Final project - Extinction Party

 
 
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Three Words

-       Extinction Party is an educational puzzle game.

 

Sentence

-       It explores the history of life on earth by looking in at the five major mass extinction events.

 

 
 

Description

-       Extinction Party is an educational puzzle game that explores the history of life on Earth by looking at the five periods when over 70% of species went extinct in a relatively short amount of time.

-       The story of each mass extinction event will be told in two parts

o   Section one will be on the outside of the puzzle, and will invite users to manipulate physical objects, emulating a scientist trying to figure out when an extinction event happened, and why.

§  For this part of the installation, I’ve invited users to act like a detective discovering unusually high levels of the element iridium at a certain level in the rock strata.

§  After that, they’ll be prompted to look for fossils on either side of the boundary that they’ve just discovered. The fact that these two fossils look so different from each other help to tell us that an extinction event occurred.

o   Section two will take participants back in time. The puzzle will open up, and players will see what life looked like before and after the extinction event on a video screen.

o   Upon completion of the game, participants will be given a QR code, which will lead them to a web page containing more detailed information on what we know about the extinction

 

Plan for installation

-       It will take the form of a 3-foot high standing pentagon shape,

o    And each side of the pentagon containing fun ways for participants to explore what life looked like before and after the extinction, and how why scientists think it happened in a certain way.

o   Ideally, this would be part of a larger exhibit about life on Earth

o   Of course, most museums aren’t open right now, so I’m considering making an online version of this project.

 

Maintenance

-       Make breakable materials as cheaply as possible. The “digging tool” could be as simple as a piece of cutout foam with a magnet embedded inside.

-       Keep the digging tool tethered to the device.

-       Have an experienced technician on hand to maintain PComp Elements.

-       For the online version, be receptive to ongoing feedback and make changes as necessary.

 

 

Project 3 - Frida Kahlo

 

When we were asked to make a video sculpture based around an existing work, we were particularly struck by this piece by Frida Kahlo.

We were all struck by her paintings, but this photo is ultimately what we chose to build our piece around. As a piece of physical form, we were interested in making a piece that asked viewers to lie down.

As a bit of homework, we all watched the excellent (yet flawed) Salma Hayek/Julie Taymor film “Frida”. We came away from the film wondering about how different people can view the same piece of art, and how an artist can sometimes lose control of their own creations. Kahlo, as depicted in the movie, lived her artistic life largely in the shadow of her prolific husband. Yet history has remembered Kahlo more fondly than it remembers Diego Rivera. We thought it would be an interesting concept to have one participant laying down and interacting with the piece, without being able to see how the rest of the world views their creations.

So we came up with this. A single participant would be directed to lie down on the bed, and would interact with an outline above them. They would be given different colors to draw with, and those colors would be separated through chroma-keying. Spectators around the user would see colors in a way that the laying down user wouldn’t themselves be able to see. The art changes depending upon who is looking at it. We used Isadora for this part of the project, because that was what I was more comfortable with.

We wanted to prompt the user to sketch at first, then a few minutes in, they would be prompted to recite a Frida Kahlo quote.

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The act of reciting that quote would make the full image fade in for all to see. Once the art is complete, society as a whole has a greater context for its appreciation.

 

Volta Festival

 

It was an evening filled with fine art, fancy patrons and not as much hand sanitizer as you’d think. I showed up to the Volta festival not quite knowing what to think; I had never been to a showing like this. Was this a multimedia arts festival? Contemporary counter culture festival? An extension of those annoying art boutiques shilling $500k Mr. Brainwash prints in Chelsea? Could I have answered all of these questions on my own just by looking this thing up in the first place?

When I arrived on Wednesday evening, I have to say I was surprised. The art was… it was good. I really liked it. I was honestly happy to be there.

I should say that I’m no art critic. The walls of my home are almost completely bare, largely because I’m too terrified of the process of picking out art to actually commit to anything. What is tacky? What is nice? What is problematic? I can never tell. I felt a little bit of that same apprehension when I was trying to pick out cool pieces from the Volta festival, but here are some that stood out to me.

This is a piece by Japanese artist Kenpei Yunde, who brought several pieces over for the festival. The blurb on the plaque mentioned that each of his pieces takes a year to create, and that he layers on pain in thick coats to create a natural feeling three-dimensional texture to each piece. This work stood out to me especially, in part because of the way it was lit from the outside. A bright tungsten light, which I have to assume the curators aligned themselves, was pointed down at an angle to the viewer’s right, in a way that mimicked the position of the sun in the painting. Light at that angle caught the layers of paint from the side, and almost made the tree look like it was glowing from within.

