Category: LookingOutwards

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.

Pearl is a VR animation film that tells a life story of a girl name Pearl through the consecutive events that occur in, with, and around the car. The audience always stays inside the car and sees various people come and go. As the film progresses, Pearl’s childhood scenes interweave with the current moments, which not only conveys the idea that her memories have shaped who she is now, but also that she perhaps is reminiscing her childhood, which many people would/could relate to.

What impressed me the most about this is that this short animated film is the piece that showed me what VR can give that no other medium can. I’ve watched many videos and read many articles that state VR will be the new, ultimate, revolutionary medium, yet words by itself didn’t really meant much. I think this film has made an exemplary usage of VR in storytelling.  The story of this film is great, and the producers have made a great choice of using VR to convey the story, as it matches well with the closeness/personal feel of the film.

DeepDream VR – Waterfall

This work was part of a bigger experiment – Google’s DeepDream program. This program uses a neural network that transforms the ordinary footage you feed it into a surrealistic, psychedelic, dream-like landscape. Just watching it on my laptop was so mesmerizing, I cannot imagine how it would look like using a VR headset. It really reminds me of those psychedelic drug trips that TV shows/entertainment depicts. This project just caught my eye because in my own work, I love to play around with iridescent/multichromatic materials to play around with reflection and refraction, and although the textures/materials used in this digital piece isn’t reflective, the overwhelming amount of colors in the video really makes it seem like it is.

Read more information here

Das Is – Virtual Reality Therapy

Better Look at the project on Chelley Sherman’s website

Das Is is a piece where the audience is in a space where they have lost their sense of “being” and/or “thingness” but still being able to communicate with the space. Chelley bases this idea off of the therapeutic process called EMDR where you reprocess traumatic imagery. Basically, her project allows the player/user to explore an afterlife shifting through space through portals as their very own disembodied self. To give some background, Chelley Sherman often studies neuroscience and psychoacoustics and utilizes them in her artwork.

What I particularly like about this work is the fact that the player/user is put in a position where they feel like they are physically confronting death and the idea of mortality. They travel across this surreal landscape containing these diverse planes of memories and sensory fragments(audio, visual).

Link

Blackberry Winter (2019)  by Christian Mil Loclair is a project that generates human poses based upon human poses to show motion. This project really interests me because of the human yet unhuman quality of the images. I really love how the shiny ceramic contortions loosely form a human figure and how upon first glance, it’s hard to tell what the shapes are, but if you spend a second to observe what the figures represent, you can pick out a human shape. Additionally, I like how the shattered/hollow nature of the figure’s limbs further highlights how ephemeral movement is and creates a feeling of one motion blending into the next.

http://www.aiartonline.com/art/holly-grimm/

https://hollygrimm.com/acan_final

The project was done with additional constraints from a neural network trained on art composition attributes. It’s attempting to take traditional fine art concepts (Variety of Texture, size, color, shape, contrast …) and embodying them as a part of the constraints.

What fascinates me most about this project is the documentation in the second link. The documentation showed every step and the different passes of images through the model, the different dimensions of values that was modified to produce the look which I though was really cool. It’s interesting to see how some traditional concepts like color theory and textures gets replicated/translated into digital, machine learning space– and also just how the categorization of human art work fits into the listed categories.

Ross Goodwin’s project is an AI literary road trip, where he drives around a text generating model that writes a novel based on what it sees through a camera. Through his work, he posits that artificial intelligence assists creatives to produce artwork, rather than replace them, as humans find more ways to collaborate with the AI. I was fascinated by this work, as we often think of machine learning models as static tools, spitting out results based on existing datasets. For this project, however, the AI is, in some sense, ‘experiencing’ the data together with the human, bringing into question the degree of entity it has. His choice to drive the model around through the trip, rather than showing an hours long video clip and gps data, seems profound, and the resulting text is also pretty interesting.

I chose this project:

https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/runwaypalette

Where Google Lab worked with  Business of Fashion to grab and clusters thousands of color palettes seen on fashion runways. I could stay on this site for days. I love fashion and this site has inspiration organized in an interesting way. Normally users go through different runway lines by designer, but this color palette organizational style is useful to laymen rather than designers.

(small comment: whoever trained the machine learning model to pull the color palettes did not teach it to ignore skin color and this biases the entire color space to neutral tones)

Here is the entire color space:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is an example palette:

Plumbing the depths of latent space
Stacked interpolation cycle – StyleGAN × floor plans pic.twitter.com/hKhYtQJ9Po

— Erik Swahn (@erikswahn) May 17, 2019

This work by Erik Swahn depicts many floor plans stacked on top of one another. It was made using a StyleGAN (generative adversarial network). I chose this work because it is really satisfying to look at cross sections of things you wouldn’t normally see. I think that this work is especially imaginative because it paints a picture of a building that does not exist, so legitimately trying to imagine what this creation would look like from how we normally interact with buildings is a fun challenge. I think this technique of interpolated layers has a similar aesthetic to Robert Hodgin’s Meander that we saw earlier this year. I also just really like how this looks because of the way it is rendered; normally floor plans are so boring

 

 https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/

Refik Anadol is the creator of Machine Hallucination, which was located in Artechouse NYC, New York.  Machine Hallucination was an attempt at “revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness”.  I’m not entirely sure what all of that means, but I interpret it as discovering new ways to visually represent memories. The exhibition itself is a “data universe” that Anadol created by feeing 100 million photographic memories of NYC to machine learning algorithms. The result is projected into a room and it tells a story through its massive archive of memories. The artwork itself is a 30-minute experimental cinema in 16K resolution and it visualizes the story of New York through it’s collective memories. What’s interesting is that the story being told is about the future where a hopeful relationship between man and machine will grow. I was originally drawn to it because it looked amazing and without a doubt it is amazing to look at. But now I’m more interested in the experience of being in the room.