Category Archives: Uncategorized

Electroland

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collaboration beween Camron Mcnall and Damon Seeley

Create interactive environments which use layers of technology to intelligently register the movement of pedestrians through public spaces.

At the time of posting couldn’t get their website to work – http://electroland.net/

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Electroland is a team that creates objects, interactive experiences and large-scale public art projects. Damon Seeley co-founded Electroland in 2002. He holds a degree in Design and Media Arts from UCLA, and has fulfilled various roles as an art director, interaction designer, technical director and project manager for design and media-arts projects. Cameron McNall is an Architect and Artist. He received a Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1985 and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Design from UCLA in 1978. He co-founded the design collaborative Electroland in 2002.


Drive By. A 73 meter electronic display that tracks passing cars and alternates between two modes: alphanumeric letters that read out famous lines from Hollywood films and abstract letterforms that follow cars as they pass by. Completed 2007


Author Wall. Interactive touchscreen interface, Guadalajara Book Fair, 2009. Visitors manipulate a floating cloud of 200 author names, projected on a 30-meter wall. This is a great example of gd-driven interdisciplinarity.

 
R-G-B ant SCI-Arc, 2001. Three month installation.
Colored lights fill 81 windows, extending over 180 meters at SCI-Arc. Light animations are commanded by cell phone keypad combinations. Anyone could call in and control part of the animation. This project questioned private interaction and control of public spaces.

Colllege Faces. Gateway Community College, New Haven, Connecticut. Year??
The faces of all students, faculty and administators, projected huge, in slow motion. Builds a sense of community, stands in contrast to the “pseudo-tudor” architecture of nearby Yale college. Individual faces can be accessed via smartphone or website.  Another

Type Fluid

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Amazing studio of brothers Ali and Hussain Almossawi. Ali is a computer scientist, and Hussain a graphic designer. Here’s a great example of design collaborating with computer science and 3d modelling.
here’s the link to all the letters:
http://www.skyrill.com/blog/2011/07/03/type-fluid-complete-set/ 

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from Designboom:
designed by hussain almossawi of bahraini studio skyrill design, ‘fluid type’ is conceptualized as a dynamic typeface, in which each character in addition to being usable as a static letter has its own exploding animation.

 

the three-dimensional letters were first created in 3D max and then filled with virtual fluid in the realflow fluid dynamics simulator. while the character was filling, almossawi adjusted the gravity and pressure level. afterwards, he released the original shape holding the fluid, allowing the letter to explode and splash around. once almossawi achieved a look he liked for each animation, he adjusted the letter mesh and imported it back to 3D max to shade and render.

almossawi elaborates:
‘each letter required its own process based on what it looked like, [including] a lot of trial and error, sometimes using more that one emitter, at different directions and speeds, and experimenting with how they would collide with each other.‘

Here’s a videoclip showing the fluidity of the letter S, in motion!

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M/M Paris Interview

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From a published interview with M/M Paris (Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak) (Design and Art, Alex Coles editor, Whitechapel and MIT, 2007):

Mathias Augustyniak: “…the more you are a specialist in your field, the closer you get to the essence of things. Only then can you start to have a possible relationship with another field — and this is where things start to become interesting. Being specialists gives us a point of entry — a keyhole through which we can look onto the world. It is in this spirit of specialism that we meet and work with artists.” (188)

On their collaboration with artists Huyghe, Parreno, Gillick: “As graphic design is situated at the crossroads between many different activities it seemed the perfect place from which to establish this kind of fulfilling exchange with practitioners from other disciplines.” (190)

Augustyniak: “From one field to another, there should be respect.” (190)

Augustyniak: “We are interested in dialogue between specialists” (191)

On p. 191, Augustyniak describes a collaboration they did with artists Pierre Huyghe, Phillipe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the Venice Biennale 1999. Each of the three artists was given a room, but when the artists decided to band together and project a single film in one room, the other two rooms were left empty to the dismay of the curators. M/M jumped in and created title sequences as paintings on the walls in the flanking two rooms, so the public would have a pre- and post-viewing experience, while seeing the film in the middle. This is such a nice and concrete explanation of the collaborative process. Designers are concrete, we speak in terms of things and actions!

Designers seem to constantly worry about whether they are equal to artists, or simply their “butlers,” as M/M say. They argue that true interdisciplinarity can only happen when designers are elevated to become equals, and not subordinates. That’s another theme of the profession, moving from service to autonomy.

Bio Art

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Eduardo Kac

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Kac

“Kac considers himself a “transgenic artist,” or “bio artist”, using biotechnology and genetics to create provocative works that concomitantly explore scientific techniques and critique them. Kac’s first transgenic artwork, titled “Genesis”‘ involved him taking a quote from the Bible(Genesis 1:26 – “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”), transferring it intoMorse code, and finally, translating that Morse code (by a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work) into the base pairs of genetics.”

