Emotica^2 aims to make users more aware of their emotional state by projecting their emotions onto the room which surrounds them. These emotions are projected through generative images, sound and text. They are also projected on a mannequin head directly in front of the user.
I think that Emotica is a fairly inspirational work because the success of the piece relies on the emotional status and participation of its viewers. At this point in time I myself am aiming to design works which need the participation of viewers to create the piece. In many ways the idea of Emotica superseded the execution. At Least through the documentation provided, the generative images around the room and on the mannequin don’t seem to have a close enough connection to life like creatures or emotions.
Electric Sheep definitely surprised me because it is run by thousands of people all over the world. Without the collaboration of these people the work would be just a repetitive sequence of visuals, but over time the contributions of the projects participants shape the global ideal of a beautiful / interesting image. Technically, developing a generationally based highly complex graphical system and interface is also impressive. Knowing that this project came to fruition is very inspirational on both the artistic and technical sides.
Net Worth by Osman Khan is a project which aims to display the “net worth” of each participant by searching for them on the internet. In a modern context, page hits are definitely popular and a visualization of such is definitely an interesting concept. Very often we as humans put ourselves directly up against our friends and colleagues in order to see who stacks up higher. While the visual representation of this project is fairly intriguing, the background of the assignment, “the searching” is only based on the google search metric which can be accessed by anyone at any time. It’s a cool project, but to me, when talking about personal or grand scheme net worth, this is missing something. (This could have been due to the fact the project was made a decade ago.)
ADMIRE: CacheFlowe and Rachel Murray – Triangulated Gem Projection Mapping
This video installation piece is really well executed, in my opinion. I admire this work because this is the kind of project I’d love to make. I think that digital art can create a captivating experience for the viewer when paired with the right electronic music. I want to create an experience like this.
SURPRISED: BassShapes – YellQuietly
This project surprised me by showing me the potential of audio-reactive visualizations. Before seeing this, or being in this class really, I had no idea that there were resources I could use to make this type of art. I’m really excited to see what I can make, given the time and resources.
http://yellquietly.com/bass-shapes/
DISAPPOINTED: “Je Pars” – Directed by Hugo Arcier
I think that the animation/digital manipulation in this video is very interesting and cool. However, I think that a good music video requires a little more substance than this one currently offers. It’s probably better if the special effects aren’t the only aspect backing the video, but used as an enhancement.
I truly admire this project as it creates such an unnatural and new experience to its user. Its beautiful in appearance and the inclusion of music makes the very technical artwork more organic. Its simple and really effective in creating emotion or interest.
This project surprised me. I’m very interested in text and fonts and how we view different texts and fonts. This piece allows the user to edit text and though this seems so simple its extremely interesting when applied to names or brands that utilize specific fonts and seeing them change under the users influence causes a weird uneasiness for me. When the iconic TIME magazine header came up I felt oddly disturbed when it began to resemble nike’s font.
This whiskey company went for sophisticated and concept but to me failed to hit the mark. In this video the artist tries to convey the sense of smell but all I really see is smoke and glittery, unidentifiable liquids. Its aesthetically pleasing but fails to engage sent. I think five gum did a better job visually representing senses in their commercials.
This project is an installation project where the water droplets from the ceiling is fallen to the ground where there are water holding tubes. There are lights that are under the tubes so the glows of light on the ceiling is visible.
The new atmosphere that is created by the mix of computer based art with water, it creates a new space where you can concentrate on the smallest things. The music that is made by the collaboration of water drops falling was very interesting for me since different amounts of water can make different sounds. What I liked the most about this was that the fact even thou it is a computer generated art work it was similar to nature in that it had randomness in it. The water droplets falling into tubes are controlled but where they are fallen into can not be controlled perfectly. I think these little differences are something that makes the project meaningful.
A surface of sand is turned into lively pool of creatures when people are interacting with the sand and moving it away. The moving creatures are revealed when sand is removed.
