage with her work and its importance.
This week’s delve into the artist Nicholas Feltron was particularly intriguing. No only has he created his own art and visuals, but has also created unique lessons on platforms such as Skillshare. The project of his I found the most interesting was the labeling he did on the wine bottles sold in Australia. I found it incredible how unique and detailed the labels were despite their minimalist and simplistic design, echoing the artist’s eye for concise messaging and aesthetic work. It is clear that Feltron used a multimedia-based approach to create his work, combining the likes of photography and digital design to produce his pieces.
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