That Game Company’s website: http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/

This is Journey, a game developed by That Game Company in 2012. They had a crew of 19 people and used PhyreEngine (and had inspiration from games like Braid). This is THE gaming experience of this decade, a story that I will never forget! Journey tells it’s narrative wordlessly, and its game mechanics aren’t particularly challenging. You won’t ever find yourself stuck on a puzzle, but Journey isn’t really a game about solving things. Journey is about finding your way up a mountain towards a light while being guided by another player who has already done the pilgrimage. This game tells a story that the player gives meaning in their own way, touching the soul in a way that only games can.

Journey excites me, not only because it is a beautiful game, but because it has made a major impact in the gaming community. It paved the way for more and more abstractionist/First Word games, and my new favorite game to come out this year: Bound, has clear inspiration from Journey. I feel like the path towards becoming a better person starts with understanding yourself, and these sorts of games are incredibly helpful at that.

My huge interest in generative things, especially generative landscapes started years ago when I first saw Minecraft on somebody else’s computer. What amazed me was not only that the landscape is realistic and beautiful, but also that the maps were infinite, and every time a world is generated it was different from any other.
I spend hours traveling in these worlds pondering how they are generated. The style of my own work also started changing. I was beginning to use less and less pre-rendered images until one day I decided to have everything in a project procedurally generated.
The project was initially developed by a single person named Markus “Notch” Persson in java, and later by his team. This fact also convinced me how much a single person with a computer can do.
It is said that Notch was inspired by other generative games such as “Dwarf Fortress”.
I believe this project, among many others, may point to a very interesting future. What will we be able to generate? Will we be able to tell if something is real or generated?

Official site

Project page on Naimark’s website

This project, called Displacements, is something I was introduced to a few years ago in Larry Shea’s Media Performance class here at CMU. I wasn’t initially enamored by it, admittedly, but as time has gone on, I find myself thinking about this piece quite often. I think it struck a chord with me in the following months and years because it was such a simple, yet such precisely executed piece.

The installation is completely blank, white room in which a spinning projector projects color and movement onto. Before the room was colored white, actors had been filmed in the room with a camera rotating at the same speed in the same place as the projector, so that they appear in the projection.  Naimark is often referred to as a pioneer of projection mapping and indeed he is; Displacements was installed 1984 in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Although there are projection mapping projects such as the faces in Disney’s theme park as early as 1969)

As an artist who is interested in memory and the connection to space and objects, this piece hit each chord while simultaneously being a very open project. Its a step into augmented reality.

I’ll be honest; I don’t really keep up with the computational art scene. When I first heard this assignment, no particular project came to mind. Sill, I love computational art when I see it; when I was a kid, and my family visited a museum, I would always spend an unreasonably long time playing with the interactive wall projections, catching colorful raindrops in my hand or stretching out my arms to see how many digital birds I could get to land on them. While I love this sort of thing, and was really excited by the idea of this class, I can’t point to any specific project and say “That’s what inspired me.”

So, what am I going to write about? Only the latest, greatest, interactive augmented reality project that basically took over the world in less than a week. That’s right: Pokemon Go. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not as purely artistic as many other computational art projects, but it’s an excellent example of emerging technologies coming together to form something that’s interactive, entertaining, and all-around pretty impressive.

For those of you who don’t know what Pokemon Go is, it’s a new(-ish) mobile game that allows users to collect and battle virtual animals called “Pokemon” in the real world. Players need to physically walk around to earn points, find Pokemon, and hatch eggs. It may seem pretty simplistic, but there’s a lot going on. The app uses GPS technology to find out where you are and how far you’ve walked (I tend to agree with the people who say that the phone’s pedometer would have been a better way to measure the latter). It uses data or WiFi to access game information, like what Pokemon and Pokestops are in your area. Finally, it uses your camera to display an augmented version of reality: one that includes little animals all over the place.

None of these technologies are particularly new, but never before has there been a game that used all of them to this degree, on this scale. Through this app, players have access to an entire virtual world that Niantic (the company behind Pokemon Go) has created. Real-world locations are used as Poke-Gyms and Poke-stops, and you can watch the digital avatar you design for yourself walking through your town. It’s a massive project that has gotten nerds everywhere out walking, exercising, and socializing, and it’s success could mean more augmented reality games like this in the future.

It may not be a traditional art project, but I find Pokemon Go pretty inspiring. Sure, it could use some improvements (*cough* tracking *cough*), but what’s more important than the gameplay itself is the fact that augmented reality is making its way into our everyday life. Niantic has even said that they are working on making it work on smart glasses! Pokemon Go is the first step in what is hopefully a massive entertainment revolution. If people had the opportunity to view the world around them through well-implemented augmented reality that wasn’t hugely inconvenient, it would make gaming much more immersive, exciting, and (for what it’s worth) healthy. That’s the sort of thing I want to work on in the future, and the sort of world I want to see.

