The kinect piano is a larger than life way to play piano. The users can step on a projected keyboard on the ground and the corresponding tone will be played. The two fellas in the second half of the video demonstrated collaborative music making. This is a simplistic demo, but the idea behind it seems like so much fun. However I’m sure that the accuracy on this thing is pretty much atrocious since the user does not have any markers to rely on. It is probably very simple to mis-step, true to every sense of the word, especially finding footing between the black and white keys.

I think a large scale collaborative music space would be something interesting to explore. The challenge with music related applications is to strike a balance between creating dynamic yet pleasant music versus building something that sounds too pre-canned. I’d entertain the idea that this can support the idea of a flash mob emerging from a crowd somewhere and it would be pretty awesome. It can perhaps be derived from various user movement, especially since the Kinect can detect more that just locations, and produces a 3d vector that can be translated to various sound effects. It is my belief that music applications if done well, holds much more potential to captivate people since working with music is simply so much fun.

Fontplore Showreel is an interactive application that uses objects laid on a large screen as an interaction method for searching font databases. I particularly liked how fonts on a piece of paper can be laid on top of the screen, and the screen would update the interface to show what font has been used on the paper. The typography used is also very modern, and works well with the user interface. Additionally, the interface felt very responsive and fluid.
However, I wondered if there was a reason for the particular choice of objects used to interact with the screen. The user would rotate a rectangular object on the screen to interact with the user interface; I think the interaction could be better by using a touch interface.

I particularly enjoyed metamorphosis because of its organic feel and the beautiful graphics. The colors were very vivid, which flowed well with the moving animations and the graphics.
Additionally, the music is done well, as it syncs with the movement of the camera and butterflies in the scene.
However, the animation is somewhat repetitive and doesn’t change much over the course of time. Beyond its inital appeal, the video gets somewhat boring after a minute or so.

Ryoji Ikeda’s live set. This is a music piece that experiments with black and white visual styles reminiscent of bar codes and digital tags. The piece uses high speed visuals synchronized with music or sound manipulated by the artist on stage.

I think it is notable because music based pieces are difficult to find. I have a personal interest in working with sound, and it seems that most audio pieces always end up looking like a visualizer of some sort. This piece does not exhibit such a property. In fact, it is highly peculiar, reminiscence of a dystopian future and a japanese science fiction aura. However, my critique is that the project doesn’t have much enjoyable sound other than annoying beeps and sounds that are sampled from various electronic devices in the real world. If I want to listen to my computer beep at me, I’d do that myself at my own time. I’m looking forward to see an artist present a work using sound that changes how sound is used or perceived.

However, it leads me to think, what if there is a possibility of making a soundscape that sounds like a sampling of real life. The audience will be surrounded with voices that is very familiar in daily life, yet the visuals are stark and hostile.

Ryoji Ikeda Live from Sheikh Ahmed on Vimeo.

My introduction to Interactive Art is through Robert Hodgins.. and I’m a big fan of his work. My favorite work of his, although not prominently featured, is his magnetic ink project.

Magnetic ink is a project that attempts to document the process of magnetic ink prints; that which attracts me is the entire beauty of the presentation. There are a few orbs spinning ontop of what seems like a surface, and ink splatters off the orbs to form nice traces on the surface. There is a zen like quality to this entire video – I love it very much and would very much like to reproduce it one day.

My only critique of this, and many of his work, is that they tend to not be real time.

From this project, I see the possibility of generating ink or paint based artwork using some sort of process that is generated by a larger system of forces. I think the entire idea is very enticing and has lots of potential for organically generated forms.

Magnetic Ink, Process video from flight404 on Vimeo.

100.000.000 Stolen Pixels is a project by Kim Assendorf in which a web crawler, starting from 10 urls, searched pages for images and hyperlinks. Hyperlinks were added to it’s list of urls to search, and images had a 10×10 square cut from them, all of which were assembled into a massive, google-maps-viewable mosaic comprising 100,000,000 pixels from 100,000,000 images. It’s a beautiful and bewildering amount of data, and it’s almost like staring into a void of noise. When you begin to pick out patterns, such as the oft-repeated image of a pencil, perhaps from blog software of some kind or wikipedia, the mosaic becomes easier to view. The massive 6-degrees-of-kevin-bacon game with the internet is perhaps more intriguing than the visuals, but this is also one of the projects flaws. I found the url log even more intriguing then the image mosaic because I could pull understandable data from it – the mosaic, while astounding, gives little clues to what the images are of originally or where they came from. If I could, say, click on a square and be told what webpage it was downloaded from (perhaps with a link to the original image?), that would push this way further in terms of time that can be spent exploring this massive collection and how rewarding spending that time is.

