Interactivity and Computation • 60-212
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2022 • Prof. Golan Levin
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I find this work of Sofia’s to be fascinating. It feels as if you’re looking at an old image, but what you’re actually looking at is fairly obscure. It’s a sort of uncanny plant life. It’s almost as if you’re looking at a historical image from a different world/universe.
I was drawn the the gradients in this piece. Although the shapes and the concept are simple, the blur effect adds dimension and makes it more interesting to look at.
This piece looks geometric yet organic and simple yet complex. These conflicting attributes makes me want to look at the piece more.
I was intrigued by the scientific look of this piece. Although it was digitally generated, it has the look and feel of a medical diagram and looks to have the same complexity as something carefully crafted by a medical artist.
2. Maolo Gamboa Noan: I gasped when I saw this piece because it looks like an art piece made of lumps of hair strung together.
3. Sofia Crespo: This piece sticks out to me because it is 3D computer art, which makes it more familiar to me amongst her other pieces.
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Zach Lieberman does beautiful things with color and here creates a generative work that feels like a material-rendering but simply using a number of moving radial gradients (like point lights). He posts many iterations/experiments on his instagram so you can really see how his techniques develop and grow more complex.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTetxTHjvsL/
https://www.behance.net/gallery/85060381/buiiin
I chose buiiin by Manolo Gamboa Naon. The piece instantly reminded me of Hong Kong at night, looking out at towering skyscrapers. I found this piece extremely clever because from afar, the piece heavily resembles skyscrapers but when you look closer, some areas seem fictional, as if there are floating buildings. However, the colors the artist uses which contract the black background render some shapes to seem like reflections of office lights.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/135411967/armmnn
I was immediately drawn in by the colours used to create this piece. The bright colours mixed with the straight lines in the centre and the fluid particles on the outside make them look incredibly beautiful.
For my looking outwards topic, I chose Garfield Kart.
Garfield Kart is a living master piece, appearing on many different platforms it can seen as one the greatest pieces of interactive media known to mankind.
I’ve spent over 150 hours playing Garfield kart and I have yet to scratch the surface of the complexity of the mechanics and lore in the GCU.
My favourite installment of Garfield Kart has to be Garfield Kart: Furious Racing, I feel like the sequel brought the game to a whole new level with new interesting mechanics while refreshing the old and outdated ones.
10/10 can’t have lasagna cause I’m lactose intolerant.
A video game that I find inspiring is the game Outer Wilds. It’s definitely one of those games where if you’ve heard anything about it, it’s probably been from somebody who goes on and on about it being a masterpiece, and I’m definitely in that camp. In short it’s basically a mystery game on the scale of a solar system, where you have total free range over where you go and your methods of uncovering the central mystery is through exploring and at times solving environmental puzzles through the settlements and technological structures of an extinct alien race, all while the player is stuck in a time loop where they die every 22 minutes. It’s the only game I can really think of where the “lore” of the game is basically the game itself, and the only piece of media where I’ve actually cared about truly understanding the mechanics of weird sci-go alien tech. The mystery in the game is surprisingly ingeniously crafted, and there were many times where I learned some new vital piece of information or where some sort of obscure mechanic clicked which absolutely dumbfounded me and completely recontextualized my understanding of the game world and everything I had done up to those points. It’s definitely a type of game that has reframed my understanding of what games can be and how to utilize games a medium for story telling.
What makes the game particularly inspiring to me, besides it being one of my favorite games, is that it had fairly simple and low-scale beginnings. The games creator, Alex Beachum, created the game’s alpha as a master thesis for USC’s Interactive Media and Games Division, and his original motivation in making the game was not to create a complex space mystery, or to push the boundaries of games as a medium, but just a desire to fly around in a space ship in a physics-based solar system. Everything else sprung out from the original goal, and I think that stands as a testimony that not every great piece of art was something that was planned out meticulously in advance, but that most time great art does and sometimes must develop and change overtime. From what I can find out, the developers behind the game were originally a team of 6, but the team has since grown to 13.
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