Light Art 2016

The light artist Paul Friedlander was born in 1951 (http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/CV%20update%20November%202013.htm) and grew up in Manchester and Cambridge England. He was very interested in the sciences from a young age and studied mathematics and physics at Sussex University. He later studied Fine Art at Exeter College of Art and become the lighting director for a few theatre productions.

Friedlander’s artwork is inspired by movement and machinery, and a show called “Kinetics” that he saw at Hayward Gallery in 1970 inspired him to dedicate his life to kinetic art (http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/memyself.htm).

One of Friedlander’s early pieces were chromastrobic light sculptures. The sculptures were built using black and white designs and electric motors to spin them. The sculptures used the concept of chromastrobic light, which is Friedlander’s discovery that changing light faster than the eye records images can produce remarkable visual effects. The images below show these sculptures.

   

Source: http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/artbackgnd2.html

Later, Paul Friedlander started to use an original technique to produce 3D, changing visual effects. The technique was to vibrate string very quickly and project colors onto it. One of his pieces was called “Dark Matter”, which had the goal of showing what dark matter would look like if it were visible. The exhibition was 8 meters tall and was interactive. Below is an image of this project.

Source: http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/guardian.html

Another piece that Friedlander exhibited is called “Timeless Universe”. After obtaining content such as ancient scripts and mathematical formulas that describe the universe, he produced a 15 piece exhibit with changing imagery that shows many variations on the theme. Below is an image of this exhibit.

Source: http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/sala2006.htm

 

Below are some other images of Friedlander’s work.

Source: http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/singapore.htm

Source: http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/Canarias2004/installation-2.htm

Source: http://www.paulfriedlander.com/text/spain2004_0021.htm

Jen Lewin: Interactive Sculptor

Tools and Techniques

In the construction of her pieces she uses a lot of small microcontrollers, custom electronics, Arduinos, LED lights and different types of sensors. Along with her skills in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. She is able to get the sculptures to react to specific stimuli in a way that she wants and she is able to build everything in house.

Inspiration

She was inspired by where she grew up in Maui, by this one spot where she could see the clouds and sunset and how the light changed and evolved in particular she liked how the light and clouds moved. Most of her work is to fabricate large-scale interactive sculptures that combine light, sound and motion to encourage community interaction. She thinks beyond the traditional art exhibition by focusing on sculptures made for public use in order to create an experience that brings vibrancy to neighborhoods, parks and public spaces. The high amount of interaction with the pieces essentially makes the visitors the artist because based off of everything they can transform the piece to become anything they want.

Art

The Pool

Her most known work, The Pool, which spans almost a quarter acre and consists of over 200 LED interactive, glowing, outdoor platforms. When stood upon, they interact with each other, change colors and emit sound according to pressure and speed changes brought upon by the viewers who are interacting with this exhibit. The idea came from a camping trip to Australia where they found a bunch of tidal pools lit up by the moonlight and they jumped around from tidal pool to tidal pool and she wanted to recreate that experience with these “pools of light”. It is constructed with plastic and  there is no centralized computer instead it has small computers (Arduino’s) in each base, which run a couple basic rules that then propagate through the system. The sensors can tell users weight distribution, which in turn makes the lights react a certain way based of the rules programmed into the system.

The Moths

3 large silken robotic moths that flap their wings when there are people touching the controllers. The controllers are these glowing orbs that measure capacitance and when people place their hands on it the capacitance changes and the sensors pick this up and wirelessly transmit a signal to the moths to start moving and have the lights on their bodies start slowly strobing, which gives the whole exhibit a very ethereal feel.

Edison Clouds

It is constructed with 1,200 LED’s that are placed inside old incandescent bulbs. The sculpture reacts to people moving in the space by sensing their motion with some sort of camera and creates a crude image or shadow effect on the clouds. The Edison cloud also has a standard cloud pattern the plays on it when you lie in the chair, which was inspired by Jen when she was a child and used to watch clouds in Maui.

Hello, my name is Jonella Esposito, I am a freshman IMGD major. Most of my artwork that I have done have been drawings. I started out with mostly pencil or charcoal drawings. This included basics such as still life drawings or even something as simplistic as gesture drawings. I also took some photos just around my hometown just for my own personal pleasure. 

After that I moved on to painting. This was a very recent development in my artistic career. It started off with a very simple drawing done in class during A term here at WPI. And eventually I ended up painting it.

As for tech I have very little knowledge about it. I have never programmed anything, I’m not even much of a builder never even made a sculpture. The closest I have come to doing anything technical combined with the arts is some work I did in Blender as well as the 3D Modeling I class offered here at WPI. Most of my work on Blender is very simple and was done by following other peoples steps and ideas since I had never used a program like it before and was teaching myself.

