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I/O, Sha Hwang, and Joanie Lemercier
This morning Zach gave us a show and tell of projects he has worked on that interfaced with hardware. Some included Talking Shoes,Connecting Light, and Play the World. He answered questions about his experience with working with clients and agencies and also gave us a general time frame for the projects he showed us. In my head I have always had this vision that media artists make these amazing projects in a week or two, so it was really refreshing to find out that a lot of these projects were worked on over a time frame of a couple months. It was nice to see the amount of research and trial and error that went into all of them as well. When approaching my own ideas, I had always felt like I was super behind, naive, or not good enough if I couldn’t just make it on the spot without much research, but hearing this really removes that anxiety. All of his projects became so much more relatable and made similar goals seem more achievable for me.
After lunch, Sha Hwang came and spoke about his work and gave us a lot of background and insight into his current project, redesigning/fixing the debacle that was healthcare.gov. He really is an amazing speaker - extremely articulate and just so calming. He has a very pure peacefulness to him. Some of his past work includes meshu.io and gifpop.io which are pretty fun. It was interesting to get an insight into how his team interfaced with other government contractors, the issues they ran into, and how they were resolved. He had a few very simple phrases of advice: ‘never assume malice’, ‘the best way to complain is to make things’, ‘simplicity is clarity is kindness’, ‘access is responsibility is empathy’, as well as a quote by Mandelbrot when asked to describe fractals: ‘They’re beautiful, damn hard, and increasinly useful.’ Overall, I think his was one of my favorite talks at SFPC, right up there with Sara Hendren.
At the end of the day, we had another artist talk by Joanie Lemercier. He does a lot of really awesome work with light and projection mapping. His work that most impressed me was Nimbes. After his talk, he invited us all back to a gallery to see a show he had curated and also has works in called Bright Matter. It was nice to see a few more of his pieces in person and hear a little more about the intention and work that went into their creation. There was also this really awesome light sculpture piece that just looked like a box with mirrors from the sides, but upon looking in, the space expanded in crazy ways and it felt like you were inside a much larger world inside a tiny box.
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3D, openGL and alumni dinner
Today Zach taught us about drawing and animating in 3D using nodes and meshes. He wants us to love nodes as much as he does, and so far they seem pretty awesome. I’m definitely looking forward to continuing to play around with them. I also really want to play around with creating 3D surfaces and objects based on data, maybe text? I’ll have to figure out how to translate text into some sort of 3D surface in a cool way. I’ve included a few initial explorations I created from what I learned:
Tega organized a dinner with New Inc and SFPC alumni later on. We all joined in to help cook what turned out to be a really awesome vegetable curry. It was nice to hang out and chat after a long day with students and friends of SFPC.
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Poetic Science Fair at Silent Barn
Helping out with the Poetic Science Fair at Silent Barn was so much fun. Lauren, Rachel, Yuki, and I ran a light jewelry booth where you could make something out of felt and LEDs. It was amazing to see the talent and energy that all the children brought to the experience. There was also a drawing robot workshop, digital poetry jam, sounds of Bushwick installation, and a binary card game table.
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Preparing for Silent Barn
I spent most of the morning finishing up the readings for Allison’s class, where we had a great discussion on privacy and surveillance, but after that, we spent some time preparing our LED throwie examples for Silent Barn. This was so much fun! I really miss working with fabric and sewing and just doing crafty things. Rachel made a fried egg pin, Yuki made a bicycle, and Lauren made a name tag all with LEDs incorporated. Hopefully the kids can get some good inspiration from them at Silent Barn on Sunday!
Here’s some photos of the hair clip I made without the LEDs (they’ll be added on Sunday!):
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A much needed studio day and Silent Barn planning
I took today as a studio day and was finally able to finish the first iteration of my word particle system! It now takes in typed words and gives them attraction or repulsion forces to each other based on how ‘close’ they are to each other using Levenshtein distance. Nothing too fancy, but I really enjoyed hacking a particle system to make this. There were a lot of little unexpected things that I learned while doing it: dealing with TrueTypeFonts, performance improvements by loading the font to a pointer rather than one time for each word particle, and much more. I’m still having some performance issues with loading in a bunch of words at once, but I’ll play around with it a little more and then ask Zach for some help.
We then spent some time planning for Silent Barn with Taeyoon. I am helping Lauren with Rachel and Yuki on an LED throwie table. We’re helping the kids make LED pins with felt. We talked a little about logistics, materials, and what we want to get out of it. I’m mostly excited about making things with my hands again and getting to know a few of the kids. Lauren is going to bring some embroidery thread and other materials tomorrow so we can make some pretty cool examples for inspiration so I’m really excited for that!
Later on, Taeyoon went and got some food for us to share and we all just chilled and talked about education. It was a super nice way to decompress after a long studio day and spend some quality time with everyone. Rachel was even awarded an honorary non-degree (because she doesn’t need a masters in order to feel accomplished) by Casey.
