Looking Outwards #1

One project I admire profoundly

Memory is a project by Shinseungback Kimyonghun that creates a composite portrait of every person who has ever viewed the piece by using a facial detection algorithm to track faces and superimpose them on top of each other. The idea of being added to this collective portrait may make you feel uneasy, and forces you to consider how we think of identity in a post-Snowden world of data collection and surveillance.

One project that surprised me

Zach Lieberman has a few tweets of screenshots of what looks like several experiments with broken, ugly, bad, and misused 3D graphics, labeled with names such as “bad geometry looking good” and “more wrongness”. This isn’t necessarily a full project by itself, but the casual attitude here of, “hey, look what happened here, what do we think of this?” is very interesting. It reminds me of how while painting, you can try something new, completely screw it up, but end up producing a strange new effect or technique that you wouldn’t have found without the aspect of improvisation. These screenshots show that even though computers seem to give the artist less control than paint or charcoal, spontaneity is still possible.

One project I found disappointing

This set of new GIFs by artist Dave Whyte demonstrates excellent technical skill and creative design, but I worry that this kind of work will dissuade artists to experiment with generative art to create new aesthetics beyond this sort of perfect mathematical pattern-based visuals that computers are good at simulating, and to push the medium of coding to new places.

(not to say that I don’t think these GIFs are visually stunning – the mathy side of me could stare at these for hours)