Other creative arts I practice is that back home I was part of the alto section in a Children’s Chorus that went to France and even sang at Notre Dame. I also in my spare time- mostly during break- play the drums. Most of my inspiration comes from nature I come from a very rural area in Maine so I got to be around the ocean and nature a lot. My artistic goals would probably be to increase my knowledge about 3D art, and also to be better at being more original. While I know there is never any original art everything is based off of something that has been done or seen, I would like to have the ability as an artist to be more free with my ideas.

Art Making Experience

I have had experience in drawing 3-D models using Zbrush, video production and editing, and digital painting. I also used to take water color painting classes when I was in high school.

 

Tech Experience

I am very familiar with Arduino and other electronics skills since I am now a ECE senior with concentration in both Analog and Digital electronics. I have also used Processing in conjunction with Arduino for graphical user interface purposes but I am not that familiar with Processing.

 

Creative Arts

I used to take classical and acoustic guitar lessons when I was back in my country. I also took a social dance class here at WPI and I found it to be very relaxing and interesting. Usually, in my free time, I just like to play the guitar.

 

Creative Inspirations

I think light and water are my sources of creative inspiration. I like how light can diffuse, reflect, and disperse through the use of a prism. Water also has the liquid effect which gives rise to ripples, reflections, droplets, and many other cool features. Also, mythology computer game characters along with their medieval weapons and armors inspire me a lot since I am interested in Middle Ages and legendary creatures.

 

Artistic Goals

One of my artistic goal is to become a good 3-D modeler for game character ‘skins’. Nowadays, most computer games have the ability of being able to change the clothing, weapon, and accessories of the game characters and skin designers can also make some decent money if their skins become popular.

 

Recent Project

The most recent creative project that I am really proud of is my final project in my 3-D modelling class. The goal of the project was to sculpt a replica of my whole self.

 

 

My experience with art making is fairly limited to assigned work from teachers. Most of what I’ve made has come from assignments in classes I have taken to complete my Humanities requirement. That being said, it has led me to complete some very cool things. I’ve made a puppet of a knight out of aluminium foil, I’ve made the literal representation of “Squeezing the money out of you” Thanks to some creative video processing. 

However, what I’ve done with programming, electronics and other tech is a lot more robust. I have created robots that can hunt down candles, I’ve created 3D printed versions of rotary aircraft engines. I have soldered together wires on everything from a battery tender to a light box that spelled out a name in tron style LEDs (Which I sadly don’t have a picture of).

 

Other creative outlets I have are few. I listen to a lot of music, I play a lot of pretty video games, but I don’t create much. However, these all help to inspire me. My favorite inspirations are Space and Sci Fi. Space has been a favorite for as long as my dad told me about the Apollo missions and various planes in the sky. Tron came about more recently with the remake. To that extent, it was the main source for the aforementioned light box nameplate.

My goals with this course are to create something that combines the aesthetics of Tron with the content of Space. Either the Space Shuttle, the Solar System, or else some combination of other spacecraft. As for the actual content, I am not so sure yet.

Recent projects I am proud of are shown after the first paragraph. The Knight was supposed to be a caricature of a knight, and I thought I was able to get the proportions just right. My only issue with that is the aluminum foil makes a very crinkly surface, I would have liked it smoother. The other drawing is a study in shades. We took a Vermeer painting shown in black and white and had to break it down into only 5 shades. It came as very blocky and very harsh, but it was wonderful in getting a better understanding of shades and their limits.

 

My experience with art making includes 7 years of photography and basic art intro classes in college and highschool. Also I know how to use photoshop, Maya, 3DS Max and Zbrush. My experience with tech is very limited I don’t know how to code, but I have done ECE 2010 so I know basic circuits. With Tech I usually buy completed products that say react to music instead of building it my self, but I do know how to strip wires and solder. I don’t do any other creative activities other than art. My inspirations usually are light related with photography I like to be able to show motion with a still image and that is why i usually do long exposures of lighted objects because not only are the conditions ideal for that sort of photography but i also love the way they come out. I also try to incorporate important family stories, traditions and objects into some of my drawing or painting. Another inspiration of mine is science so using different scientific concepts or phenomenon to create a picture or even shooting some interesting phenomenon by themselves. My artistic goals are to create cool pictures; stuff that wow’s the viewer. I like to make art that people will ask me how I did it. Above are some pictures I have taken that have to do with light. Then I have to screenshots from my Instagram because I couldn’t find the originals, but I made a Deadmau5 helmet and a chandelier made with coke cans. and the link below “Light reactive leds” is a video of what I did to my room last year.

light reactive leds

 

My name is John Williams and I am a Junior doing a double major in ME and ECE.

