Admire: Botanicus Interacticus

Disney Research created a plant that can detect where it is being touched.

This project excites me from a more technical prospective. Capacitive sensing has been around for awhile but not in organic material. This project opened my eyes to the potential for sophisticated recording of interactions with nearly any object. This was also a nice use of machine learning techniques.

Disney Reaserach did a nice job choosing a plant. A boring office ornament gained a bit of personality in the process. I foresee creating interactions with other objects like chairs or sculpture.

Surprise: Do Not Touch

This music video was created by tracing people’s mouse pointer during a video.

This project caught me by surprise because I didn’t understand the power behind what was going on. Because each mouse pointer is a person, the video is a crowd. From this perspective the dynamics of the mice became very interesting, There were individual acts of defiance and curiosity. Mice made decisions to go up or down. What made it interesting was that as each person added their path they could see who had come before them. When the mice were asked to spread out or form a shape it was interesting to see how each person’s small independent decision summed up.

Disappointment: The Chime: Scoring The City

This project caught my attention because of its scope. The chime was designed to succinctly capture the feeling of a city block in sound. It employed 18 sensors and measured 27 variables. There was certainly enough data for a composition. However, I felt there was too much data. While the sounds were interesting I lost track of the data source. In particular the visualization in the videos focused my attention on simply trying to decipher the various blips without allowing me to see the connection to the city street. I loved the idea and the sounds are interesting. There could perhaps have just been fewer sensors so that a balance could be maintained between inputs and outputs.

Admire: Flat-e’s interactive set for Jamie Lidell’s You Naked

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65r_xN1eWeY]

Flat-e is an London-based interactive agency that created a truly unique and interactive set design for singer Jamie Lidell that projects procedural graphics on to four semi-transparent walls surrounding the singer. The visuals react not-only to the music, but also the tilt of the microphone stand and are generated in real-time using OpenFrameworks. This set was brought to his live performances as well.

The work is incredibly inspiring because of the tight integration with the movements of the singer and the music itself. Most visuals are simply pre-programmed video loops projected onto a large display behind the singer. This takes it into the 3rd dimension, making the music really feel tangible. The semi-transparent panels also provides several benefits; it reveals the singer and his body motions as well as maps the same visuals on to the singer, the cube walls, as well as the floor — adding to the illusion of depth.

Surprised: CLOUD

[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/49748983]

CLOUD is a large interactive sculpture constructed from 6,000 light bulbs. The frame consists of hand-bent steel and new/used bulbs are wrapped around to form a shell.

What is surprising is how simple and under-appreciated the materials are. Light bulbs are things that we use every day and take for granted, but seldom think about how much energy they take or how we dispose of them. This project not only makes these simple objects a delight to see and interact with, but also brings awareness to the possibilities of “upcycling”. Prior to and after this project, the artists tapped into the local community to donate used bulbs. This inspired me to take a look at other ordinary objects to see what else could be made from them.

Disappointed: Inhibitf AdVan

[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/81205331]

This piece consisted of a van with a large screen and a camera to display and track the actions of nearby pedestrians. Areas on the screen were interacted with by waving your hand in the indicated area in order to play a whimsical animation of a character being zapped of all of his hair.

While this is a novel idea, the implementation falls short. Although this was released only a month ago, the demo looks and feels as if it was done 8 years ago. The interactions are not directly mapped to any of the resulting consequences, making it feel more like a slideshow or a flash banner ad than an interactive experience. Finally, the piece doesn’t consider the context in which the display and camera are placed. It may have been much more interesting to see a view of people across the street, as if the screen was a magnifying glass. Users could then zap the hair off of random people and they would never know. Take for example Hand from Above from Chris O’Shea.

A project that I Admire:

Link: http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/mechanical-characters/

Here is a project by Disney. It is a project that allows someone who hos does not have very high technical skills to create mechanized animals simply and easily. I really enjoy projects by Disney because they are always pushing for ways to augment the way we experience the digital and physical worlds. I particularly admire this project because their process is remarkable. They created software that analyzed curves generated by geared mechanisms. They then compiled the data into a database and using the collected data they were able to output a certain mechanism that produced a curve as close as possible to a custom curve that was then drawn by a use. Using this information they drew the movement of say leopard’s leg, the example they used, then they were able to generate the mechanisms needed to produce similar movement t the one studied. Finally they used this process to create a bunch of other mechanized creature, that are also very easy to build.

