Category Archives: looking-outwards

Ron

29 Jan 2015

The House of Walker

The House of Walker is an interactive Johnny Walker whiskey tasting experience created by Nelson Ramon. This interactive exhibit took place in my hometown of Austin, TX; guests to this event were given RFID cards that they placed in a slot at their tasting mats. Two 25-foot tables  embedded with 6 glass panels each were illuminated with visualizations and information that corresponded to each type of whiskey that they sampled, and guests were able to share their experiences on social networks directly through a button on the table. The video shows testing and only images are included for the actual event, so it’s difficult to see what other information was displayed. This exhibit is an interesting application to visually enhance and personalize alcohol sampling experiences, and can be applied to other types of events in the service industry to add an educational element to the consumption experience.

Curio Cabinet

The Curio Aquarium is an interactive exhibit created for the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference developed by Specular with support from Microsoft. In this installation, users can create bug-like creatures from tangible wooden pieces, place them inside a cabinet, and then see a digital version become born inside the virtual aquarium, often interacting with other digital creatures created by others. I like how the users can participate in the creation with their own hands-on physical creations and then observe their digital counterparts interacting with other creatures. The exhibit uses several Kinects to scan the shapes of the physical creation and translates it to a virtual creature. The cabinet also listens so that when the viewer speaks the creature’s name, it comes to life with its own personality and interacts with the other creatures. Perhaps the Kinects can also detect movement outside the aquarium so that the digital creatures can react not only to each other but to the viewers outside? I would imagine that this can also have educational applications for young students.

John Choi

29 Jan 2015

The Stranger, by Brain Fox (2013)

The Stranger is an immersive interactive installation that whispers louder and louder as the user moves closer to it.  Basically, the user inputs his name on a smartphone or tablet and the installation begins to visually “gossip” to itself everything it can find out about the user from publicly available information located in sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  While the whispers are prerecorded, the information displayed around the installation are gleaned in real time.  This is supposed to alert the user into finding out exactly how much is known about him or her from just his or her online presence.  I think this project really hearkens back to the magic mirror in the fairy tale Snow White.  Like the magic mirror, the Stranger seems to know about everything about everyone, almost to a level that makes it creepy.  The Stranger also looks like the white face in the magic mirror.  Frankly, I don’t think the face belongs in a project like this.  The wispy environment of texts and whispers seem to be more fit for a purely atmospheric experience.  The human entity makes the user think that he or she could interact with it and speak to it, even though it is just for appearance and does not really react in any other way than just looking at the user.

The Digital Flesh, by the Creators Project (2011)

If I were to describe this project as close as I could in just 13 words, I would say this:  Creepy growing ball of mushy faces mashed up like wads of chewing gum.  Seriously though, if this project was trying to strike a feeling of awe, wonder and disgust all at the same time, it nails it perfectly.  With beautifully warped visuals ripped straight from the trench of the Uncanny Valley, I don’t think this project could have achieved a better balance of interactivity and graphics if it tried.  It really reminds me of Zach Rispoli’s final project in EMS II last semester, really picking up on the theme of deformed faces on globby balls.  I imagine it captures faces from somewhere and processes them with the users being blissfully unaware.  I wonder how much more creepy the ball would look if it also captured other body parts like hands, arms and legs and globbed them onto the ball as well?  On second thought, I actually don’t want to know the answer to that question.

 

 

 

 

pedro

29 Jan 2015

Generating a form is always an intriguing process… but what about generating a set of rules that generate a form? Or even more intriguing, a form that generates itself?

There are many roots of the generative thinking, but there is no doubt that biology provided in the 19th and 20th century the fundamental ideas to comprehend the natural phenomena as the result of rule-based processes. We can cite here Darwin’s natural selection, Watson and Cricks’ discovery of the DNA structure and the seminal work of D’Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form. Along the 20th century, with the propagation of systemic theories and information technology, rule-based processes occupied an important role in art and design. Terms like “complexity” and “emergence”, research fields as “artificial life” or techniques such as “form-finding”  or “evolutionary algorithms” permeate  current production.

The idea of this post is to present an interesting branch of art that instead of maintaining a inspiration in biological processes, utilizes theses natural processes as the raw material for a generative art. Cyberneticians such as Gordon Pask were also interested in things like slime molds and ferrous sulphate solutions in the 1970s. Particularly, slime molds (and other molds) are interesting because they morph from unicellular entities into aggregate.

molds1

The project magical combination (and here, 2012-2014) by Antoine Bridier-Nahmias explores the visual characteristics of different molds. It is very interesting to have all these organisms growing and presenting different patterns. However, I believe that the emphasis on the pictures end up treating molds as static visual compositions, and hides its growth process and all the techniques behind the project. Of course, if the author adopted a critical discourse, this conflict with the logic of an growing organism could be seen as the exposure of the arbitrariness of an artistic image or even a critique about the privilege of human creativity in aesthetics.