A computational project that got me interested in taking this class was SketchSynth by Billy Keyes. The project is basically a draw-able controller. The user takes a piece of paper and draws various buttons, sliders, and toggle switches. The program recognizes these drawn controls and then makes them functional through the tracking of human interactions with said controls. I admire how the artist connects the physical and virtual world through the nature of the project, and also how the user has control in what type of controller they develop. I also think it’s cool that this project actually sprang from a class held at CMU in 2012. It goes to show how we, although intermediate programs, have the resources to develop such exciting programs.

The project was created/developed entirely by one student. In terms of the software used to develop the program, Keyes primarily used commercial software (openFrameworks) and also used add-ons that were developed by other artists. This projects aids in developing a stronger user influence and sets the stage for more complex works where users can change the outcome of the program based on minor decisions.

My first exposure to computational design and art was through Steven Wittens (acko.net) in my senior year of high school while taking a Calculus and Vectors class. I had become irritated with the way my teacher was approaching the topic, never letting us explore the material or do projects, instead forming the entire semester around wrote tests and quizzes. Around the same time, I also became aware of Bret Victor (worrydream.com), whose projects inspire me immensely to this day.

One of my favourite pieces of Bret’s work is Drawing Dynamic Visualizations (video, additional notes), a concept for a hybrid direct-manipulation/programmatic information visualizer.

In his talk, Bret introduces the problem of Spreadsheets only creating pre-fab visualizations, drawing programs like Illustrator not being able to deal with dynamic data, and the output of coded artifacts not being continuously “seeable.” Meaning you can’t see what you’re making until after you render, which creates a feedback loop where errors can occur. To express this idea, he posits that programming is equal to “Blindly Manipulating Symbols.” A feeling I relate very strongly to when I don’t know exactly what my code is doing and can’t recreate the entire structure in my mind’s eye.

As a solution to this problem, Bret presents a concept for a program that combines the idea of direct manipulation with the ability to process and handle dynamic data.

This prototype was created wholly by Bret, but is not his first attempt at creating programmatic drawing tools or concepts. For prior art, see his works: Substroke, Dynamic Drawing, and ‘Stop Drawing Dead Fish.’ In terms of the future, I see the possibility for tools like this to change how many people work with the computational display of information and ideas. Personally, I’ve never taken immense joy from the act of programming, but, rather from the results which it produces and I believe tools like this could make that power far more accessible and enjoyable.

For this week, I’ve chosen to write about one of the first computational design projects I ever heard about, and one that certainly changed the way I understood programming forever. While enrolled in 15-104, we were working in processing, which felt enormously intuitive for me. I had encountered programming in an introductory class in high school, but it had always been so deeply rooted in a perspective of math and execution of function that it never really grew on me and I found it difficult. Processing flipped the programming metaphor on its head, establishing a visual feedback system that I immediately understood. Naturally I was curious about who had created this amazing tool and quickly stumbled upon Casey Reas portfolio. I was enchanted by the intricate and pseudo-natural patterning in his work, but couldn’t unpack it visually. Then I found his “Process Compendium” which describes the algorithms behind (much of) his work in plain english, a logic-based framework for creating interactions infinitely more complex than each component. This compendium also explains likely the name behind ‘Processing’ as the method of translating a ruleset or process into a coded algorithm which creates an output. This collection of projects and the mindset it implied is what really showed me how powerful programming is as a creative medium, and how it allows artists and designs to work in ways so far beyond the capabilities of their owns hands, in an orchestration of thoughts and rules to make beautiful systems. Since then, I’ve followed this theme both in programming based work, as well as learning about natural generative or emergent systems as a lens to observe, learn from, and emulate nature.

http://reas.com/compendium_text/

Rafael Lozano Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian artist working mainly in large-scale interactive installations. In his 2013 Eyeo presentation, Hemmer covered a plethora of different projects across a very prolific career (even managing to break a rib in the middle of his presentation), which I won’t describe in their entirety, but rather focus on a few key projects, and some underlying principles which I found important and unique among artists dealing with interactivity.

