Category Archives: LO-3

Alex Sciuto – Looking Outward – 3

carousel-1

Carousel Gif

Here’s some inspiration for the GIF assignment. It’s a gif of a rotating carousel (there are others, but I don’t like them as much). The gif works well and is novel for a few reasons. First, its motion is takes of the full image and it loops. Not many real-life gifs do that. I like it on an artistic level because it uses the looping animation to tell me something new about a carousel. Different parts of the carousel move at different speeds. This gif falls into the category of cinemagraphs—gifs of photos with subtle animations. But I also think it connects back to the Lumiere Brothers, some of the first people to use cameras to capture motion. The Lumiere Brothers captured “boring” scenes of daily life that were made exciting through animation. In a similar way, this gif turns the prosaic into something more.

Fabulous Olfactometer – Sensorial prosthesis for air pollution

[iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/102654799?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0″ width=”600″ height=”338″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen”]

“Can we accelerate human evolution — by means of existing technologies — to cope with extreme living environments?” This project gives humans the ability to smell the chemicals in the air in an animal-like way. I really like the thesis of this project—that we can use technology to make us experience the actual non-digital world in a different way without resorting to screen-based interfaces. This is not a criticism of the project, but I wish this project would have been less grounded in art and decorative artifacts and proposed something more realistic that people could use. American capitalism is founded on the concept of “externalities,” of offloading your company’s costs—in pollution, in labor wages, in build quality—onto others, the environment, consumers, or workers. This project hints that we can experience these externalities in a more concrete way. I think there is a great need for these “enhanced experiences” beyond the realm of critical design / critical art.

 

dantasse

28 Jan 2015

A couple neat OFX Addons:

ofxProcTree – a procedural tree generator. Looks like it makes trees, like this:

screenshot

I guess this is a “parametric object”, like our next assignment will include. There’s a handful of parameters, and I guess if you tweak them right you can get something cool and semi-realistic like this. Not super-realistic, but I could imagine a forest of these and it would look reasonable.

ofxObjectSurfer– an object recognizer/tracker. You draw a lasso around an object in one frame of a video, and this will track that object in the rest of the video. I was kind of hoping it was a general object recognizer (I give it an image and it returns a list of objects in the image), which it seems not to be, but still cool. I don’t know much about vision, but it looks like it works based on “features”, or little tiny bits of the image that it can recognize even when rotated or moved.

circlescircles (2)

mmontenegro

28 Jan 2015

Untitled No. 1

We have been talking about data collection and how to answer a question or tell a story with all that data. Untitled No.1 has a lot of data! They collected only images from the previous 24 hour news cycle. As we can see in the video, there are a ton of images. But what are they trying to show us? I really enjoyed how the video starts by showing us nonsense of the data. I felt it was trying to represent all the amount of news that happens in 24 hours and how crazy it is. But then, when the images come together and show a big picture, I was amazed! I had been waiting for them to do it and then there it was! I thought it was a very good use of the collage and of the data they had. I didn’t like the music the video had. If I could change anything it would have been take the music out or put something different. I would have also cut the amount of time showing craziness and added more time showing big image collages.

Collages have been a very nice way to show a lot of images in a cohesive way, and I really liked how they did it here in a 3D space.

no1 documentation

The process of rendering the videos was also very interesting. You can see they experimented a lot and tried different techniques of rendering video and images. Perception plays a lot in the video processing. We can see what they get and how they want to interpret it. I have to say I really enjoyed watching the process because you get to see what inspired them and how did they get to the final goal.

Bryce Summers

28 Jan 2015

Note: I did not see the note that says that the projects need to be related to open frameworks until it was too late. I have appended some cursory comments about some interesting ofxAddons that I have found/find interesting.

“Boundary Functions”

http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Archive/2006/Openspace/art_technology/boundaryfunctions.html

This is a project that attempts do display the personal territories of individual people interacting with it. It seems like it computes a vernoi diagram for actual people in space. I like this piece, because it is an example of a project that tries to make an abstract concept concrete. This project was done in 1998, so it is quite old. Now that artists are starting to create technology that can sense a person’s emotional state, this project could evolve into a subjective personal bubble visualization that displays a person’s personal bubble to others. Imagine if we could see our friends and know when we should leave them alone when their personal bubble is large. We could also see when someone is inviting us to enter a closer conversation of social interaction if we saw them having a small bubble. People who are sensitive to being interacted with in certain physical ways, such as people who do not like people tapping them on their shoulders could indicate these behaviors that they do not like my configuring their personal bubble. This project seems to come directly from Vernoi diagrams and the introduction of real time image synthesis.

myData = myMondrian

http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/24114/myData/

Bryce's Personal Mondrian

Bryce’s Personal Mondrian

This project is a webapp that asks the user for personal information and then maps the input data to a Mondrian drawing. I like how the project maps quantified values and the personal cultural value of a person to a generated work of neoplasticism reminiscent of Piet Mondrian. I find this to be fitting, because artistic movements such as neoplasticism and minimalism sprung p from the counterbalancing pendulum of cultural taste and rebellion. I find it hard to understand these art movements in the current times when they are taken out of context from their predecessor art movements that they sought to differentiate themselves from. These art movements that I find hard to appreciate non-rationally sprung up from mundane everyday cultural tastes just like the data that is entered in this artwork.

ofxAddons

ofxDelaunay

https://github.com/obviousjim/ofxDelaunay

I am a big fan of computational geometry and it seems cool that people are putting up code for Vernoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations.

ofxFatLines

I am also a fan of drawing functions that allow the pixels to dance better. I often find myself wishing to draw lines of very particular thicknesses that are not always supported by standard libraries.

ofxTonic

https://github.com/TonicAudio/ofxTonic

I am interested in sound synthesis, so this addon that allows access to a sound synthesis library seems very useful.

I am somewhat partial to the ofxButterfly addon.

https://github.com/Bryce-Summers/ofxButterfly