Stephanie, Looking Outwards no.1

Hunting Arrows

http://open.adaptedstudio.com/hunting_arrows/

This isn’t a Youtube video, but it’s definitely worth clicking on anyway!

I was Stumbling through the Internet and I found this interactive herding simulation game. You guide groups of colored arrows with your mouse around the screen, and if any of the black arrows touch them they disappear into colored inkblots on the screen. As you play the screen gets more colorful as all the colors start mixing together, providing a record for the amount of “prey” that has been killed and where they were.

I loved the smoothness of the animation in this piece, and I was captivated by just gathering large herds and watching how they interacted with each other as I moved the mouse. Their movement looks a lot like the behavior of flocks of birds and insects as well as schools of fish. I was also interested by the way they seem to take on life of their own as they break formation to avoid the black “predator” arrows. Their colors are also pleasing to look at and remind me of animals like deer, fish, birds, and butterflies.
However, I do have some critiques for this piece. I think it’s a little too easy to avoid the predators because of their slow acceleration compared to the prey. It only really becomes a challenge to keep your herd intact when there are large amounts of either predators or prey involved. I also wish for more variety in the shapes of the ink blotches left behind by fallen prey.

Falling Girl

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rmd44OwMgk&w=420&h=315]

 

This is another piece by Scott Snibbe, the artist we were introduced to in class the other day. In Falling Girl, a silhouette of a girl leaps off a tall building and falls slowly and gracefully downwards. As she falls she passes windows that are filled with recordings of the silhouettes of audience members, who she can interact with.The overall message of the artwork was to convey the shortness of life, and that the act of living is itself a part of dying.

I liked all the pieces by Scott Snibbe that we saw in class, and I like this one just as well. The movement of the girl is graceful and convincing and the audience interacts with her in a way that doesn’t seem forced or contrived. It was interesting to me that the audience’s interaction with the piece did not affect the outcome of the narrative or the message of the piece, and that they remained onlookers even though they had been fully injected into the artwork. While this makes incorporating the audience’s actions easier for the artist, it may also be difficult for the audience to pick up the deeper meaning without being caught up in how their own interactions are affecting the girl.

Lilypad Embroidery

 

I’m having a hard time embedding the video of it working because it’s hosted on a non-Youtube site that WordPress doesn’t seem to play nice with, but here is the link to her page with the video: http://sternlab.org/2008/04/lilypad-embroidery/

This is a piece that entrepreneur Becky Stern made as a tribute to Leah Buechley’s LilyPad Arduino. The Lilypad is woven into fabric with electrically conductive thread, which is connected to a photoresistor, some LEDs, and a small speaker. Bright light causes the speaker to play lower tones and the LEDs flash slower, while dim light causes the speaker to play higher tones and the LEDs flash faster.

I like this piece very much from an aesthetic point of view. The weaving is beautifully executed and does a wonderful job of fully incorporating the Lilypad. However, I wish this piece had taken the functional side of the Lilypad as seriously as the aesthetic side. The LEDs do not seem to be arranged according to the weaving pattern, which would have been really cool to see. I also wish that the speaker was placed in a location that would not break the symmetry of the embroidery. To me it almost seems that a random circuit and embroidery pattern were superimposed on to each other to create this piece, and I feel that she could have done so much more to make it great.