Category: LookingOutwards01

I have to be honest, prior to this class I haven't had any prior exposure to a lot of interactive and computational art outside of video-games, and one game that I have played really stands out to me as doing something profound and interesting with interaction. That game is Dark Souls III, made by From Software on their own engine and funded by Sony. To me, what really stood out about this game was their ability to really use interactivity as its own medium to express ideas and evoke feelings from the player instead of just using it as a device to drive the story. Dark souls as a game is a convoluted, labyrinthine with looming, powerful obstacles  and large hyper-Gothic architecture. Everything from the music to the character design and color pallet is meant to make the player feel small, confused, lost and alone and the game play perfectly echoes those feelings. The level design collapses back on itself and can be frustrating to navigate and everything about combat and exploration can be completely daunting to some. It is the first game I have seen that wasn't designed just to be enjoyable, but to convey ideas and emotions about the world using  the medium of interactivity instead of exposition, and this is where I think interactive art thrives and is truly unique.

Slow Hot Computer - Sam Lavigne

"Slow Hot Computer is a website that makes your computer run slow and hot. Use it at work to decrease your productivity."
http://slowhotcomputer.com

I love introducing this work to my friends in design school. You can surprisingly see a lot of art-phobic people in design departments, and it can be hard at times to successfully introduce a work that you like. But Slow Hot Computer has been a constant success. A friend of mine recently got into Samsung and bragged to me about how he's been spreading the site around to his coworkers.

I very much admire the transcendent experience you get from some types of artworks. And this one doesn't give you that. But it speaks to you immediately. When I show this work to people, most of them initially have a good laugh, and agree that Sam Lavigne is a genius. The main factors in play here are:

1. Humor
2. Succinctness
3. Narrative

The first two are quite obvious. This simple artifact also speaks much more about itself than it initially appears to. And that process of revelation happens pretty quick and easily, giving you a pleasant emotional burst, or that "aha" moment. I identify this quality as having a narrative.

Deus Ex Machina

Last year, I came across this book Soft & Cuddly, in which Jared Kobek talks about his experience playing his first bootleg video games on a ZX Spectrum. I went home, spent the next few days googling this amazingly intriguing, but now mostly obsolete, system, and found out about a specific game called Deus Ex Machina.

Before getting into DEM specifically, I wanted to mention that I became momentarily obsessed with ZX Spectrum--as someone who's never really played that many video games, I was intrigued by how much had been done by such minimal engineering (relative to today). The artwork was so communicative with just 6 neon bright colors, and the music, as well as creative, unique storytelling was clearly industry-changing (creating?).

Deux Ex Machina was made in the time when "video game" was still being defined--thus, it functions less as a playable game, and more of an interactive narrative. What inspires most about this game is that it pushed the boundaries of its time by focusing on the narrative and executing that through syncing an audio tape that the player has to pause at critical points throughout. In today's perspective (and even back then), the gameplay is actually quite boring, since you don't actually need to do anything. However, I believe there have been remake(s) of the game since then that are more player-oriented.

The creator of the project, Mel Croucher, had already been known at the time to be quite innovative. He had already had other more successful games under his belt, but felt that the industry over all was "derivative" and that the "concepts were all stale".

Kinetic Lights is a project from Christopher Bauder and his creative studio WHITEvoid. The DMX-controlled winch and LED platform allows for hanging structures, lights, and mirrors to move and change form. I find objects animated by light captivating. The structures seem like they are from science fiction films, but they aren't images on a screen--they are nearly surreal, breathing spheres, rods, and beams of light.

The ecosystem of winches, light fixtures, and controllers appears to be built from the ground up. Each winch can be connected to an assortment of shapes of light-up forms. WHITEvoid designed software to map out and program in the system in 3D while still controlling the lights through standard DMX. Unfortunately, Kinetic Lights is a commercial product, so not much information on the development of is published.

Bauder developed this project after he created Lichtgrenze, a massive outdoor installation commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. The same light-up balloon system used in that project are available as Kinetic Lights fixtures. The floating nature of glowing spheres may have inspired the Kinetic Lights project.

The system is primarily used in very large installation art, but there are more possibilities. It may be used in performances where light and movement usually complement performers (ex. concerts, dance, plays). Kinetic Lights would also fit well in malls and large atriums where kinetic, hanging art is already found.

Kinetic Lights by Christopher Bauder as a part of WHITEvoid

MIRROR-MIRROR

DEEP WEB - kinetic audiovisual installation and performance

One of my first introductions to the practice of expressing culture through the medium of technology was through Deeplocal. Though I've been interested in their work for a little while now (and curious about how the idea factory over there really works), a project that struck a variety of cords with me is their "Old Navy Selfiebration Machine". The questions this project indirectly asks about the homogeneity of screens in contemporary culture and the projections it makes about new mediums of interactions with technology make this project stand out for me. Beyond that, it does all of this while still maintaining a certain punchiness that's attention-grabbing in a rather ludicrous fashion.

As someone who's trained as an architect, any new medium of interfacing with computation that is physical in nature is always interesting to me. Which is what makes this radical questioning of what a "pixel" means for computation, executed in such a non-conventional method is deeply fascinating.

To briefly describe this project, it is a grid of inflatable balloons connected to Twitter, where people can post their selfies, which then get rasterized and displayed through this inflatable balloon grid. (The video below explains it in a little more depth) . Knowing Deeplocal's project cycle, it's most likely that this was done in a timeframe between 2 weeks and a month, with a team of 5-10 engineers and designers working on it.

From my knowledge of how they work, I'd say Deeplocal probably developed custom hardware (pneumatic systems, circuit boards etc) for this installation, and used some form of either C or C++ to program this system (though I am unsure how they linked it to Twitter).

The potential something like this holds in my mind is enormous. I hate the homogeneity of the screen-based interface of technology, and I envision a world where technology operates around us in a very real and physical manner.  This project for me is both a  provocation and a beginning of that idea(again, this also just might be because of my architecture background). I yearn to experiment and play in that place where the material world interfaces with technology.