Looking Outwards – Physical Computing

Hyper-Matrix

In this colossal piece by Jonpasang, a Seoul based media arts group, thousands of blocks move back and forth on a wall creating a moving surface. I like the size of it. To have something that covers the walls of such a large room move is stunning.  It reminds me of pin art on a very large scale. I appreciate that the display is made for generating an image from the texture of the landscape of blocks. I feel that they made a good choice by not projecting color onto it, as this would distract from the texture. However, I would have liked more to have seen this with an interactive component and with a higher resolution. I don’t necessarily appreciate the incredibly pixelated feel of it.

Aerosol

Florian Born created Aerosol, a physical interpretation of a virtual particle system. I find this piece interesting because it takes something that is so ingrained into the culture of computer generated graphics, particle systems, and makes a physical interpretation. Originally, I thought that this was an attempt at displaying a virtual particle system’s particles with a physical system, but after reading more thoroughly, I found that the piece is meant to look like a virtual particle system but be made and controlled by physical components (no virtual particles simulated). I thought that this could have possibly looked better if it used moving pins rather than a set grid. In this way it could move attractors and repellers around, demonstrating the particle reactions. Also, maybe emitters and destroyers could have been implemented with tubes that dispersed the balls or consumed them.

Light Barrier

Using a projector and curved mirrors, Kimchi and Chips, made a system called Light Barrier which projects 3D images into the space filled with smoke above it.

I like that this works more towards the type of displays I always wanted which could be found only in SciFi movies. I would be interested in seeing this project done with many projectors projecting colored images into 3D space rather than just white light. As far as the displayed scene and audiovisual portion of this project, I found that it was stunning and impressive to look at, but didn’t really evoke anything other than that. It seemed to be nothing more than a simple demo of a fancy display. I would have appreciated something more evocative.

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