Nonmanifold Mandible is a video by Ben F. Carney, in which a digital model of a human face has it’s controls linked to 4 channels of audio, distorting and warping it depending on the music, in order to “parallel unreasonable human behavior”. The music that plays is fast-paced, and the face quickly warps between a recognizable human form, a jagged mass of swirls and spikes, and something in-between. I’ve always found the distorted, glitchy aesthetic appealing, but applying it to a human, more recognizable form, and switching between different areas and magnitudes of distortion so rapidly moves past just an exploration of glitch and distortion into a disturbing and monstrous realm. While the visuals are grotesque and engaging, and the rapid music and pace add a lot, it moves so fast that its hard for me to draw a mental connection between sound and distortion beyond a rhythmic one. I wish I could unravel more of what’s going on behind the scenes just through watching and analyzing. Because it’s hard to establish that link, I almost begin to wonder if there is one.

“Light Butterflies” is a lighting piece executed by Chiara Lampugnani for the Milan International LED Light Festival. What caught my eye was the abundance of like shapes forming a field effect at the urban scale. Lighting projects are often interiors which need little luminosity to create a big effect. These butterflies create a (seemingly) living canopy over a city street.

Their beauty lies in their simplicity but the inanimate nature of these forms may dull their impact over time. There is a great opportunity to create subtle variations in lighting (changes which are imperceptible to the casual observer) which may allow this piece to take on an element of time.

eCLOUD from Dan Goods on Vimeo.

“eCloud” by Aaron Koblin, Nik Hafermaas and Dan Goods is an interactive sculpture at the San Jose airport which provides real-time weather information to air travellers. The project reminded me of Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Live Wire”, which visualized web traffic on a local router.

The eCloud is fascinating in it’s use of polycarbonate plates that somehow (not clearly explained) move between opaque and transparent states. the field effect here is , again, stunning.

The project seems to fall short in that it is beautiful to look at but the sculpture itself seems to provide little useful data to users. As it is intended to be a sculptural display I view this as shortcoming.

I am fascinated by the development of CNC food production. These types of machines have (subtly) inserted themselves in many facets of our lives and food seems like a critical and final frontier. Food preparation has been traditionally, an intimate act which modern food production has almost succeeded in destroying. I’m curios how new tools like the “3d food printer” could scale down enough to have an impact in homes instead of factories or high end restaurants.

I’m less interested in the effectiveness of this particular instantiation of CNC food, however it does suggest that we will be confronted with questions similar to the CNC fabrication revolution. How does this change hand crafts perceived value? Will mass production dissolve into mass customization? And, who chooses the flavors in the tubes?

Now That’s What I Call MIDI! is a project by the group Internet Archaeology to take MIDI versions of songs that were popular during the earlier days of the internet (~1996-~2002) and release them on a physical vinyl record EP. I think that the reframing and relocation of something outdated and purely digital (MIDI’s of 10 year old pop songs) onto a format that’s even more outdated, revival in popularity withstanding, and purely analog (Vinyl records) is a quite pointless, but somehow sort of appropriate act, and it’s that paradox that makes this project interesting to me. It does, however, come off as almost not enough. 16 MIDI’s aren’t much – and it’s only EP length. While money is certainly an issue, it could be interesting to play and remix some of these artifacts instead of just drag-and-dropping them onto a record. The tracklist isn’t given, nor do users (who must contribute money to make the project happen at all) have any say on what will be included. The world of old MIDI’s is gigantic, and this seems like a tiny and unprepared slice.

Dirk van der Kooij is a recent graduate from the Design Academy of Eindhoven where he began to investigate the potential for robotic fabrication and 3d printing to be coupled and to produce full scale furniture. Unlike much of the work done on these machines, this hints at an extremely fertile territory of design, interaction, and process. Currently, 3d printers are limited in scale because of the technologies and cost. They also take quite a bit of time even to produce desktop size objects. As this research hints, we may soon be able to download a file and print our own furniture and objects. I beleive this area of research is extremely important because automated manufacturing is becoming more viable as it leaves the manufacturing lines and enters our schools and even homes. The next step is to take a critical stance as to what these tools will be making and how we as designers may go about creating design process’ that incorporate these new tools and a new design philosophy that comes along with it.

Philip Beesley is an architect that produces sculptures that blur the line between biology and architecture. They are responsive, kinetic, and offer unique interactions with the users of the space. Endothelium is a project that is designed to be deployed across a landscape and it burrows itself in by collecting energy from the wind and then charging organic batteries that turn small vibrators. The feet of the tripods begin to go deeper into the soil and the entire geotextile starts to merge with the earth below.

