Mike and I have been continuing our progress with our series of video projections up at the Bronx Museum with Acconci studios.  We decided that some new, better footage was required, so we filmed a new series of objects with the intention of keeping it purely abstract instead of the human gestural moments that were too recognizable based on anatomy.  Some of the experiments are below.  The footage was than edited and multiplied to highlight certain aspects of the architecture of the corian structure.

Work in progress. Content for the Acconci Studio installation at Bronx Museum 2009-10.

Copyright Michael Kelberman and Angela Chen.

As the final revision to the yahoo weather XML assignment, I thought it appropriate to place it within more of a spatial context, moving the whole frame back into space and letting the information interact with the blinds by having the text be enveloped by the movement.

Weather Data Visualization from Angela Chen on Vimeo.

Deathstar Automata is a modular video “pod” that can be reconfigured and built as a simultaneous sculptural wall divider and multi-plane projection surface.  Its form and content is a physical manifestation of a branching recursion.  As a video sculpture it utilizes a geometrical shape as the means for creating modular yet singular mutli-plane projections. On the technical side, it uses Augmented Reality as the means for letting the camera know where to project the moving image.

color study

tree study in Maya (mad props to Nick Rubin for the assistance)

drawing. front elevation

drawing. side elevation

rendering: rhino/photoshop color study

Forgive me.  I sort of know where I’m going here and I sort of don’t.  It started off as a project with Adam Lassy using boxes and QR codes to implement Augmented Reality on top of the forms.  The idea started off as an exercise of redefining form which in turn would redefine function type thing, ie.  how you arranged the boxes would determine what would be projected upon them (ie. a lamp, or a dresser that would than function as one).  But now I’m off on some tangent and I’m not sure how or where it will end up.  I started off with the block which I played with and came up with the form you see here.  These blocks I wanted to be multiplied and stacked upon so it still has the modularity aspect but I was playing with the idea of having the images projected upon the boxes to become a sort of chandelier. but maybe it would just be a wall sculpture…seeing that there could be a lot of complications with having the camera see the markers from the ceiling and how to hang the whole structure off the ceiling without blocking the markers so that the camera can see it in order to activate the projections.

UPDATE:

military expenditures visualized as a familiar video game.  The size of the explosion is directly proportional to the amount of money spent, in millions of dollars.

the “bad” data visualizations that we are starting off with:

(1) NYC waste

(2) Military expenditures

(3) topographical map

GAME PLAN

PROPOSAL:

I found an old volume of the complete works of Henrik Ibsen that I am envisioning having a form laser-cut and using it as a “set” for a new type of scene.

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At first glance, it is solid, this tome.  It is a magnum opus…an ever-expanding volume and series.  Now it becomes a building block, and acts as the keystone to the threshold that lays behind and within its pages.  Its words are weighty and the tension builds until it must be split or perhaps ripped into strips inches wide, centimeters and now, nanometers.  We aim to make the pages become light, like Nora taking flight and leaving her life behind.  Her words must be cut out, must be freed.  But first the house must be built before we destroy it.  This is the house that Ibsen built.  It is built on the immaterial and the unwieldly.  So build it and than we will watch it slowly crumble down with the hypocrisy of the situation, in reaction to constructs set up by proper society.  It wil fall over Hedda Gabler as she picks up the pistol, and Hedvig as she chooses her own life over that of a fowl.  All for what? For an ideal that the human heart cannot bear to know nor understand.  Instead, it splits in two: with Matta-Clark’s chainsaw; with a laser so that it smells of charcoal and smoke; and with a blade, so that the cold steel rends it apart.  It is sliced into several parts, as if we were disecting a specimen.  And than it will be reconstructed inside-out.  Casting the plaster of a house from the inside out.  everything will be backwards and upside-down.   The master builder is telling us to hammer away at the characters and break down their conceits.