 A project that I found surprising:

Link: http://plethora-project.com/completeworks/2012/09/27/bloom/

This is the project that really surprised me. This project was done at the Bartlett by Jose Sanchez. This project initially caught my eye because it reminded me of a project the is currently being done by Madeline Gannon. The work flow is what I naturally expected. It was a generated mostly by a parametric script in Grasshopper. But the part that surprised me is that the complex form generated is composed of one singular component that repeats continuously across. As shown on the website, this one piece is able to create a plethora of objects ranging from benches and crawl-spaces to bikes and even humanoid objects. The piece is created through injection molding, which creates a strong seamless unit, and contributes to the strength of the over all products created by it. This is a very surprising project and really embodies the idea of using computational design to mass produce customizable objects.

A project that I found Disappointing:

Link: http://www.biothing.org/?p=343

Lastly this is the project I am a little disappointed by. It is a trend that has been showing up a lot in architecture recently. Its the idea of using algorithms to generate facades and other building conditions to help the deal with environmental impacts on its skin. This idea think is pretty awesome, and the process they have here is really cool as well. They have made a a Java applet that uses particle simulation to calculate how an element, be it water or sunlight will behave on a certain surface and then it simultaneously adjust the surface to optimize water flow or shading. Their example seems to deal with shading. The pit fall of the project is a bit under whelming and looks like a generic tessellated facade. That aside I think they have developed a great framework to produce compelling responsive work. The results of this framework needs a little fine tuning.

Admire – Starry Night (Interactive Animation)

This impressed me as a relatively simple idea, very well executed.  The visualization seemed almost obvious as soon as I saw it and I thought the sound design was well-executed.

Surprised – Fragmented Memory

I thought this was a very interesting.  The software part (turning a memory dump into an image) isn’t particularly interesting by itself, but the idea of turning that into a physical tapestry really appealed to me.

Almost – CSIS Data Chandelier

I really like a lot of elements of what’s being done here.  At the basic level, the piece serves a practical purpose but has a nice aesthetic.  It is dynamic and adjustable while still be subtle. However, it doesn’t look like it can really display that much and it comes across as rather dull in the video.

Conspiracy Clicker (Play Here, Read More Here):

A nicely-made social commentary game about the media, industry and politics of modern America by Luke Nickerson. Made as part of the most recent Ludum Dare MiniLD, an online 48 hour game jam that happens on a monthly basis. The themes of the jam were: facade, scheme, conspiracy, deceit

The game certainly fits the themes well but I believe that the actual gameplay falls a bit short. The idea that rapid mouse clicks constitute most of the gameplay could probably work if it felt different. The graphics are nice, but I think ones that would have been more representational of the actions would have really increased the game feel. Sort of reminds me of Papers Please and Cart Life.

Fluvial Terrains of Amorphous Carbon (View Here, Read More Here):

The Under the Microscope photo set by Engineering at Cambridge has some of the coolest things I have ever seen hands down. For the past year and a half in my free time I have Photoshopped with the goal of creating intriguing and engaging textures. I have often used photographs of algae and other organic life I have taken at museums. Here are two examples of my work: ZVVL and Still Sane. Seeing people take this to the next step and seeing the beauty of nature is mind blowing for me. I labor away for hours trying to combine my photos in interesting ways, and then Ingrid Graz takes incredible shots using extreme zoom lens, changes nothing and that work is what I dream of making/capturing.

A Walking City for the 21st Century (Read More Here):

This idea certainly shocked me. A moving city. What shocked me the most was the fact that it was actually fairly feasible. The architect behind the plans, Manuel Dominguez, did a great deal of research to ensure that it could be made. The idea of a moving city originally was proposed by British architect Ron Herron in 1964 (here are details/photos of his absurd legged bug-city plan).

Dominguez was inspired by the current waves of urban contraction. His idea is to have all the core essentials be a part of the moving city and then the moving city can go to wherever jobs are at the moment. Certainly an interesting idea. It seems feasible when it comes to engineering, but I question its environmental impacts (though Dominguez does suggest this could help deforestation).

New-Media Arts/Design

An Admirable Effort:
A project I admire is an interactive adaptation of The Little Prince. While the story goes through each page from the actual book, the reader claps, changes room lighting, blows into the mic, and other various interactions in order to communicate with the characters in the story. The words in good stories fly off the pages and immerse the reader into the store by themselves, but I like that this project took it further and made the story entirely interactive. When reading, you can imagine that you’re there in the story, witnessing and participating, but very rarely are you given this opportunity. Additionally, the various methods of how to interact with the story and the story’s response was delightful.
The video doesn’t show how the reader is to know how to interact with the story though. It seems that we’re just supposed to know when to clap, blow on the mic, etc. That would be very troubling if you didn’t know how and when to do such things.
What the creator got right was being able to keep the emotion and tone of the story. The involvement of interaction did not seem to take away from the story itself. Additionally, the interactions were related to the characters, which also helps with continuing to convey the story.
The creator was inspired by interactive children’s books, particularly those of Bruno Munari, who explores non-traditional interaction with paper. This project was created to be analogous to such books but in computerized form and outside of mouse and keyboard interactions.