Projects like this become very interesting when you begin to discuss the potential for highly adaptable software to couple this responsive hardware. New landscapes and architecture become possible when our static spaces are left behind and replaced with ones like Beesley imagines. After all, why should we be designing static environments for our dynamic bodies and lifestyles?

find out more about the work of Philip Beesley here

Just Landed – Jer Thorp

Just Landed mapped the travels of twitter users, by searching for the words “Just landed in” in tweets, and comparing the location to that of the user’s listed hometown.
I was first attracted to this piece because of it’s simply beauty. It very, very well excuted, which really allows the viewer to see the information, as opposed to looking and a table of information and disregarding it. This piece struck me for two reasons. First, it makes me very very aware of how public the internet is. Even though I may only have 30odd followers on twitter does not meant that my tweets are invisible to everyone. Sharing flight and vacation information in such a public way makes me worry about this ala pleaserobme. This point, however, is general internet unnecessary panic. More interesting to me was simply how USA/English centric the project was, undoubtedly because the program only searched for the English phrase. Seeing this literally mapped out for me made me wonder about what this map would look like for another language, and indeed, how much of the internet I do not access because I only proficiently speak English.

http://www.temporary.cc/

temporary.cc is a website that deletes itself as visitors visit the url.

When I first found out about this website over a year ago, I used to visit it with some frequency for several months. The original website itself was beautiful, as well as the subsequent versions of it, created as a single character was randomly removed from the html/css on each visit. Because this website is ever-changing, it invites its viewers to return over a long period of time to see how it has degenerated. Whenever I used to visit it I felt two feels – one of not-so-secret hope that my visit would be the one to “radically” change the website from the last time I viewed it, and another of greed – I felt bad every time I refreshed, because I shortening the magic, and robbing others of the experience of seeing the website disappear.

Overall, I think the website is fairly successful. It’s a beautiful degeneration. Of course, by now, the html is so mangled that it’s a non-readable mess of halves of divs and “s and >s that don’t do anything. And while that is certainly part of the process, I would hope that somewhere there is a complete record of the degeneration, because it’s current state does not reflect it’s previous beauty. Perhaps, however, that is the point of these things. If you missed out, you missed out, and this piece of the internet is not forever.

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

This is a simple website that lets you “paint” the music video to the song “soy tu aire.” Over all, its functions are fairly limited “spontatenous” imagery arises from your cursor controlled paintbrush at predetermined intervals in a predetermined sequence. Though this piece is supposed to be interactive (and it is), it is not particularly generative. I find it very effective, nevertheless, because of it’s high level of refinement. The creators carefully chose and created their images, and their curation lets the viewer experience and “make” a painting with a high caliber of finish. This resonates with me because I find that I have a hard time with the intersection of letting code create something wonderful, and then stepping in as a designer to tweak things, or mold this outcome.

Green Cloud is a project by Nuage Vert and is is designed to bring an awareness to the community of Ruoholahti, Helsinki. A series of high power green lasers were used in conjunction with heat tracking cameras and software to highlight and trace the smoke/pollution coming from a local smoke stack. The project is surprisingly powerful in its ability to take something anyone who has lived in a city has taken for granted. They call out something that is generally lost in the chaos of a metropolis in a technologically clever way. The end result is a kinetic projection of the city’s own consumption of power.

“This is the effect of 4,000 residents and 5 large scale companies in Ruoholahti participating the Unplug event. Since Salmisaari substation also measures energy consumed also by those living in Lauttasaari, which includes over 30,000 residents, this is a very successful result! ”

find more about this project here

Niklas Roy’s My little piece of privacy

Niklas Roy is a Berlin artist who has a workshop with a street-facing window. Apparently tired of all the nosy passersby, he set up a robotic curtain and camera that detects people on the street as they walk past. The curtain travels with them, aggressively preventing them from having a proper look into Roy’s workshop.

I like how this project engages people in a very unexpected way. People walking around in city streets never expect buildings and other static surroundings to recognize and react to them. They often break out of their routine to take a second look and have a little fun in the middle of their walk.

Some things that I’m not sure about: interestingly, the curtain takes on a certain personality, but the personality reminds me of a very manic and paranoid hermit; also, the artist likes to be very coy and say that he made this to keep people away, but obviously it is more useful at getting attention.

3. PossessedHand: A Hand Gesture Controlling System using Electrical Stimulation

This project is implemented by Emi Tamaki. It is about using electronic devices to control the movement of one’s hand.

The interesting point is that, contrast to ordinary device that using finger and hand to control machines, this device do it vise versa.

The mechanical principle is, to using light electronic shock to stimulate the muscle on one’s hand to change it’s behavior.

In my mind, this device could be used as a teaching tools, i.e. teaching people to play piano. If the device could be wireless, that would be perfect.

1. Delicate Boundaries

This is an awesome project.  Small bugs made of light can crawl out of computer screen and crawl on people’s body. The most interesting thing of this project is that it change people’s mind of what a screen can do. It make the screen and the interaction evolve into a more tangible space. This experience beyond people’s expectation, that’s why it can call people’s eyes.

If the bugs can understand people’s body, not only random crawling, but have some purpose, that would be more interesting.

An interactive artwork that allows the spaces inside our digital devices to move into the physical world. Small bugs made of light, crawl out of the computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them.