The first project that piqued my interest was Body Movies. Inspired by the long tradition of shadow plays, Lozano Hemmer used a multi-projector setup to project giant 70 foot portraits of local people onto large facades in public plazas(he did iterations of the project in Rotterdam, Wellington, London, and beyond), and then also project people’s shadows onto those sets of portraits. He said that, in his work, it’s important to not tell the audience exactly what to do, but rather create an open space for them to explore, express themselves, and sometimes to communicate with others. I think this notion is very important when working in the field of interactive art. Interactive art can be really drab when the viewer’s experience consists simply of “getting the joke,” and figuring out whatever finite trick the artist had up their sleeve. In Body Movies, Lozano Hemmer’s projectors serve as the medium for the audience’s humor and creativity; viewers act out skits with each other and collaborate to animate the figures. There is a very short period of figuring out how to interact with the piece before the viewer is able to creatively explore its potential.

In making interactive art, it seems important for the artist to “get out of the way,” in a sense, and let the viewer express themselves through the piece. The artist’s job becomes to create a powerful, dynamic platform for the viewer to introduce and manipulate their own content. The piece where Lozano Hemmer most effectively “gets out of the way,” in my opinion is Voz Alta (“Out Loud” or “Loud Voice”). He was commissioned to make a work for the 40th anniversary of the student massacre in Tlatelolco, and decided to install a megaphone in the Plaza De Las Tres Culturas, allowing people to speak freely into it, sharing personal accounts and stories of the massacre. The megaphone was connected to a searchlight pointed at the ministry of foreign affairs which would flash every time someone spoke, along with three other searchlights pointed out across the city. The words spoken into the megaphone were broadcast uncensored over FM radio. I love this piece because Lozano Hemmer does such a good job of amplifying the voices of the participants and creating a warm and powerful platform for others to speak, while simultaneously making a few simple but poetic aesthetic choices, which complement rather than compete with or exploit the people participating.

The video I choose is from an information architect Giorgia Lupi in Eyeo 2014. She talked about her obsession with hand drawing and its role in her life as a design tool and a means of expression. She draws constantly whenever she is thinking, and it helps her so much to understand herself as an artist.

She takes her drawings very seriously and not seriously at all at the same time. She draws whatever is in her mind and does not really try to make sense of them, enjoying the moment of spontaneousness and comfort of expression. Then a lot of times in her work, when she tries to visualize complicated data and information, she can somehow retrieve the once random shapes and images in her drawings and create amazing and out-of-box ideas.

She talked about it like it happened so naturally, which is the most fascinating for me, that for her, working as an artist has become an extension of her inner self therefore is truly enjoyable and adventurous. Just like when she talked about her work visualizing the data of scientific articles and their citations over the years, she is inspired by her love of the music notes. She was fascinated by how music notes can display such compact information with so much elegance and simplicity, and how much they resembles the relationships among many factors in the scientific world, and translated the symbols of music into variables that can accurately reflect the information hidden in the data of 20 years. It appears to be a delightful coincidence, but in fact it takes really deep understanding of the data and imagination to make the connection valid, and create a whole new perspective. It is not only a good example of problem solving in design practice, but also human-centered design thinking, which results in an experience for the readers to engage, explore or even care, therefore delivers the information that is initially obscure and hard to follow through.

The Life Cycles of Ideas, Popular Science

Aside from her amazing projects, the speech really got me thinking about what makes an artist unique, what makes an artist’s personal style, and what I can do to find my own. While it’s difficult that information is overloaded, and everyone has his or her own theory of how to make it to the other side, her insistent self exploration and unprejudiced acceptance of herself and her art is truly inspiring. But most of all, she makes me never afraid of my ugly drawings again.

I feel really basic writing this Looking Outwards assignment about a blockbuster film, but I hadn’t had much exposure to interactive art prior to this course, and my response does reflect one of my sources of information, so screw it, I’ll be basic. When I saw The Jungle Book last spring, I was completely blown away by its unprecedented vfx. I’m too young to remember when Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, but my hippocampus was firing on all cylinders by 2009, and the release of  The Jungle Book inspired a level of CGI hype that hasn’t been reached since Avatar.

The graphics in The Jungle Book are almost realer than life. It’s almost gets so real that it returns back into the realm of the imaginary from which it came. It took 800 computer graphics artists to bring the story to life, utilizing motion capture and compositing, among other techniques. In fact, the only physically real components were Mowgli and the pieces of the set that he immediately interacted with — all of the animals and about 80% of the jungle were computer generated. Since Hollywood isn’t allowed to keep exotic animals for reference, each animal had to be researched extensively.

I assumed that most of the art for The Jungle Book was done using preexisting software, but in researching for this project, I learned that there were some challenges that required software engineering to surmount. For example, the CGI characters didn’t throw shadows onto the live-action Mowgli, so they had to develop software that would project the animals’ shadows.

See the movie’s website here