 
 

I spoke with a representative of the artist. He said that his organization represents many artists, and that this painter was one of the most famous painters in Japan. I asked him why they chose to bring the work of this particular artist over for the Volta festival. He said it was because the painter was famous. That was the end of the conversation.

Which, honestly, was fine by me. I don’t do these kinds of conversations well. I’ve gone to conventions where I’ve met artists and illustrators that I liked, and often times I want to talk to them. But what to say? How can we talk verbally about a visual medium? I was both disappointed that the conversation didn’t last longer, and relieved that I had a way out. I had a few other conversations with artists’ reps that didn’t go much deeper than this one. Talking with artists about art is a skill that I know I need to work on.

I also really appreciated some of the optical illusions that were on display. It was fun to see the sorts of things hung up in a physical space that couldn’t be really experienced online.  

This is a three-dimensional sculpture, with lines that make it difficult to make out its exact topography. It’s a little tough to communicate through a photograph, but it made me do a serious double-take when I looked at it in the space.

 
 

And speaking of three-dimensional uses of space, this piece by John Ferrara stood out to me as well.

 
 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the artist was making a bold statement with this piece. I could pretty easily see this thing being hung up in a fast-casual restaurant. But it did stick with me as an interesting piece, I think mostly because I found it to be an effective use of the physical space. It felt tactile in a way that some of the flat paintings didn’t. (Obviously I didn’t actually touch it.)

I think that my main takeaway from this experience was that, if we’re asking people to come all the way out to a gallery in Chelsea, then adding dimensionality to our pieces is a good way to give them something that they couldn’t have gotten at home.

 

Project 2 - Video Portrait

 

When we got together to discuss a possible subject for our video portrait, we were drawn to the idea of a “mad scientist.” Someone whose passion for their craft led them to do impossible things. After many long meetings on what best embodied the spirit of the concept, we decided to make a project about the Curiosity Rover. We felt that this particular subject, while it isn’t a human being, captured the spirit of humanity as represented through the hard work of hundreds of engineers and thousands of fans in such a delightful way that this would be the perfect direction to go with this project.

In order to put a human face on what is, ultimately, a piece of machinery, we wanted our project to really have two focus points. One would be the machine itself, and the second would be the human beings who made it possible. We decided that the best way to do that would be to treat humanity like proud parents, with photos of its favorite college grad framed on its mantel.

A note next to the mantel gives a subtle prompt for viewers to pick up the photos from their frames. When they do, we wanted the room to change, and for the viewer to enter into the experience of how a certain side of humanity feels about the rover. To accomplish this, we used four different photographs, two of CGI renderings of the rover on mars, one of engineers working on the rover, and one of actual imagery sent back from Curiosity. When each photo is picked up, a proximity sensor triggers a power switch tail to turn the light off, and also triggers Isadora to play a video that represents the feelings captured in the photograph.

 

Week 1 - Light sculpture

 

Our main source of inspiration for this project was the work of painter Josef Albers, specifically his series of square compositions. We loved the idea that a single composition could have a totally different feel depending on what colors we put into it.

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So we got to work on making a piece with a similar composition to the Albers series. We wanted to make each square an offset piece of etched acrylic that would be lit up from underneath using Neopixels, creating some depth and variability in color. Nok and Hyunsu went off to cut some acrylic pieces, and I started laying out a pattern for the box to be cut on the CNC.

 
 
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The pockets that were cut out of each side of this box should have been the exact right depth to contain our 4.5” x 4.5” acrylic sheets into a nice clean box. Unfortunately, I must have measured the thickness of our plywood inaccurately, because all of the pockets wound up a little too deep. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it did leave us in a position where we needed to do a bit of surgery after the fact to get everything to line up properly.

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But of course, this whole thing doesn’t work if it doesn’t have lights. Thanks to a year and a half’s worth of ITP wizardry experience, this wasn’t the most complicated process. Three 10k potentiometers would work as our dials, and some Arduino code generously shared online by Paul Andrews allowed for the conversion of RGB to HSV.

So now we have 3 knobs to determine Hue, Saturation and value. We pulled our starting saturation value from the values in an Albers composition.

 
 

Now when we adjust our HSV, we still always wind up with a compelling Tetrad.