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

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“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.