Adam-LookingOutwards

Admire

Tele-Present Water | David Bowen

An older piece but a good one for sure. David Bowen takes data from a buoy located in the ocean an re-interprets it with a kinetic sculpture. I love this piece because of its beautiful literal yet abstracted representation of the data. I like to think of it almost as a type of “uncanny valley” – If we have a large projection or video screen that is showing a live stream of the ocean somewhere we expect it to be perfect, we expect to to sound, feel and smell like the ocean. Anything less is a disappointment. But Bowen is not presenting his sculpture as a stand-in for the real thing and so we can enjoy it’s beauty and perculiarities for what they are.

Surprise

Fly Revolver | David Bowen

Also by David Bowen – When I watch the video, with the gun flailing around madly I can’t help but think of scenes that I have seen in movies and on reality TV shows (cops) where the criminal is waiving his gun around at all those that are trying to put a stop to his antics and I cannot help but ponder – could this acrylic ball, with the flies flying around in it be a representation of the criminals mind?

Disappoint

Descriptive Camera | Matt Richardson

Descriptive camera is a camera that takes a photo, uploads it to mechanical turk where a real life human then sees the image and is instructed to write a description of it. The description is then printed by the camera in place of an actual image.

I am disappointed by the piece because I think that using human computation has so much interesting potential (sheep market) and this could be a really interesting implementation (do you really implement humans?) but there is no compelling narrative. I feel like it is more of a technical demonstration than a finished piece of art or design.