{Admired}:

I think this is a very well-done project. It has invented a new way of controlling to adapt to a new control interface – touching screen. The controls are very intuitive and of high usability while I wish the colors were prettier….

Samplr – by Marcos Alonso

{Suprised}:

This piece is so elegant, yet the technology behind it is so simple. I like the the way the user used the magnets and created such a poetic piece. Watching the slow movement of the metal cube, I feel like time stops..

moving objects | nº 502 – 519 by: Pe Lang

Gearmotor, magnets

Size: 660 x 540 mm
Year: 2011, Galerie Mario Mazzoli – PreviewBerlin

I’ll begin with the work I was impressed by: OutRun, made in 2011 by Garnet Hertz.

Hertz essentially took an old OutRun arcade cabinet and modified it so that it became a small electric vehicle in its own right. Custom computer vision software analyzes the road lying in front of the vehicle (as recorded by front-mounted cameras) and constructs an analogous image of it using the game’s sprite set. The virtual road is displayed on the “windshield” in real time.

Mainstream video game designers strive for realism, but this effort seems to end up concentrated specifically on games’ graphics. Hertz de-simulates OutRun’s essential gameplay component – the driving, bringing the game onto the mean streets of the real world. Simultaneously, he subverts the effect by forcing the driver’s focus to a relatively small amount of visual data. The “gameified” model of the world is the driver’s sole navigational tool. With our own GPS systems, how different is our own experience driving?

It’s nice to see a project that has a sense of humor (16-bit go-karting!) that, as an experiment in augmented reality, can provide useful data for other future research in the field.

link: http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2012/12/garnet-hertz.php

Now, the work I was surprised by: Ice Angel, by Dominic Harris and Cinimod Studio.

This work is just as much a performance as it is an installation, with one viewer at a time taking the role of actor. As a participant stands on a mirrored pedestal and moves his or her arms, an array of 6,500 LEDs behind the pedestal generates a pair of wings which match the movements in an impressively natural manner. The camera used to capture user movement data is placed diagonally above the performer, making coding the installation more complex, but ensuring no jarring disruption of the scene by the recording device.

Though I would contend that the conceptual underpinning of the work is somewhat weak, I was surprised by two aspects of the installation. For one thing, its requirement of audience participation that is performative rather than cooperative is something I don’t see enough of. Perhaps more importantly, the installation records performers’ biometric data, thereby “remembering” the wings unique to them should they mount the pedestal again. Where many generative New Media artworks focus on the ephemeral experience, this work has a sense of permanence.

link: https://www.creativeapplications.net/featured/ice-angel-by-dominic-harris-from-snow-angels-to-angelic-forms/

Finally, a work I feel could use improvement: The Pyramid series, by Dev Harlan.

Harlan projection maps intricate and ever-changing patterns onto pyramidal surfaces.The video he projects emphasizes, complicates, and is limited by these simple geometric surfaces. Harlan’s clean aesthetic makes for some colorful, interesting monolithic installations. Despite this, I feel that he isn’t pushing his work to its full potential.

I feel Harlan’s expert manipulation of geometry in two dimensions could translate just as well into three dimensions. Imagine projection mapping on an installation that transforms and undulates. As it stands now, I find Pyramids stales rather quickly.

link to video: https://vimeo.com/19641254

Deeply Admire: Make A Baby by Lucky Dragons

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing/performing through this piece several times. It consists of several hand decorated leads feeding back into a max patch (I think) measuring the overall resistance created as users hold hands/release their grasps. As circuits open and close, the characteristics of the sound evolve and expand.

In the performances i’ve seen, this results in a lot of relative strangers spontaneously grasping each other to create really lovely generative musical compositions. Make a Baby is a prime example of something that’s totally technology driven, but which totally obscures that technology in the interactions it facilitates.

Surprised: Gunta Sotlzl’s Textiles

Stolzl produced  textiles in as a master craftsperson in the Dessau Bauhaus. Her textiles were created on Juaquard looms that use punch cards to encode weaving patterns.  I saw several of these at a MoMA exhibition a few years back and they surprised me because (a) they’re so obviously obscenely amazing and (b) they were largely made in the 1920s on  what are essentially massive proto-computing platforms

Disappointed: Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited #8 – www.facebook.com by Ursula Endlicher

http://www.ursenal.net/wi_ttmv/index8facebookmovie.html

This piece is technically impressive and, on its face, seems like a really cool idea. HTML is pulled live of a page and interpreted by dancers whose movements are subsequently interpreted, and stored into a language of movement, and then re-interpreted (again!) by a second set of dancers. Additionally, sound is generated by mapping the characters of HTML tags into sonic elements (H-E-A-D, is given as an example).

For all its real-timeyness, this performance lacked any sense of urgency or immediacy. More importantly, by using HTML as a the driving tool Endlicher conveys nothing meaningful about Facebook as a system. Sure there are some handy bodily metaphors (head, body, link, span, etc) but HTML is merely an artifact of an end-user experience and is fundamentally not what’s interesting about Facebook as a network (which is what’s interesting about Facebook). Doing an HTML based interpretive dance for any site (cuteoverload.com for example)  would look just about the same.

Project of admiration: Aleph of Emotions by Mithru Vigneshwara. It is such a simple poem, that this small machine writes. This machine uses and Arduino, OpenFrameworks, GPS, and smart phone to create a camera-like display of visualizations of a particular locations human emotions based on accumulated tweets. It’s a beautiful and elegant thing that lets the user explore, on somewhat of a deep level, emotional well-being throughout the globe. I admire it’s scope. I admire it’s aim to incorporate an intangible yet ever present element of human existence. Quite a lovely thing we have here.

Project that Inspires: Ambient Synthesis by Amanda Ghassae. The ambient noise machine is a work of art that is extravagant. What I mean is that, the form could be anything, from a node, a bench, anything. The fact that this was created not as an object of disguise, but as an object of symbiotic invasion makes me love it much more. I love to create things that go against the human perception of average. I think I am inspired by this piece because of my ability to relate to the creation of an object as more than the sum of it’s parts. This piece holds attention because it isn’t alone. It has context within all environments and I am greatly intrigued by that notion.

Project that disappoints:  Noisy Typer by Theo Watson. It isn’t that I don’t like it at all. It is that the potential to tell a story or narrate our progression through time technologically is left unused. I believe that this is quite the one-liner if you will. What else could be done? I feel more compelled to talk about the application of the tool, rather than the tool itself. A simple act that transgresses time (writing a letter, a composition, a note to a friend) could have changed this neat tool, into a project with some substance.