I was surprised by this artwork and technology since it is really easy for people to interact with. There is no complicated theories or background behind this but all you have to do is interact with it. Kids are always playing with the sand and interacting. Playing with different mediums is something that we don’t do as we grow up, but through this project people actually interact with the art piece and also have a chance to go back to childhood when they were surprised by even the littlest things that are hidden in our lives.
A string is a shadowgraphs to a performance piece. I think this project might have been better if it was more of an interaction between the dancer and the shadowgraph that was shown on the background. They do have a synergy effect that makes the mood more to what the artists and the choreographer wanted it to be I think and it fits well with the Korean atmosphere that they were trying to achieve. As a two different medium they do go well together but since it is not interacting to each other but rather is being played to fit each other I think there might have been more opportunities if it were interacting rather than playing it.
The visualizer can be found here. I found this project by Chris Lee at processingjs.org/exhibition. I immediately admired it because it found a way to demonstrate a complex idea using simple and easy to understand animations. It also manages to look quite interesting and flow smoothly between different modes. For instance the addition or removal of a seed or peer flows smoothly when readjusting the circle and continues to move the “data” bubbles between the seed and peers. It also uses color very well. Not only does it look nice because of the bright rainbow of colors that are used, but the colors also manage to represent separate parts of the data, thus allowing it to more precisely demonstrate how BitTorrents work. It is interesting to me further because it finds a concrete way to demonstrate the operation of a complex system using a simple animation with little to no textual information. I often find that diagrams for systems I am shown use too much text and little to no color and leave most people confused because they simply can’t keep all that textual information in their head when looking at the whole diagram.
Interactive wall with Kinect
I felt that while this demo was interesting, it could have been better executed. The jittering 2D physics (Box2D for oF by the looks of it) in the demo left the demo feeling broken. It seemed that whenever the user touched the screen a new solid was added that left the system throwing things around because an impossible state was reached. It would have looked better if when the user touched the screen that area was held by the user. Then the user would be able to throw, slide, or pick up things and the simple physics wouldn’t have looked broken. However, the demo did show that the addition of a user experience adds a lot to a simple demo. This demo was made by Biopus Studio which after further reseach appears to have many much more interesting interactive electronic art pieces.
This surprised me simply because of the amount of time that I spent having this fish collect food. This simple application manages to make you forget that it is an just a simple game by calming you with music while you gently steer a fish around to keep it alive. I like it because it uses sound and smooth animation together well with a very smooth style. The interactive aquarium was developed by Sunah Suh and David Leibovic and the koi which were used were designed by nardove. Nardove has the following quote on his/her website which I appreciated.
The design looks really amazing and clean, almost like a mix between architecture, geometry and the veins of a leaf. [dirty venation #4 by Yukio Minobe]
One I was surprised by:
The concept of a sound sculpture was not what I had imagined in my mind, and it was pleasant and inspiring and almost mesmerizing to watch. The editing and camerawork was also well done, a step up from bland showcase videos. [unnamed soundsculpture by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer: http://www.onformative.com/work/unnamed-soundsculpture/]
One I thought missed an opportunity:
Although the video was impressively done (and was all of the 3D done in Processing? I feel that most of the text/designs were done with After Effects though), the disappointing part was the world Genesis, so simply made, with simple trees and a few houses on the world. It was a bit dissapointing and a let down, i feel they could have designed a much cooler planet instead of something that looks like a christmas commercial.
A project I admire is called “The Creators.” (http://www.thecreators.tv/concept.html) By being in the same space as the installation the viewer is already inadvertently influencing the audio and visual effects of it, and then the viewer is also able to make physical contact with the installation to consciously alter the sounds and visuals via touch.
I really enjoyed how self-aware of a project it seemed to be, even if I wasn’t overly impressed with the results. The fact that it’s an interactive project about interactivity as a concept is really cool to me.
