Category: Observations

Most cultural products are mediated through computers; from the beginning of the creative process of conceiving an idea, to production, distribution, and consumption computers play a crucial role in the way we understand media. With computers, media becomes more malleable increasing the possibilities of re-imagining existing content, creating several iterations with the same data, and of visualizing data in new ways. Today cultural products are the outcome of the process of reshaping data and rethinking through it. My final project, for example, by building on Borges’s ideas of language in his short story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius re-imagines the language of Tlon with the use of data stored in Cloudant, and Merriam Webster’s dictionary.
Continue reading “A la mémoire de JM Jacquard + Processing”

Is Computational Media important? Why?

Continue reading “What Computational Media Can Do”

Before I answer the question whether computational media is important, we need to look at what “computational media” is. When you type in “computational media definition” to Google search, you can find a link to an ITP course called Introduction to Computational Media that defines what computational media is in their first week of classes. The professor of this class tries to break the word down into “computation” and “media”. Wikipedia defines computation as “finding a solution to a problem from given inputs by means of an algorithm” and media as “plural form of medium” and “a truncation of the term media of communication, referring to those organized means of dissemination of fact, opinion, entertainment and other information.” By definition, computational media doesn’t necessarily need to involve computers, as long as you derive a result using some sort of predefined steps of action from a given set of input. To me, computational media seems very much like what generative art is. Generative art refers to “art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system” which is generally “one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist”.

Continue reading “Computational Media in Context of Contemporary Art”

Is Computational Media important and why?

Continue reading “Computational Media + Sharjah Assignment”

I’ve been told consistently by my relatives how I need to exercise both sides of my mind: the creative right side, and the analytical left side.  But instead of trying to find a blend of the two, I thought my choice stemmed between the black and white logical fields, and the colorful, ambiguous artistic world. Now I’m realizing that computational media and the interaction between art and technology is not only a new option to integrate both sides, but it’s essential to the progression of technology as a whole.

I see technology as a medium for communicating artistic ideas into an applicable format. Companies using design to improve the interaction between people understand the value of visual appeal. Art creates an experience behind engineered objects. Art communicates and transmits ideas through media, and technology adds to the functionality of this interaction. When it comes to the importance of fields like Interactive Media, I’ve found that I’m not the only student searching to infuse art into the technological world. As the technological world progresses, the demand for simplicity in technology is more and more imperative. We engineer for convenience, to enable, and to open doors for people to study and learn more about the world. The tools we use to do so demand art not only for ease in functionality, but for the communication art offers. We can use art to ask questions and consider ambiguity, and we can use art to build on opportunity in other fields.

I’d argue computational media is only in its earliest stages for the potential it has both in art and in computer engineering. But the more its fostered, the more doors I think it opens up for artists and engineers to learn skills they wouldn’t have otherwise considered. I saw a future holding a paintbrush, and I am, except I’m writing code to make a paintbrush on a computer. If nothing else, the skills learned by studying computational media can be applied to any new fields. I didn’t realize mathematicians needed to be creative, nor did I realize artists need to know how to properly manipulate sine and cosine on 3D planes to create amazing designs. It’s like we’ve just realized peanut butter and jelly work super well together.

Arguably computational media may not be considered as necessary to other computer scientists or artists as it does in my eyes. But from seeing the opportunity computational media offers me, I’m happy to lock myself away in a lab for several hours with a group of other interactive media artists. I’m happy to make amazing, beautiful, broken things in that lab, and if nothing else, I find enough intrinsic motivation to continue pursuing computational media until the world agrees with me of its importance.

Check this piece out here. Basically the idea is that by moving around plastic sculptures a user can create new rhythms. The piece consists of a number of universal bases. By changing out the sculptures, the user can change the nature of the beat being played. Visually, this piece is pretty cool. Each of the sculptures is made of translucent plastic, and when placed in a base, lights up from the bottom. The face of each of the sculptures has some inlaid shapes whose color matches that of the light. The beats are goofy sounding. I feel like if I saw this piece in a gallery, I would play around for a minute or so, and then peace out pretty quickly; it’s scope is deliberately limited. It’s interactive, but not game changing.

Computational media is important because it allows one to visualize the unseen. Despite their elegant presentation on paper, equations contain massive amounts of information. For anything beyond the most trivial of cases, understanding how different elements in an equation (or set of interlaced equations) influence the development of a solution is impossible. Computers allow one to solve complicated systems and store the approximate solution. This solution is normally displayed visually, but can be represented in other ways. My final project, for example, is a haptic representation of Gauss’s Law. A user can feel the magnitude of the electric field generated by a point charge by moving his or her hand through space. Computational media provides a means to sense how equations behave. Moreover, the tools of computational media allow one to dynamically change equation parameters and see the results in real time. Most of the time this still involves moving sliders on screen and seeing the changes on screen, but the possibility of integrating some physical interaction exists.

Visualization and other means of representation allows for improved understanding of stationary and dynamical systems by decreasing abstraction. Equations are a compact way of expressing relationships between different quantities, such as electric field and charge distribution, or time and position. One can quickly derive new relationships by playing with the symbols in these equations. However, symbols are not easily grounded in intuition. Computing a numerical solution to the equation governing some physical system is a way of opening up the equation, unfurling it in time and or space. It also assigns values to variables, and functions that act on values to symbolic operators. Abstraction is further decreased by taking the solution, at this point a series of values, and giving it some physical property — vibration amplitude or color for instance. This physical representation of the equation is more natural, thus easier to understand. The power of computational media is the ability to display complex relationships in a more readily human-comprehensible form.

 

First of all, this course has really been an eye-opening one for me. Before I came to college, I’d never imagine myself learning to code and make circuits at the same time. Neither did I know about what’s called “Computational Media”. But now it all starts to make more sense to me. Just as our guest from Istanbul said, people don’t know new media until it is introduced to them. From my own understanding,   Computational Media is indeed future-oriented, but it is also tangible and easily accessible so that we could begin to get the sense of it after only 14 weeks of an intro class.

Continue reading “On Computational Media”

I got my vibrating glove to work! By moving a slider in Processing, a user can change the strength of the vibration felt in the three motors on the glove. You can see a video of the glove working here. Its kind of hard to see/hear the vibrations, but you can definitely feel them. The next step is to get a battery and bluetooth hooked up to this bad boy.