Sepho Body

For my body project I created a program that tracks the users face in order to get their distance from the screen. The screen displays a map of Pittsburgh and the closer to the screen you move your face the more the map zooms in. It will continue to zoom in until your face is almost touching the screen at which point it will show you a view of yourself from above. For me this piece was meant to be a commentary of the state of surveillance through things such as satellites, facial recognition software and personal devices in general.

https://vimeo.com/306442105

 

Sepho – ARSculpture

For my AR sculpture I used the decal on my hat to project the logo of the hat, making it function almost as an animated billboard. This introduces an interesting, almost hologram-like way to customize clothes and advertise.  Animated/modeled/textured in Maya

VIDEO:

 

GIF:

sepho-book

Title: Exploration?

Description: A generated log/diary of a sailor/explorer.

Zip: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TessDSHxPt30Q2uxnF5K0VLUhlkLHVRu

Example Chapter: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1u6jQYzeuN5EQFFpsqIsgdtsZk0qZzJu6

Sepho – Telematic

My project is about reaching through a kind of field or veil of abstract shapes to communicate with other people on the other end.

https://the-veil.glitch.me/  - (url because the embed only works in the WordPress preview for me?)

 

The idea for my project started as a way to play around with interactive, emergent behavior, however, the more I considered this project and its nature and the more I fiddled with my code the more this project because about the various abstractions we use to communicate and interact with one another. I really wanted to play with how much I could limit the rules of interaction while still allowing for that feeling of 'someone on the other end.' In a way, communication it self is just us arranging things such as ink, light, our bodies, or the air around us to get ideas across, so why not add weird glowing circles into the mix?"

Sepho – LookingOutwards02

In the fall of last year I went to my first lecture series at CMU and to see Ian Cheng it really inspired me. I specifically enjoyed his work Emissaries. Emissaries for me was really interesting because I was really able to see the artist and his style in his work beyond the 3D models and textures done by him. The movement and behavior of these kind of microcosms just had a general "brush stroke" to them almost that I thought was very dreamy and unique and in the same way a little haunting. Additionally, all of his pieces were up for an extremely long time, on display but not tangible the entire time. This made me feel like i was really watching this tiny world grow and develop in front of my eyes.

Sepho – Reading03

I found this page really interesting to me because up until recently I believed mostly in creating last word art mainly because that is simply what I had been told was art. To me art had to be a response, it had to carry a message or be the result of a plan, especially computer based art. Nobody in their right mind can code something if they don't know that they're coding right?

Since a few months ago I have been slowly leaning away from last word art and slowly I have started to gain an interest of art as an exploration of an idea or medium. Why do people have to have an end goal in their projects? What happens if i start a project with a specific medium or the seed for an idea and simply let it direct me where it pleases. I now think that art can be a language with which to share an idea with the world, but it can also be used as a vehicle for exploring new feelings and ideas.

Sepho – Clock

For my clock I chose to create a clock that doesn't tell people what time it is, it tells people what time it 'feels like.' When planning for this project I began thinking a lot on how weirdly arbitrary and meaningless measuring time really was. It was interesting to think of how we need this abstraction of miscellaneous systems such as the earths rotation to keep order in our lives. What interested me the most about our measurements of time was how absent subjectivity and the humanistic experience of time were from these measurements. With my clock my goal was to subvert the objective, factual nature of "clock" and how we view it. Suddenly time is something subjective and fickle with absolutely no foundations in reality.

For my process I really wanted to keep the actual clock pretty simple and let the idea do the talking, and I learned that for me, keeping things simple is the most complex thing ever. In order to replicate the face of a digital clock I had to draw my own font out of shapes and in order to get the average between times I needed to convert times to degrees on a circle.

Ideally, this clock would exist as any other clock would, for example as a simply alarm clock on a night-stand. I really enjoy the idea of taking something so personal such as what time it "feels" and presenting as fact by putting it on a clock.

Sepho – Reading02

Slime mold is a super interesting system with effective complexity. Being organic, slime mold is pretty close to being right in the middle of total order and randomness, but due to it's behavior it leans more towards order. Slime mold works by first reaching out and finding food, then by forming efficient paths to the food, creating amazing synthesized systems to get to and from resources.

 

 

I really don't think that with generative art there is a "problem of authorship." I think the "artists hand" is an interesting notion that was questioned by people like Duchamp and Pollock and I think that generative art is another way of experimenting with that concept. Its also interesting to think about separation between arts and crafts, what turns a painter into an artist or a painting into art? well what turns computer code into art? Intention? The audience? The art-world? I think that these are important concepts to ponder and generative artists explore them, but through their artwork.