LookingOutwards-08 – [OLD SEMESTER] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

LO-08 Creative Practice

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.

http://eyeofestival.com/2018/speaker/ariel-waldman/

https://spacehack.org

Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Christina Phazero Curlee is a game designer, specializing in emotional impactful and narrative driven Art Games. She describes herself as a “multi-disciplinary game designer” since she works seamlessly in multiple 3D editors, and does script coding, and uses her traditional art foundation in her game design process. She studied traditional art in college and even formerly worked as painte but also she is self-taught in game design, 3D Art, and programming. Her visual art foundation and self-teaching gave her an unusual framework as a game developer as she blends a principle, techniques, and subject matters found in fine arts with game conventions to create her own design style and language in game development.
Her body of work usually explores emotional experiences, marginalized identities, and digital consciousness. I admire her work “Artifacts II” the most as her passion in emotional storytelling is well brought out in this game. Artifacts II is a surreal narrative game about personal discovery and trauma such as chdildhood neglect; The game is set in a surreal storybook-like series of environments, representing memory spaces in the character’s mind. The character engtangles trauma in the mind and body and go through process of introspection and self evaluation as he/she plays. I admire the way she utilizes symbols to convey her personal experiencs, making an game environment conceptually rich, imaginative, and compelling.
To effectively present her work, she uses symbols such as enemies, scores, and timers to represent the concepts of love, fear, and defense mechanisms. Also, Artifact II uses elements of exploration (walking sims), RPG, and survival MDA (mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics) to effectively reveal the fragments of character’s past memories.

http://www.christinazero.com/

Looking Outwards – 08

Jennifer Daniel is a designer and is pursuing a career in illustration. Originally from Kansas, she moved to New York. Since then, her work has been published in a variety of publications. Jennifer has taught visual narratives for SVA’s masters program and recently moved to San Francisco. She was a professional communicator before working at an engineering company and now makes visual art.

In the eyeo festival Jennifer Daniel talks about an app she helped develop called allo. In the app you take a selfie and it makes automated emojis cartoons of your face. Traditional computers utilize mapping on the art to analyze pixels of an image. Algorithmically it examines attribute values to look for shape and colors. A well known problem is the uncanny valley of images. Emojis that look too close to the picture look scary. Machine learning can access and confront people about what they look like. Instead alo produces low resolution emojis which create a less realistic emoji. There is a customization feature of emojis. She talks about how she can as an art director design something for everyone when machine learning can reduce data about unique stories. She is aware of bias in computer algorithms and how it can promote racism and sexism. Art directors who work on these projects can work with artists with many perspectives to articulate their world. Not enough to make an avatar that is a literal representation of you when there are many versions of you.

What I really like about Jennifer Daniel’s app and project is that she takes an approach to illustrating similar to a UI UX designer, which is my dream career. She explains that visual vocabulary online is very vast. There are text, emoticons, emoji, and tiny illustrations. Emojis, gifs, stickers all make up an emergent complexity. Texting is closer to speaking than writing. People spoke first to communicate. Writing only came later. Writing is very different from talking. Writing is a conscious process while Speech is looser, text is like that. No one thinks about capitalization, we text the way we speak. Emoji is a Japanese word which is a combination of emoji and character and a very important form of digital communication in japan. Easy way to apologize or show nuanced communications. Emojis have a problem when trying to communicate something detailed. Automatic emojis can change meanings of texts. I’ve seen this with slack and face messenger. Emojis are not perfectly transferable across mediums. Ios emojis sent to an android emoji may look much different. Important emojis look similar across platforms and are cohesive but she wishes emojis used unicode like type fonts. More styles there are, the more variations can exist. Emojis have broadened the world of communication and it will be interesting to see how it shifts our language in the future.

https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2017

Blog 08: Manuel Lima

By Ilia Urgen
Section B

Manuel Lima is a Portuguese-American designer and author who is known for transforming informational data into various elegant and beautiful forms of art. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Industrial Design at the Technical University of Lisbon and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Design and Technology from the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Lima’s website, Visual Complexity, illustrates his vast portfolio of detailed and intricate artwork, which I find very appealing to the eye. His work often uses a lot of curves and lines, which is made up of many different colors. Yet, each piece of art represents some different form of data. For example, his piece “Marvel Uberframework” (see below) represents the correlation of different Marvel characters, such as Spiderman and Captain America.

However, his most well-known and complex artwork can be found in his literary work, “The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge”. As mentioned in his 2017 lecture, Lima shows various artwork pieces represented in many circular forms that comes from any form of data, ranging from ancient to contemporary times. I love how in his lecture, Lima mentions the bridge of knowledge from thousands of years ago to the present, which keeps our well-established society going. He also emphasizes the importance of creating new artwork using data, that can be passed down to future generations.

Link to Lima’s website:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

Image 2: Contemporary Circular art using data from the size of various companies

Looking Outwards-08

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.