I was really surprised by the “Understanding Shakespeare” project by Stephan Thiel (http://www.understanding-shakespeare.com/about.html), mainly because I often don’t ever think to associate Shakespeare and programming, or in fact digital anything. The project aims to introduce a new and innovative way of looking at Shakespeare’s works, so as to better understand them. As a massive Shakespeare nerd, I really appreciate projects like this existing, because it makes Shakespeare’s works more accessible to people who wouldn’t be as interested in them otherwise.
One project I think missed an opportunity is the “City Symphonies” project by Mark McKeague (http://markmckeague.com/work/city-symphonies/). It’s a really interesting concept, which uses the roads as musical staves and the cars as the notes moving on them to create music. While interesting as a concept, I can’t see any practical application of it, and also the video demonstration of it wasn’t particularly interesting to watch or listen to. Possibly it’s just the presentation thereof but I feel like the project missed the opportunity to make something really “symphonic,” whereas what actually happened sounded more like dial-up startup sounds to me.
Dreamlines is a project created by Leonardo Solaas which creates unique, almost surrealist paintings based off of keyword users input into the form. The piece uses related images taken from the internet and merges and renders them into a new composite image, a painting. The project uses a combination of Processing and PHP with Flash as the user interface. The Processing reads images sent from the PHP and uses them to generate a drawing that is constantly changing.
What I really like about this piece is how dynamic it is. The paintings created from the searched words are constantly changing, utilizing an aspect of the internet and technology that I feel is sometimes overlooked: its constant changing and updating. In the other pieces I discuss below, the work is static despite the constant information and data being streamed into the projects and programs. However, I feel that Solaas’ piece really takes into consideration the dynamic nature of the internet and technology and this is reflected in a piece that is constantly changing and upgrading. This piece really feels interactive with an interface that like the project, is constantly moving. Another thing I really admire about this piece is its accessibility. A lot of times art seems so constrained and detached from the public but this piece, because it is online and uses the internet especially, makes the art available to everyone, critics and spectators alike and I really like that. My only real gripe is that you have to click submit, instead of enter, to have the image be rendered.
http://www.solaas.com.ar/dreamlines/p5/
One project that surprised you (why?),
The project Fragmented Memory is a collection of large woven tapestries that works to render invisible digital information and photography through woven tapestries. However, what I found most interesting about the work is that it doesn’t only work to render the digital information on the tapestries, but to capture and store that data. Essentially the tapestries are like a combination of all the digital information in a computer’s memory expect on a physical level, represented in woven string instead of pixels and memory.
This project is especially compelling to me because of the concept of physically representing digital information. Through this project they were able to make data, something so seeming ethereal and elusive tangible. In order to visualize memory they extracted Phillip Stearns’ physical memory from his computer. They converted the data into images using custom software written in Processing which grouped the six bit info into RGB colors.
In the comment section of Phillip’s page, I noticed an interesting comment that left a link to a BBC program. In the program it linked computers to looms, essentially noting the close relation of the information processing to the looming process. I think that was a really interesting connection to computers and fabrics. Learning of this connection really added another layer of depth to the piece.
And one project that missed an opportunity (why?).
News Knitter is a projected created by Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz which converts news feed of a certain day or period into visualized text and data that is then printed on a sweater. Like the looming project I mentioned before, this is another project which uses computer data and converts it into garments. The project uses processing to convert the constant news feeds into visual representations which is then sent to knitting machine which creates the sweaters. I really like the concept of the project and the overall execution. If you look below, you’ll see that the sweaters the program prints are visually appealing, especially with its striking blues, reds and blacks which are very akin to the colors we see in political spheres.
Despite this, I find that the process in which the information is selected and filtered isn’t explained very well or doesn’t appear to reflect very much in the overall pieces. The sweaters have streams of words or graphs, but the information it is trying to convey is lost because of the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a filter in which the news is selected. I feel like this is one of those cases where because they are selecting from so much information and not really seeming to do much to filter or organize it, it doesn’t mean very much. I think this project could be more effected if the sweaters and news were categorized in some way. If they could filter out all the news regarding one subject, Israel and Palestine news for instance, and create a series of sweaters based off that news for the day, and so on, then the information being conveyed from the sweaters would have more impact. However, right now they are simply just a series of sweaters that relay old news.
