Author: marimonda

marimonda – ARsculpture

Sentence: “A guide on celebrating December 8th”

 

For this project I focused mostly on the story of the AR, using JustALine as a prop for a larger overarching story.

Reflecting on this project:

Today is one of the most important holidays for Colombian Catholics, it is a national holiday that ultimately marks the start of the Christmas season. I grew up Catholic in Colombia from a family that is ethnically complex, in terms of religion and racial background(but that is a can of worms that I don’t think ill be touching for a while). For that reason, religion has been something that I am really cognizant of, not so much because of the actual  religious practice and believes but the elements of tradition and culture that radiate from it.

I changed my location on Twitter to the city I grew up in Colombia, in part as a performance and in part as a way to connecting back to that community. One of the most interesting things to see is the way many teenagers interact with our traditional holidays after growing up in English-speaking platforms, as such I saw many girls point out the inherent mysticism and magic of candle lighting. In a way, approaching the weird intersection of the hyper traditional space Catholicism lives in, and modern internet subcultures live in. This lead me to start thinking a lot about the bizarre aspects of my childhood and the beliefs that I held, growing up in a country living through the silent waves of a civil war.

This video was a way to reconnect to some of those experiences from my childhood that sort of came back to interact with me as an almost-adult.

 

marimonda – ARSketch.

I have 3 mains ideas for this project, I only  used JustALine in one of them because I found the process of using this app insanely difficult since my sketches would get deleted, and I would not be able to save the videos directly into my images. I’m assuming they would save to my google drive but when I checked they were not there.

    1. Peculiar lifeforms
      1. Bizzare organic creatures, ideally bugs, slimes, spirits or other sort of soft/sharp and weird things springing up to live in random corners as you walk through a neighborhood. I like the idea of very small organisms being able to be seen only with your phone camera.
      2. The main scripting behavior for this I want to play around with is the spawning and movement of the creatures.
        1. It would be nice to have some sort of responsive behavior, maybe they approach certain objects.
      3. Sketches
        1. I tried to use Justaline to draw this but it didn’t really look great. I retook the video a lot of times and it doesnt look great but I do have tons of sketches.
        2. This image (1) below shows some of my process in ideating the mushrooms, It is a little unclear but essentially it shows street corners.
        3. Refined digital sketch:
          1. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/720701646077952116/782737394935922698/image0.png
    2. Upside down view
      1. This is a very very basic Idea I have, and my process is shown above with the first idea as (2). It would be nice yo have an app that requires human input/interaction in such a way that requires movement. I think Id like to make an app that allows people to place objects upside down and to see them, it would require the person to move in this way. I don’t have much to show about this frankly. But I thought it would be cool to bring up.
    3. “Reforestator” Lol
      1. I am sort of thinking about the artificial trees in the Lorax for this one. Miami/South Florida in general has had a lot of urban development and gentrification through the past few years. Many protected areas of land have gotten their trees cut down and destroyed. I thought it would be interested to make an AR app that spawned trees wherever the camera detected an empty plot of land. These trees wouldn’t look realistic at all, but rather blank, standard-texture (or maybe a shiny texture like glass or water), and as you walk through them they have some sort of response (ex. perhaps you can tear them down with a tap. or you can add a texture to them).
      2. Sketches: I know its not too clear what is happening in my sketch but essentially trees are outside of a person, and maybe you can place them down.
      3. Refined digital sketch:

marimonda – PhazeroVideo

I am someone who finds VR and virtual 3D media difficult to grasp, while I have worked on it before in classes it is quite difficult for me. It isn’t what I usually do in my own work but seeing this fantastic artist have a solid grasp after a relatively short time seriously gives me hope that I, too, can create work like this. I truly appreciate the visual craft she has in creating spaces that incorporate type, video and game attributes as VR spaces. The aesthetic values she plays with are also super, super interesting to me! I also really appreciate how dynamically she weaves many conflicting concepts to create a characterless virtual space that inserts you, as the player in this space. I also think it was really awesome to hear her relationship with assets and how she, as a creator works through modelling, scripting and designing spaces. This is a lot of labor and hearing an artist talk about this, it made it into a very real relationship to me.

marimonda – LookingOutwards05

For my looking outwards assignment I chose this video regarding Marina Abramovic’s VR work. I am familiar with Abramovic’s previous work but not in any particular detail (mostly stuff regarding her collaborations with Ulay) and this is the first time that I hear about her work in VR. The reason that this project was of particular interest to me is because it really showed me an application  of VR that had less to do with living in a digital space, and with applications of games  or artistic tool (I saw at least a good 5 or 6 videos that focused on modelling or drawing in a 3D space).

