Category Archives: looking-outwards

JohnMars—LookingOutwards—6

KUKA Revenge from KUKA Robotics

Explained: A robot arm dueling a human in a singing wine glass competition.

Chosen: Robots + Music = :D

Critiqued: I want more than just a presentation. Show me the workings, please.

TouchKeys from Andrew McPherson

Explained: Multi-touch decals for piano keys that allow for a novel hybrid interface.

Chosen: Related to my thesis work. Hardware + Sound + Programming

Critiqued: The installation process is extensive, and the price is relatively high.

JohnMars—LookingOutwards—5

The Big Atlas of LA Pools

Explained: Computer-Visioned and Crowdsourced attempts at cataloguing every single pool in Los Angeles.

Chosen: It’s a really cool combination of machine and human intelligences, matching those intelligences to eliminate potential downfalls.

Critiqued: Having crowdsource workers from Amazon double check the work of crowdsource workers from ClippingFactory is fairly inspired.

Tardigotchi from SWAMP and Tiago Rorke and Bureau

Explained: A Tamagotchi-like toy that carries a real-life microscopic organism — the Tardigrade, or Water Bear — and a living digital avatar of the creature.

Chosen: I’m not entirely sure if this is a real thing, a speculative design piece, or a piece of art. Whatever way, I’m fascinated. It’s a really interesting combination of the past and the future, nature and the computer.

Critiqued: The Tardigotchi has a web-presence a la Facebook and email. I’m not sure I’m, sold.

Related: Tamagotchi clones have become somewhat pervasive on modern devices.

jackkoo

19 Mar 2015

Time Artifact.

This piece is about uses the slitscan technique we saw from Jussi Ängeslevä & Ross Cooper in class. However unlike most slitscan pieces that render the piece to look very blurry, this slitscan piece remains very sharp. In addition, it looks more as though the physical parts of the bags was literally being transformed. Something about those spirals maintain a strong presence in the type of material it is. Its really nice to see some type of artistic image processing effect to maintain a real looking clear image afterwards. Too many artist these days distort the image to something thats totally foreign. Being able to reshape the object but keeping material content of it is really awesome. I feel that this piece is strong artistically and commercially.

Telescope.

Whoa its a band dedicated to making procedural demos and having cool arduino outfits! There’s another video where shes wearing glowing cat hears that pulses to her emotion! I wish that there were more bands focused on having a team member that just makes interactive tech stuff. I mean its not unheard of for bands to include demos. Amon Tobin had this really cool piece for their concert

however, I wish there was a non-artsy more commercialized culture based on making cool interactive concerts.

Ahem… open frameworks. Yes. The video generated from openframeworks was quite an interesting one. It took me a few times to figure out what was going on. Its a cool use of motion capture to animate the characters in the video. Whats interesting is that those cubes minimally look like characters. It also used of glitch which I assume was also an ofx addon.

Ron

19 Mar 2015

Novel Views

Novel Views is a series of visualizations of “Les Miserables.”  Characters are listed in order of appearance from top to bottom. The novel’s volumes span the horizontal space, with subdivisions of books and chapters. The height of the colored rectangles indicate how often that particular character is mentioned in a specific chapter. Additionally, color is used to indicate mood – positive associations are indicated in stronger shades of blue, and negative associations are indicated in stronger shades of red. This is an interesting visualization as it combines the display of a character’s appearance frequency with the emotional context in which he or she appears. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the scraped Dilbert transcripts and downloaded comic images for use in my final project, and this view has given me some ideas and inspiration. This visualization is static, and I think it might have been nice to be able to filter specific characters or themes for better visual clarity.

Speech Comparison

This visualization project analyzes words from nine speeches from notable people and then displays the results in an arc. The words — whose associated arcs are divided by colors linked to a particular speaker — are shown on the right, ordered by the number of times they appear in the speeches’ text. This allows one to see what particular words or topics are common to multiple speakers. I find the presentation style to be a clear and appealing way of illustrating what percentage a word or topic is used by a speaker. The creator indicates that graphis diagram books that visualizes abstract data were a source of influence.

John Choi

18 Mar 2015

Giant Saturn Controller for Death Crimson by Takamasa Sumi, 2005

For my final project in this class, I want to combine my experience in robotics and video games. So, I intend to build an “Action Figure Controller”, where you pose an action figure to play a video game. This is a really weird controller when in comparison to the standard dual-joystick layout. However, not the weirdest, as the project above can attest.  This giant alien cockroach you see above is actually a light gun controller for an rather obscure game called Death Crimson, which made its debut in for the Saturn Game Console in 2000.  This project was showcased at the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2005 at the Fukuoka Asia Art Museum.  I would never see myself playing any game with such a strange and bulky controller, but it is an interesting novelty to see.  I do suppose it will immerse the player a lot more and do much in eliminating suspension of disbelief when actually playing the game.

Project Link here:  https://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?8706-Giant-Saturn-Controller-for-Death-Crimson

 Special Full-action Body Type v.3 by Dolk Station, 2013

Simply put, this is the most detailed art mannequin on the female body you will ever see.  Priced at $300, this is a highly detailed posable figure with 80 moving joints, even the fingers and the eyes.  Like the standard wooden mannequin used for drawing, this one is to be used specifically for sketching in the unique Japanese anime style, hence some exaggerated body parts and stylized eyes.  This object is probably very fragile, so it really isn’t a toy or an action figure.  I like this project since it serves as reference for my final project.  While I don’t intend on mine being as detailed, I do intend on it being electronic, and this project has lots of good information on how to create mechanical joint linkages.

Project Link here: http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/10/07/meet-the-artists-model-set-to-improve-accuracy-for-anime-character-illustrators/