I like to draw all kinds of things, from cartoons to still lives. Sometimes I like to use chalk pastels on cardboard because it makes shading more fun and you can add both lightness and darkness, whereas you can only add darkness to white paper.

My main interest recently has been exploring the rules of perspective drawing. I love geometry and compass/straightedge constructions as a way of ‘graphical calculation’. As a few examples, I figured out a way to draw icosahedrons in accurate perspective without using calculations (not sure if my particular method was previously discovered), how to rotate a line in any direction while preserving its length (projected length may change), and how 3 vanishing points in mutually perpendicular directions can be used to graphically locate the vanishing point in the direction perpendicular to the page. I could go on and on! I love perspective. I also like to play with anamorphic distortion(such as the wineglass below) and nontraditional perspective such as fisheye and cylindrical. The other picture below is a room assembled from three pieces of cardboard in different planes (one for each wall) and appears to have depth when viewed from the right position (for example, the floor lines match up, even though the pieces of cardboard are in different planes).

Although I am studying ECE, I have never done a significant hobby project just for fun.

As for programming, I know java, C, and Matlab. I have also done artistic visual programming projects. The most interesting one was Moiré pattern animations. The idea is that two transparent patterns moving on top of each other, such as window screens, produce a moving interference pattern. This can result in a planned animation if the two underlying patterns are computed. If one of the two patterns is vertical bars, the other can easily be treated as the frames of the animation. This idea has been used before, but I came up with an interesting addition: If one pattern is a grid, the animation can proceed differently depending on the direction that the layers are sliding. I have uploaded Photoshop files of these – to view them you simply drag one of the layers. I couldn’t embed the Photoshop files here but I uploaded them to the media library. Check them out, they’re worth your time. I have also printed these out on clear acetate and they still work. I have also done programming projects that involve 3D glasses.

As for other creative arts, I like to read and write poetry, although it’s been a while since I’ve written anything.

My creative inspirations are math, nature, and the artists I find on the internet.

My artistic goal is the satisfaction that comes with creating something new.

My name is Max Levine. I am a 3^rd year student working on my BS/MS in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB). My major is very interdisciplinary so I work on many different types of projects from biology to math to computer science.

I haven’t worked on much art making out of art classes because I’m not a very good at drawing and have trouble finding time to work with more elaborate media. However, I really enjoy more digital forms of art and find working on computer modeling relaxing. I have worked with many different modeling/animations software including Cinema4D, Maya, 3dsMax, and Zbrush. Below is a model of my hand that I made.

I have worked with many programming languages for my major such as Java, Python, Matlab, and R. However I have not worked with programming electronics, although I would like to.  My experience with electronics is small, I have only done soldering of simple circuits and putting light strips in my room.

The types of art that I enjoy most are fun and visually stimulating. Light art falls right into this category. I am also a big fan of interactive/changing art which tempts you stay and enjoy for a little bit of time. I find most of this art on the internet which is also where I draw much of my inspiration.

A recent project that I am proud of is the 3D modeling project that I worked on for an art class last year. I made a buff humanoid chameleon. It was a lot of fun to make the model, texture it, paint it, add clothing, and finally pose it.

In this class I would like to make something that is whimsical and fun. I hope I can add element of interactivity so that it isn’t just a static piece.

My name is Virginia Massa, but I prefer being called Ginny. I’m a sophomore Biology/ Biotechnology major. Art is something that I practice in different ways. For example, I love baking. I enjoy making things out of pulled sugar, or just twirling sugar threads and seeing what happens. I have also worked with fondant a bit and actually made the cake toppers for my brother’s wedding a few years ago. In fact, a lot of my art is done in the kitchen. My family gets pretty serious about pumpkin carving, and I’ve carved one for as long as I can remember. I have experience with digital art and 3D modeling. Although digital art can go past boundaries and be very creative, creating physical art is also fun.

I don’t have much experience with coding. In high school I took a computer science class where we were taught the basics of Python and Java, most of which I have forgotten. My roommate and I have messed around with her Arduino a little bit, so I have a small amount of experience with that.

Music, video games, and cartoons are some of my largest influence. I really enjoy listening to and singing along to music. My favorite songs tend to be classic rock and alternative. Although I am a bit rusty, I can play the flute and piano.

This is an example of a symmetry project that we were assigned in an art class. I really like working with the unique shape of the octopus. They are really interesting creatures.

These are the cake toppers I made for my brother’s wedding. They are only about two inches tall, and it was challenging to get small detail in. I am happy with the end result though.