This piece right here is one of the pieces in the set that truly focused on approaching VR from a performance perspective, in a way. I really appreciate VR as an approach to fine art, as an effective form of conveying a concept and allowing a person t0 experience what you as an artist consider. It seems like a really elaborate space for conceptual work and I think that’s what’s so fascinating to me about this project by Abramovic.

marimonda – LookingOutwards04

IMG_9734

Dimensions of Dialogue (tablets) (2019) by Joel Simon

Link to project

This project is incredible to me because it explores a really interesting approach to the intersection between technology and language. The idea of having two algorithms compete, edit and change a set of glyphs in the generation of a completely new character system is almost a corny replica of the change of language through time. The most interesting part to me is that I might not even be able to recognize the difference between the text shown above and a legitimate ancient script. The idea of constructing a digital space where two systems compete is incredibly interesting to me, it almost becomes a space of linguistic evolution and collaboration– that in the end relies on a human to ascribe meaning to it with the original data that’s given to them. This was not the only project that caught my eye that had to do with typography or language, these two projects [1, 2] very differently approached type/scripts/visual formats of language. Some of these projects used ML to map typefaces across a space, similar to the sound map project we looked at yesterday in lecture. Some other ones deliberately explore human created glyph systems (like A Book from the Sky by Xu Bing in this project).

Unrelated, but this  is a gorgeous project. 

 

 

marimonda – GPT2

“I dreamt* one night that the peaches would come and kill me. I stood in my kitchen, peaches all around me, peaches flying at my head. They clawed at me with their sticky fingers, and drooled all over me. I screamed for help, and my husband came running in, unarmed, not knowing what was going on. I chased him down, and grabbed him by the throat, squeezing. I told him the peaches were coming, and they were going to eat me, and it would all be his fault. I grabbed his hand, and squeezed harder, telling him this time the peaches would really hurt him.”

This was REALLY FUNNY and really clever. I am amazed by the way this AI algorithm maintains meaning and grammatical structure. This story makes sense, it wasn’t like the short film we watched in class where the dialogue was nonsensical! I think out of all the tools I have played with so far, this is my favorite one by far!

“Shakira released Pies Descalzos in 2005 with Daddy Yankee, Wisin, Nicky Jam and Jowell & Randy, a Spanish-language album that was a massive success around the world. The album stayed on the Billboard 200 chart for 120 weeks and was certified 16 times platinum by the RIAA, becoming the best-selling Latin pop album of all time. In 2013, Shakira released El Dorado, which went on to become the highest selling Latin album of all time. On June 3, 2016, Shakira released her ninth studio album El Dorado, with different themes”
In this one I wanted to see how it would deal with legit factual information. As many of you may know, I really like this one album by Shakira. It didn’t do very well this time 🙁

“MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. His father bought some bags of ice for their house from a peddler, on a side street with a red-roofed church at the end of it. Aureliano stood in front of the ice chests, looking at his father, who was smiling and pointing to the church. The peddler’s dog was snarling at the collar of the boy’s shirt; Aureliano was afraid of it. His father said, “Eat. There is nothing you can lose.” He took out a handful of change and said, “You must buy something.” The peddler was going to ask him if he had”

In this one I decided to input actual textual information from a famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This one was rather interesting because it actually retained some of the context of the original story! Although this isn’t how the story goes.

“I wish I was a puddle of water, so I don’t have to go to my coding interview. I wish I was back home with my mom so I could eat fried plantains and noodle rice. I wish my parents would understand and support me. I wish I were in class. I was packing my stuff and preparing myself to go to work when the tears came out. “I wish I was back home with my mom so I could eat fried plantains and noodle rice,” I mumbled as I held back the tears. “That’s OK, and guess what? You’ll go back home soon,” a voice told me. I suddenly felt better, and I finished the interview on time.”

LOL. Thank you  algorithm, for giving me advice on reframing the situation.

*this is grammatically correct.