A Surprise:
A project that surprised me was the Reach for the Sky Game. This is a version of a common game where the player moves upwards into the beyond to collect coins, avoid crashing into dangerous objects, etc. as far as they can go. When I watched one of the videos on the game (the screencast), I was pretty disappointed. I didn’t think that the game had anything special and actually lacked some features that games similar to it always have. For example, movement of the playing figure in space seemed to be entirely controlled by the player and not coerced by the movement of the background, making the game a lot easier. However, this was the second video that this person put out; I had been going through videos from most recent to least recent so I watched the second one first. I also have this habit where I don’t read the description first. After reading something about a “self-made jetpack” in the description, I looked for another video on the project, and lo and behold, the game was controlled by a physical “jetpack”. The player hits buttons on controllers in both their hands to turn left or right, turning on and off dual-fire engines–essentially mimicking what we think a real jetpack would do. So this project truly surprised me. The game itself? Not so much, but how the game is played? For sure. Being able to create whimsical things but with great fervor and amazing results is what inspires me.
From what I could find, this project was developed as a school assignment for a digital media and design class, aiming for an installation for children 12 and under. Everything else I could discover about this guy was that he really likes music and has a band. I think it would have been interesting to fire discover this person through his music, follow him for a while, then come across this coding and design project and be completely surprised by his abilities to do things other than music. People always surprise you.
First video I watched, Screencast:

Second video, Game Promo:

A Disappointment:
A project that disappointed me was this drum and bass synthesizer. Essentially, it detects the color green on a piece of paper that you hold up to your video camera and changes drum loops based on the tracked color. Though I do admire this project a good amount, I think he could have taken it much further. I suppose there are limitations on what the developer was able to do, but I would have liked it better if there was more depth to the variation. It really only seems to have two modes (2 colors are demoed) and varies only slightly based on the location of the colored paper he holds up to the camera. In addition, I think the actual sounds created by different colors and movements could have been more distinct. I cannot really tell whether a certain sound is intentional or just part of the synth sound.
The fellow that created this also seems to be involved in music. The reason behind the development of this project is actually very admirable. He often encounters people at live electronic music concerts complaining that the DJ could be checking his email or playing pre-recorded tracks on the computer he is DJing with. The developer of this project decided to come up with a more interactive way to mix sounds in order to create a deeper connection with the audience, giving them a clear correlation between what movements they see the DJ make and what sounds are produced.

Slightly Disappointing

This piece disappointed me a little bit even though it is pretty.  I love art that is this tactile, and the concept is obviously awesome.  The resting state of the fabric looks beautiful, and it looks fantastic in the photo below.  However, I don’t feel like it looks completely natural when people start moving their hands around, and it doesn’t satisfy me enough to make me feel the magic.

I’m not sure if the problem is due to using a Kinect, since the piece doesn’t actually react to touch but to movement, but in any case I’m sure this concept could have produced something much better.  There’s an article on Colossal here.

Admirable

I love this piece because it’s so original! The first mirror is brilliant and clear and well-executed.  It seems simple but I’ve never seen anything like it before.  It’s also interesting how it uses technology and an awful lot of work to create a lower-resolution version of something as simple as a mirror. The fan mirror is less clear, but then again it is made of fans, and I love it anyway because it’s so incredibly bizarre and makes such fantastic sounds.  I could watch those fans open and close all day.

I found the little article about it here.  Daniel Rozin also makes a bunch of other mirrors and they are all pretty great.  Naturally, there’s even a mirror made of mirrors.

Surprising

I’m including this because, even though I technically saw it before school started, it stands out in terms of being surprising.  I was walking through the EMP museum in Seattle, which is ostensibly about music but has a lot of other exhibits too.  I’m not really that into guitars, so I didn’t really care to look at the “guitar tornado” when I saw it from afar.  After my boyfriend convinced me, we went closer to the sculpture.

And I’m glad we did, because it wasn’t just a guitar sculpture; the electric guitars actually played themselves with a bunch of picks attached to little motors!  I didn’t realize until I put on the headphones nearby and heard the music.  For something I found in a pretty touristy museum, I thought this was really cool (and probably also unreasonably expensive).  The museum has a short blurb about it here.