misspokahanni-blog-blog - Tumblr blog

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 medical artifacts presented artfully (Source: Intro to House MD)

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“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

Chinese Proverb

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Scott Garner, rotatable still-life

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Actelion Imagery Wizard by onformative on Flickr.

Cool image

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New Blog

Hi! I will be using a wordpress blog until I figure out how to code comment sections into my tumblr account. Please keep following me :)

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Climate Dress by Diffuse

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Art and Science united! I remember testing tropism in plants in high school. Which way will a plant grow if you leave it in front of a window? Can a plant grow if the seed is upside-down? How the heck do vines twirl around branches? The  Poietic Studio used this phenomena in their piece the Tropism Well (seen above) to overlap nature's quirky ways and human needs. For those who seek clarification, tropism is a growth response in an organism to external stimuli. So the Tropism Well detects human presence and it bends over to pour a glass of water. When the person leaves the well returns to its upright position. This is the sort of programmed behavior my teachers love to talk about. As an artist for interactive art we have to forecast how the audience will behave and this can be tricky if the interaction is not usual. I don't think the audience in this piece could get it wrong, heck they were prepared with a glass to get filled!

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Oh drats!

I spent the last 12-hours struggling through writing the code for my visualization and generative processing project Data Portrait. The idea was to visualized my high school grades and feedback from teachers in a way that revealed something about my character. I had the idea that higher grades meant that I was more grounded and focused on school and lower grades meant that my head was in the clouds instead of focusing on school. I don't want the grades to reflect my intelligence but instead my focus. But after running the idea by a couple of friends they suggested I make it the other way. Higher grades are a metaphor for being about to reach the sky and bad grades are weighing me down. If I do decide to switch it up, then a whole lot of hours spent trying to figure the code out are gone to waste. Oh drats!

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Marie Polakova and Jonathan Cremieux’s Mimodek

Mimodek is a site-specific artwork that uses data from the environment to create a visualization of living organism. Polakova and Cremieux draw conscious attention to the intuitively understood life of occupied spaces. The artwork responds to the universal question of how to situate our presence relative to other ecological beings. The artists, Marie in particular, is interested in nature and the action-reaction system living systems use to thrive, abide and deteriorate. Humans are born with a sense of importance and repeatedly forget about other living creatures. More importantly, how actions affect other living organisms. Fertilizer run-off interferes with marine ecosystems, light pollution disrupts bird migrations, and deforestation leads to an unimaginable amount of home destruction. All of these activities are byproducts of human-oriented purposes and are relatively unsympathetic to other living beings. Mimodek presents a dynamic system in an easily comprehensible way. It draws attention to how actions cause a reaction in how another non-human being lives. Using climatic and behavioral sensors, the artwork is categorized as a monitoring system. Being site-specific and using the visualization feature of computer program, Processing, it uses both the presence of location system and input using code languages. The pieces works as a feedback loop where movement fuels the organism’s growth. Movement is detected with sensors and code translates it into an initiation factor. Objects in the virtual system use quantitative data of movement to initiate organism growth. High values of movement data result in organism outgrowth, which are used as a determinant for the number of objects that detect movement data. It is a feedback loop much like ones found in hormone regulatory systems in the body or pressure-valve monitor in a hydraulic system. Data exchange happens in detecting changing coordinates of moving people by a sensor and using the values in a mathematical algorithm defined by a computer-language code which passes the values into visual symbols on a digital screen in the location of movement origin. Through this exchange of information the human action of movement is transformed into a tangible quality useable to a virtual organism and contemplated upon by an audience.

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Imagine walking on an ordinary weekday, taking your usual route to school, when suddenly out of the corner of your eye, behind the glass windows of a display a full-sized screen with images of moving people catches your attention. Without a warning, in the early years of internet connection, people on the streets of New York City and Los Angelos were given a portal to communicate. My class was introduced to this art piece by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz called Hole-In-Space (HIS) (1980) during a lecture on Telematic Installation. The premise of telematic art is the transmission of information across geographic distances and audio and visual data were the two types of data transmitted between the two U.S. cities for 2-hour periods lasting a week in the month of November 1980. Shock and intrigue ensured that the portal  was put to good use. For the first time, family members and friends separated by the distance could see one another instantaneously and communicate. Relationships between strangers were formed. Without any help from the artists, people were able to understand the abilities of the piece and create their own use for it. The instant success of it displayed an intrinsic need to bridge distances and form connections. While we unconsciously know that there is a whole world out there the idiom 'seeing is believing' holds true.

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Glass, Land Art and New Media by Leah Stravinsky. It looks very poetic. Deep inside a glass cave and illuminated at the back with the glass creating a very nice light diffusion pattern is a lonely and dying plant.

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Andy Goldsworthy sees the world a little different, he sees beautiful opportunities for manipulating organic material into visual curiosities.

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This was the first time I saw Kingston from the 14th floor - it goes on forever and ever, a mountain-less plain but what character it holds. When the sun sets in the west the horizon turns a deep burgundy and slowly melts into dark blue mid sky with diamond-like star interruptions that twinkle like jewels.

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I found this on the artist networking site Behance. The photographer is Jan Masny.

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Here is a video using arts and crafts to create a beautiful organic-looking plant - the hyphae. The artist also creates organic looking jewelry I find to be very fascinating.