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The Harp Cave is an interactive installation which consists of a sheet-covered enclosure lined with harp strings that are attached to piezoelectric vibration sensors. These sensors trigger an Arduino, which activates sounds from Max Studio, which then activates visuals in Processing.
I highly admire this piece, due to its immersive nature, as well as it being quite multifaceted. It has an element of sound and visual, along with spacial since it is something that encapsulates the viewer/participant. These pieces of art always seem to grab my attention more so than others, since the nature of the interaction is not as ephemeral as simply viewing an object, or walking through a space. Being involved in a piece and immersing yourself within it leaves a more concentrated after-effect.
– Generative Canvas
by Robin Jeanney
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The Generative Canvas is an interactive painting experience, where the participant utilizes their personality and movement to paint lines and circles on a projected surface. The painting creates shapes of a certain size depending on how much the participant moves around and shouts. While I enjoy the premise of this piece, I was disappointed while watching the documentation. The “painting” was not very fluid and painting-like, and the shapes would just pop up into space. Relying on the fluctuating nature of the human element, this piece should reciprocate natural tendencies, but comes off as a little stiff.
– Justification
by Ann-Katrin Krenz
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This is an two-part installation, consisting of a scale which displays the emotional state of a twitter trend, in terms of the most basic of emotions; happy and sad. The second is a machine which manipulates the scale’s system. The ‘parasite’ has a desire to balance the emotions of the scale, and taps into twitter and sends himself emotional tweets in order to reach some equilibrium.
This interaction of machine and social network for the pure satisfaction of the machine surprised me. The machine has been given emotions, and the means of which it can deal with these emotions. Much like humans, the machine is constantly seeking to resolve unevenness, and since given the means to do so, it tries to find peace while the host wavers back and forth between states.
Created by Yunsil Heo and Hyunwoo Bang, <OASIS – sand> allows one to create a pond and view the creatures inhabiting it by moving around particles of sand. The creatures react to changes in the pond’s shape, avoid pebbles placed into the pond, and react with surprise if a pebble is suddenly dropped onto the pond.
I’m impressed by the mix of complexity and simplicity this project creates. I imagine that the surface the creatures inhabit must have been custom made, so I’d like to know more about how the different elements of Oasis interconnect. Is the table itself the computer that senses sand placement and spawns creatures? Even the creatures themselves are complex, as each kind seems to have some sort of flocking behavior informing its movements. The element of simplicity is the user interface, which allows all of the intricate code and machinery to become an organic experience.
I would like to see the ideas behind <OASIS – sand> applied in a gaming context. Could different pond shapes and rock placements result in different ecosystems? Could individual creature populations be monitored and messed with? What sorts of feedback cycles might result?
More information about the Oasis project, such as <OASIS – water> and Oasis II, can be found here. To see more of Yunsil Heo and Hyunwoo Bang’s projects, visit their website by clicking here.
Surprise: Birds?
Created by Frédéric Granon, Birds? appears to exhibit some form of flocking behavior.
I was drawn to Birds? by its overall visual effect.The simplified shapes and color palette are attention grabbing, and I keep re-watching in an attempt to understand how the flocking behavior works. I could see Birds? working well as a title sequence, or possibly as a background element for a menu screen. There’s not really anything revolutionary about Birds?, yet it appeals heavily to my sense of style.
Created by Universal Interaction, Poster Generator was made for the Shutterstock Analog Mensch Digital Exhibition in Berlin 2014. Poster Generator appears to take multiple images of the same subject and combine them in definable chunks to create a new image.
While Poster Generator certainly looks cool, I wouldn’t want to use it as its namesake. The designs it is capable of making are unattractive to my sense of taste. It’s possible that this is a fault of the documentation, but as the program is not available online to play with, the documentation is all I have to go on. Regardless, I could see some form of Poster Generator as an add-on for something like Photoshop.
Universal Interaction’s website can be found here.