There is another project that tries explicitly to register the growth of the molds and also to influence it. The Nexto biologic workshop ( and partners, 2014) was based on the use of programming and 3d-printers to simulate/generate a pattern upon which the slime mold would growth and adapt itself to. I believe this project does not have a huge visual impact, it did not took so long as the first and it also does not have a space to question the structure of the artistic field and aesthetic discourse. However, it has a fascinating characteristic. As it explicitly exposes human interference (it is a workshop) the results depart from the field of visual aesthetics to a kind of curiosity associated with the development of simulations and (at some level) even with board / strategy games.

ST

29 Jan 2015

I’ve never used OpenFrameworks before, and up until this Looking Outwards, I wasn’t clear on what it was. After seeing the large variety of projects created with it, I am very excited to learn it.

My interest in animation led me to look at a library of animated GIFs created in OpenFrameworks. I was looking of giphy.com which had a lot of submissions by Adam Ferriss. a BFA student at MICA. I was particularly interested in the following GIF (link):

IAdam Ferriss

This GIF, although computer generated, has a sense of material, in the way that it references drawing techniques (contour lines). It also reminds me of the shape of an ink line on paper. I aim to make work like this, work that is referencing very organic, physical phenomena. However, I really wish this GIF would have been seamlessly looping. Every time it restarts so abruptly, I am reminded of how it was created. Transitions are never as abrupt as they can be on screen.

 

Next, The Color Project at IFP Media Center. For this project, the artists selected movies filmed in a city. Then, they got the recording locations of scenes in the movie and plugged each location into Google Maps.  The maps are displayed in a grid, and are synchronized as they zoom in closer and closer to each location. Eventually, the whole map is filled with a field of color, and the whole grid is filled with a color palette that related to the city being filmed in.

One of the things I enjoyed about this piece was its presentation. This is not software for any users besides the artists involved.  It was not presented in browsers or as an application; the piece was presented on 27 HD screens. This is an awesome piece: Information visualization, Open frameworks, and Art.

dsrusso

29 Jan 2015

Untitled from Christian Moeller on Vimeo.

MOJO // CHRISTIAN MOELLER

Mojo by Christian Moeller is an interactive art pice that utilizes and industrial robot arm, augmented with stage lighting.  The effect is an automated spotlight on the street that follows passers by.  The project is a charming intervention in that it creates quite a playful atmosphere on the street.  Individuals are given the ability to literally be in “the spotlight” in a public place.  I really enjoy the playful aspect of this work.  However, I feel that simply using a spotlight was a limitation.  Why not use a powerful projector or more advanced dmx lighting? This also has a great opportunity for the presence of sound design.  The addition of something like a sound laser may be interesting.  Most of all I believe that the interaction could incorporate a bit more.  The movement of the robot is quite simple, so some deeper level of interaction could boost the theatrics of the piece.  Thematically the piece is very similar to Snout by Golan Levin, however the execution of this project isn’t as dynamic or clear.  Although I really enjoy this piece, it set’s a bar for future improvement.  There are several ofx add ons that allow interfacing with industrial robots.  Although its somewhat unclear as to what was actually used for this project, it is a good example of what could be achieved with the add on.

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Kenny Wong and Marco De Mutiis – ][LIMINAL][ Performance Video from Kenny Wong Chi-Chuen on Vimeo.

LIMINAL // KENNY WONG + MARCO DE MUTIS

Liminal by Kenny Wong and Marco De Mutis is a work that utilizes a flock of hacked drones to deliver sound throughout a space.  The drones work together to create a distributed sound system that knows no limits of gravity.  This allows for a completely free exploration of spaces in ways that un- aided humans cannot.  This aspect of the project is very interesting to me.  The drones expose something that doesn’t exist otherwise.  To me this is a strong justification for their presence.  The only missed opportunity that I find with this piece is the absence of visual presence.  Although I appreciate the purity of simply engaging sound, I feel like a visual accompaniment could be very powerful.  Work with drones has become very prevalent amongst the media arts community.  Things such as light painting, and projection have found nice couplings with this hardware typology.  There also is a comprehensive ofx add on for the ar drone, which allows a broad low level control of these platforms.  This enables adaptability to a number of purposes and networked communications.

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