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.

a self-portrait posed through a forensic exploration of my uniqueness, and how body elements of hair and blood are derived and have roots in cultural, historical, and genetic footprints.  References to many female artists who use manipulation of the body, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper, were considered.  Using the metaphor of the hourglass to represent the passage of my time as a living, breathing, functioning human being.  Filmed my hair and drops of ink in water using the high speed camera at 420 fps.

Here is the exploration of the Gotham typeface…very clean, and as the foundry describes it, very “practical”, with an engineer, draftsman-like bent.  Found an interesting article in the NYTimes about the use of Gotham for the cornerstone of the Freedom Tower, and that despite Gotham’s intent to be neutral and just “Gotham,” its choice for this purpose at least, is anything but.

Did a quick search of my fonts, and lo and behold…I don’t have it.  Next question, how do I get it? Do I pay the $299 that the foundry HF+J charges for one computer?  Last I checked, I was on a grad-student/thrift-store budget.  Now what?

I might not completely outline my strategy from here on out but here at least are some fun typography sources:

• www.dafont.com
• www.typeneu.com
• http://www.neo2.es/blog/category/typography/

Next on the agenda is venerable Matthew Carter, a type designer who founded several type foundries and responsible for many of the font faces found on the web: verdana, tahoma, georgia, etc.  First reaction being, ugh, I hate Verdana and Tahoma, not realizing of course that I’m using verdana on my own blog.  I switched it to Helvetica to see the difference and it just screamed Helvetica to me in a way that was distracting.

the original

with helvetica

arial anyone?

http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm

started a canvas years ago, and finally decided last weekend to rework it completely.

gold spray paint, house paint.  30″ x 40″

the last go-around was a bit static in terms of changing things up with my variables so here is a second attempt to make it more dynamic.