“In what is probably his most famous work, Alba, Kac commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent rabbit; a rabbit implanted with a Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP)gene from a type of jellyfish. Under a specific blue light, the rabbit fluoresces green. ”

>>>Interdisciplinary work is not without controversy

I Hate Perfume

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Interesting fusion of science and art- a perfumer who makes scents such as soaked earth, burnt wood, old leather, North Atlantic…

http://www.cbihateperfume.com/

“When I was a child, I wanted to be an artist or perhaps a scientist. Instead I am a perfumer – this is perhaps a bit of both. I’ve been described as one of the most innovative perfumers of the 21st Century. I’ve won awards, my work is in museums and countless people in all civilized parts of the globe enjoy the unique scents I create. Much to my surprise, at least in a small way I have changed how people think of perfume: what it is & how it’s used. “

Bjork

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worth visiting her site to listen to her narrate her ideas behind her most recent album- nature, music, technology- listen, learn, create

http://bjork.com/

Andrew Byrom

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Here’s a tedx video of Andrew Byrom, who makes awesome interdisciplinary typography:

http://tedxucla.org/2011/05/12/andrew-byrom-if-h-is-a-chair-mapping-new-forms-in-typography-through-experimentation-collaboration-and-a-shifting-view-point/ accessed January 31, 2012.

Notes while watching the video:
Face recognition
Color blind test
Typeface recognition — type made of drinking straws
seeing letters everywhere — in bandaids, searching out typographic forms, then digitizing them; finding something in 3d and bringing it back into flatness.
“if h is a chair, what do the other letters look like?”
His thinking process leads him to collaborations. He envisions physical form for his letters, such as metal furniture, neon, kites, rails, blinds…and seeks out the craftsmen/factories to make his visions come alive. Sometimes he has a 3d idea, such as flipping blinds, and then envisions the typographic form to go with it.

What’s neat here is the back and forth he has with the manufacturer — an old school relationship to make new form. Breaking into other disciplines and bending them to suit his needs — persisting until the neon guy is hooked and wants to make his complicated forms.

Sample Chapter: Method — 002

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INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD

We live in a compartmentalized mind frame. Home is different from office, fun is separated from work, science lives apart from art. We’ve been trained to specialize in one thing and call that our profession, pushing our other interests down to lesser importance. Many of us, however, have several seemingly unrelated passions simmering within us, waiting to be manifested with the right method.

Interdisciplinary thinking turns compartmentalization on its head encouraging the coming together of disparate interests. In her map painting series, designer Paula Scher, partner in the eminent studio, Pentagram, combined her passion for lettering, maps and painting to create a series cross-disciplinary works. Similarly, designer Andrew Byrom merged his love of typography and furniture to create typographic furniture, while the ceramicist Stephanie Dearmond cast letterforms in porcelain to make new and unexpected form. These are but a few examples of what can happen when we choose to combine our interests instead of segregating them.

Passions are fluid. They change shape and intensity. Introduce yourself to a new subject matter. Prod into a new discipline in order to give yourself a new perspective. Conversations fuel passions and can lead to new ways of thinking. This is precisely why designer James Victore holds The Dinner Series, an annual week-long workshop where each day culminates in a lavish dinner party, meant to stimulate creative conversation. (Get Victore quote here). Give another example of stimulating conversation here. 

Conversations can lead to striking collaborations between experts from disparate fields. Longtime collaborators  ______ of MM/Paris and photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have produced hybrid photo/text works. (Show alphabet here). Likewise, designer Stephen Farrell has worked closely with writer Steve Tomasula to publish novels that bestow equal value on the design and the text. (Need example of designer working with a no-artistic collaborator). 

How does this work get done? In this chapter, we give you some leads. We attempt here to break down the method of interdsiciplinary design into useful tools—charts and diagrams, tips on inter-personal relations, and rules for testing the work as you go along.


 


 

Paula Scher: Map Paintings

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Scher combined her love of painting, lettering and maps in these interdisciplinary works that reflect on our information-centered society.

From the Pentagram website:
“In her paintings, Scher renders information and data culled from headlines, maps and diagrams in madcap fields of hand-drawn typography. Obsessive, opinionated and more than a little personal, the maps provide an exuberant portrait of contemporary information in all its complexity and subjectivity. Scher’s new book of her paintings, MAPS, was published last fall and recently went into its second printing.”
http://pentagram.com/en/new/2012/01/paula-schers-maps-exhibition-o.php 

Antartctica, 2011


 

Learning from each other

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“What Gutenberg did for writing online, video can now do for face to face communication.” Chris Anderson

Streaming video online has changed the way we work together and exchange ideas. Chris Anderson of TED speaks about how a crowd can accelerate improvement, the bigger the crowd the greater the innovation. Global recognition is initiating huge amounts of effort. It works by people sharing their biggest secret (radical openness), their greatest talent- they make a video of it and post it to the web. People across the entire planet see that video, get inspired, learn that skill, improve upon it, and then post their innovation. Video offers something the printed word and photographs cannot. It is an exchange beyond words, and talents such as dancing can thrive. Video offers new ways to learn and respond, building ideas in a participation age.

How does this relate to Interdisciplinary design projects? We don’t have to be in the same room to work together. Streaming video online has opened doors to new ways of collaborating and gaining knowledge.