From within the pages now springs a new form.  The laser has formed, and shaped, and carved away until there is nothing left but the crux of the irony that lays underneath this form.  When this tome is now opened, the words that once appeared like grids, and streets, and buildings, now rises out in a new dimension, a new axis.  Let us put the negative space where there were once words, replacing their meaning with the light of another source.  Here we can insert the image of a new story.  It grows like vines, and twists itself around this crumbling structure so that where there was once the remains of a life, there is a new life.  We project through this negative space.  It will cast its shadow onto the space around it, transforming everything now into Ibsen’s house of the new order.

olafur eliasson’s Your House

gordon matta-clark, splitting

I’m wondering if this week’s assignment, to “decompose” an image by mapping its RGB values to an XYZ-axis, has anything to do with halloween, but I’ll settle for any references of the ‘hood as being the final frontier…

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After also taking a closer look at the work of Aaron Koblin and Karsten Schmidt, I’m encouraged and inspired to think that there are still so many varied and creative ways of expressing data, but more so, ideas.  I appreciated how these artists are using tools like Processing and other new technologies to keep pushing the envelope in an elegant, clever way.  One of the things I am attracted to about Aaron’s work, is the impression that his pieces don’t get caught up in the complexities of programming towards expressing what may be a simple but striking concept.  In other words, using Processing, LIDAR, Maya, After Effects, etc. doesn’t become the thing that drives the work, but rather its things like audience participation and the beauty of the results.  Though I first heard of his work from the Radiohead music video, I think some of my more favorites pieces are ones like The Sheep Market and Bicycle Built for Two Thousand.  The idiosyncrasies of which I feel bely the complexities of human nature and our ever-changing relationship with new media.  I think there is room to take these pieces even further.  And if I had the chance, I might introduce more factors into the equation.  For example with Sheep Market, it might be interesting to have the participant also choose a word to describe his/her sheep or maybe just for kicks, analyze people’s sheep using a Bob Ross -0-meter, to assess an arbitrary drawing scale.

I recognized most of the work on www.postspectacular.com through toxi.co.uk as well as the collaboration work Karsten Schmidt did with Universal Everything.  I can’t help but be blown away by the breadth and strength of the work in its entirety.  The manifesto was interesting to read because i tend to believe that manifestos can sometimes be limiting rather than liberating, but he does put the disclaimer in the beginning that it is in a “constant state of flux”.  In comparison to Koblin, his design methodology is more refined in the respect that his creativity is more of a process.  Whether its figuring out a new technology or problem solving through learning and research, I think there is a maturity to his approach in the way that he has learned from experience what kinds of outcome to expect when working with other people and how letting in other influences can also affect the work in your own process.  His interview on Vimeo also had some relevant points, but I could see how some people (particularly graphic designers) would disagree over the bit about the Jesse McMullin Design Manifesto Continuum as the realm of “style” being the main concern of graphic designers.  I’m only harping on these points mainly though because his work, no matter what manifesto drives it, speaks of having depth and meaning, far beyond making pretty images or design objects.  Moreover, I think Karsten is a great example of the blending of technology and craft and his work is a great retort to those who would denounce generative art and design as generic and lacking any sense of true originality.

An improv performance performed below the amphitheater on the Highline near 16th street.  As a class, we performed a series of constructs as a way to engage the space and the viewer from both above and the “spectators” below.

Mike and I filmed a series of experiments of us playing with spandex as part of our effort to integrate projection with Vito Acconci’s corian sculpture up at the Bronx Museum.  Our motivation was derived from an effort to extend Vito’s analogy of the sculpture as body, pulling, poking, tearing, etc., and the idea of conveying emotion through the use of gesture and shadow.  So we took it upon ourselves to really manipulate the idea of skin, texture, and surface.  See the full blog post here.

The last visualizing data assignment was parsing the XML from the Yahoo RSS feed using two data sets and two colors.

Since my usual gauge for weather consists of me looking out a window and taking an educated guess, i wanted to create something that would emulate window blinds that were moving in a weather vane like movement.  I chose to visualize the relationship between temperature and wind speed by setting the wind speed equal to the rotational speed of my blinds and mapping the color of the blinds from blue (coldest) to red (hottest) using an HSB colormode.  It doesn’t run well on the browser, but click here to download source code.