Guest Speaker: Timothy Nohe – Electron Drawing

Electron Drawing – Visual Music

During week 7 we had the pleasure to meet Timothy Nohe. He is an artist and educator engaging traditional and electronic media in daily life and public places. The Light City festival in Baltimore takes places once a year. More than 500.000 people have attended and more than 160.000 people came from outdoor the state. Timothy Nohe was one of this year’s artist at the Light City Festival. His Artwork called Electron Drawing – Visual Music encourages audiences of all ages to become active creators of live technological art and beautiful mathematically derived music and drawings. He also explained the functionality of his artwork and key requirements for a festival.

Key requirements for the Artwork

Remove physical touch of the controller through gestural control
Make it easy and understandable for the audience (make all complex components ‘invisible’)
Understand the geometrical location
Keep humidity, rain, and wind in mind
Quick access to the Artwork otherwise interest of the audience could be lost
Enable audience to interact with each other.

Other things to keep in mind:

Liability, insurance and responsibility issues

Picture Source: https://umbcarts.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/tim-nohe-electron-drawing.jpg

September 19, 2017September 19, 2017

FUTURE WORLD: WHERE ART MEETS SCIENCE

Yesterday we visited the Art Science Museum for the Future World exhibition. It’s a permanent exhibition where only the light installations change over time.
The exhibition is divided up in four narratives – Nature, Town, Park and Space.

NATURE

The exhibition begins with a trip through nature. The first installation was an artwork with crows, rendered in light, that fly around the space leaving trails of light in their path. The second installation was a depiction of digitally rendered waves in a 3D environment. We were able to sit down and enjoy the seascape.

The second installation was a depiction of digitally rendered waves in a 3D environment. We were able to sit down and enjoy the seascape. The intention of this artwork is that there is no separation between the humans and nature.

NATURE - Black Waves — NATURE – Black Waves

TOWN

This interactive artwork reacts to the visitor’s input and ultimately develops into a cityscape. By moving cars, trains, planes and boats the system of roads, rivers and railways evolve smoothly. And adapt to the continuous development of human being. It’s a very important issue to consider the increasing amount of traffic and transportation systems in a growing world.

PARK – LIGHT BALL ORCHESTRA

Visitors can work together by pushing and rolling the balls to create a continuous change in the composition, color and sound. There are infinite possibilities to interact with each other as in the real world.

Another installation was the Sketch Aquarium. This artwork allows the visitor to create their own drawings and watch them come to life in a digital rendered aquarium by scanning the drawing.

SPACE – CRYSTAL UNIVERSE

The Crystal Universe was my favorite artwork. It is created with teamLab’s Interactive 4-D Vision technology and more than 170,000 LED lights. The animated Universe gives the illusion of stars, planets and galaxies moving in space. You have the feeling that you are inside the centre of action.

September 11, 2017

Response: You are what you carry

Jan Chipchase’s chapter You are what you carry is a follow-up of his speech 10 years ago. Since his book Hidden in plane sights was published 6 years later in 2013, he mentioned more detailed approaches how people carry their belongings in the future. During his research over decades he found out, that there is a global commonality of how people live and what they value.
The most essential items are keys, money and the mobile phone. Those items help people surviving and satisfy the most primal needs.

In this Chapter he described several factors of how we care about our belongings depending on different places. One of this factors is for example the range of distribution which depends on the presence of familiar people, density of strangers, familiarity and cleaniness.
But due to the technical progress more and more possessions became digitized which leads to a reexamination of carrying behavior.

The cloud service revolutionized the transport of digital belongings. No matter where we are, we have access to our data from anywhere in the world.
But I think this is not only an advantage. Companies get a deep insight into our lives. Algorithms can help us organizing our things but also analyzes our behaviors. Jan Chipchase said with change comes opportunity. I completely agree with this statement. There are many opportunities to facilitate our lives and make it more efficient. With the digitalization we can reduce the things we carry thus reducing the loss of things, the costs of replacing and recovering things. And the temporary use and rental services get more and more popular.

To summarize you can say that the way of interaction with the goods changes. Mobile technology has changed dramatically from carrying less, to remembering less, to own less. I agree that there are many opportunities with the technological progress. But the more information we disclose the more we lose control of ourselves.

September 4, 2017

Anthropology of mobile phones

Ten years ago Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. He started his speech with the words “We’re going to make some history together today”. Now in 2017 when we’re looking back, he was completely right.
Jan Chipchase gave this speech in 2007. Even then the three most important things people carry are their mobile phone, money, and their keys. The reason is simple, these things depict a spiritual, emotional, and functional value. With the mobile phone, people can transcend time through messages or voice calls.

After the presentation of the iPhone, the connection of people increased very fast. Almost everyone owns a mobile phone today.
Also the functional value increased a lot. People can use their mobile phones as a payment method and can even control their homes with it. Not only people become connected but also devices. Advancements in smart home technology continue to push the limits of what the internet of things is capable of.
These are some of the consequences about Jan Chipchase spoke in his show 10 years ago. The speed of sharing things as ideas and objectives increase more and more. I am very excited where this takes us.