Category: LookingOutwards

Part 1: Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks

This is a city-block-sized installation by sculptor Janet Echelman and media artist Aaron Koblin. (Aaron’s been a part of many a crowdsourced art project, including the Johnny Cash project, the Sheep Market, and This Exquisite Forest.) Viewers complete the work by choosing animations from their smartphones to add to the graphics projected on Echelman’s suspended fiberwork piece.

This piece involves participants gathered in one place, unified under the impressive lightshow going on, but their contributions all travel independently to the projectors. If there’s the potential for participants to organize so that they can color the piece as a collective, it doesn’t seem to be happening in the project’s documentation.

Considering telematic art, I’ve been looking for crowdsourced projects that amount to more than just an exquisite corpse (I want something more goal-oriented, like e-Nable’s crowdsourced 3d-printed hands or EteRNA’s modelling). I think Unnumbered Sparks has the potential to be an exquisite corpse, but invites interactions from audience members that can be so independent from each other that it doesn’t need to be anything more than a more general interactive artwork.

What sets this project apart from some other audience-completed installations is that it compresses the results of the contributions into a single object visible to all the participants at once (vs. scrolling through The Sheep Market, or even zooming in to actually see details on r/place), and it limits contributions to the present (vs. the accumulation of drawings in Gutai’s Please Draw Freely, or of clay figures in Urs Fischer’s The Imperfectionist).

Part 2: Watermark

This is Ann Tarantino’s 2017 work in Millvale, right here in Pittsburgh. It visualizes the flow of water through the town along Girty’s Run, the Allegheny tributary and name of the watershed that provides drinking water to this part of Pittsburgh.

I learned about this visualization project on Saturday while attending the Water Walks Luncheon in East Liberty, a discussion on the watershed issues challenging Pittsburgh communities. Millvale frequently experiences severe flooding that’s been highly destructive to the town. It’s because it sits at the bottom of the watershed, and with urban development built over the streams and ponds on higher elevation, rainwater and snowmelt now wash over parking lots and roadways and right into Millvale homes. Sometimes 6 feet of it.

This kind of visualization project is so critical because where our water comes and goes is really invisible to us. But it matters, as much a house or a business at risk of flooding does. Building an understanding among Pittsburgh communities of how water flows into Millvale could help drive policy that invests more in ways to channel water out of the town, and in the protection and even re-exposure of the Girty’s Run watershed.

Starseed Pilgrim is a game made by Alexander Martin, Ryan Roth, Mert Bartirbaygil, and Allan Offal which I just started playing this week. It’s a game that dissects video game literacy, attempting to capture the feeling of what it means to not know how video games work and how to introduce outsiders into new and unfamiliar terrains. Not only does it invite outsiders in, it asks them to change its world through experimentation with abstract tools. Martin says: “Create systems that are interesting to explore, and people will get more out of their own learning than any tutorial would ever give them.” The game does not have a tutorial, or instructions besides vague poems strewn across its surface. Interactions must be paid attention to- you’ll probably need notes to understand the elements you are playing with. However, in the end, the game asks the player to construct its world, to plan and ultimately make the chain of building blocks that will let their goals be realized. In a way, there is no one way to solve its puzzles. The game is completely emergent, assigning you the role of gardener, refugee, and builder. Abstraction through cellular automatic blocks and corruption are your only real visual guides on the journey.

In the designer’s words: “I really don’t like describing Starseed Pilgrim! But if I don’t, I’m pretty much asking you to buy it based on… images, and that’s worse. It’s a game about discovery and learning, and eventually about mastery of a strange set of tools. It’s been said, and echoed, that it’s a game you have to experience for yourself.”

Martin built Starseed Pilgrim in Flash. It took a year to do- “Starseed Pilgrim had been 90% done for a year and a half before I finally finished it. This wasn’t even a case of “the last 10% takes 90% of the work,” there was honestly almost nothing left to do but to make some tough tiny decisions, write some super easy code, and get sound. Sound ended up being the dealbreaker, though; it was worth the wait.”

I would say it is certainly time consuming, and I just started it. If you are willing to feel like you did the first time you played a videogame, unsure how it worked or how to interact with it, then Starseed Pilgrim should be of interest to you.

Atlas – Guided, generative and conversational music experience for iOS

above: documentation video

Atlas is an ‘anti game environment’ that creates music and includes ‘automatically generated tasks that are solved by machine intelligence.’ This app aims to question presence, cognition, and ‘corporate driven automatisms and advanced listening practices.’ The user generates music through their interaction with the app, which asks the user questions from John Cage. These questions are ‘focusing on communication between humans’ and ‘concentrates on the marginalized aspects of presence…’ This game looks visually stunning, and I appreciate how it attempts to be a different type of game (‘anti game’). I can’t judge how successful it is in being ‘anti-game’ without playing the game, but I like the addition of the questions into the gameplay mechanic and am a big fan of how clean the visual shapes are.

It was created with javascript, p5.js in Swift iOS, and Pure Data. It has an example template using libPd and is available in the App Store for $1.99.

Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides

by Joseph Delappe 

CW: animated graphic violence

Link to Actipedia documentation

Link to live Twitch stream

This project is a self-playing version of Grand Theft Auto V that performs as a data visualization for “a daily reenactment of the total number of USA gun homicides since January 1st, 2018.” One interacts with this work by watching the 24/7 live stream on Twitch. As the camera slowly pans backwards, one sees characters in the video game killing each other every few minutes (or more often I guess depending in the day) as a way of marking something that can feel invisible. Elegy is challenging to watch (even though generally I do not find first person shooters to be that triggering). The mix of mediums – i.e. real gun violence vs. video game gun violence vs. statistics on gun violence – presented in a never-ending slow scroll to chill-but-patriotic music creates a performance with the viewer that forces into being a complex and unanswerable dialectic around the reality of the large number of gun homicides in the USA and the apparent impossibility of change. This complication of data is what I find to be the most fruitful aspect of the work for me. I find the work’s attempt to repurpose material observations about our reality – and communicate them in familiar cultural forms in order to visualize the political nature of data – helpful and inspiring.

Matthias Dörfelt’s Face Trade is a work that asks viewers to trade a mugshot for a computer-generated portrait, but the transaction is recorded a blockchain semi-permanently.

What interests me about this work is how much the artist gets away with asking from the audience. The trade-off is unnervingly real; not only does the work promise to record your mugshot permanently, you can also see the records for yourself at this website. The tension that the work induces is very real and, for me, very hard to separate from the artistic intention of the work. I can’t help but recoil instinctively and accuse the work of being malicious in itself. I think the audaciousness of this piece makes it successful, and I would like to take away some of Dörfelt’s nerve in my future work.

Looking into Dörfelt’s past work reveals a deep practice in generative art and a recent exploration of blockchain as an artistic tool. This helps me contextualize the choice of using computer-generated portraits as the commodity of the transaction. Face Trade‘s generated portraits seem like an arbitrary trinket that just fills the description of “commodity which the user trades for” (which may very well be the point), but I can see how these portraits build on top of Dörfelt’s previous generative sketches. It’s interesting that in some ways the viewer is paying their identity to view Dörfelt’s next iteration as a maker.