CAD  Week01

This week’s assignment is to plan and sketch a potential final project using a computer aided design program of our choosing.

IDEA 0: Data Visualization Art Experiment

For my final project in How to Make (almost) Anything with Neil Gershenfeld, I will design and fabricate a costume with programmable LED’s reflective of Instagram hearts as well as the void of them. For my final project in the Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD)Proseminar with Krzysztof Wodiczko, I will use the costume as a techno-cultural prothetic in a performance. Conceptually, I intend to research the publicness and performativity of images, the intimate space between viewer and image, and how the private spheres of both authors and viewers have led to a public sphere in virtual space. While the costume is embedded with lights that serve as an accessible metaphor for visibility and even monumentality on social media, I am equally interested in using the dark as a metaphor for the more ambiguous aspects of Instagram.

For the costume design, I draw immense inspiration from Alexander McQueen’s 1999 fall/winter collection for Givenchy. With Neil and Krzysztof’s encouragement to replicate designs we admire, with proper acknowledgement of course, in order to learn from them and to discover our own process along the way, I will attempt to revive the below bodice.

Further, I will bring movement to the bodice via contemporary dance choreography. The below highlights the movement vocabulary I will develop towards this end. Regarding my choreographic intention, I am researching how creating in the private sphere (in this example, my bedroom) for a virtual audience (Instagram) affects my gestural choices. At a meta level, I am eager to see how the choreography will resonate in December in view of a live audience.

At the programming level, I have several ideas shown partially in pseudo code below. Simply expressed, the LEDs will be “played” like a symphony, with temporal lighting changes being commensurate with my Instagram data. Combined with the conceptual elements researched choreographically, the performance will be a data visualization art experiment.

IDEA 1: Performative body, haptic heart

Another project concept I have is to create a sensorial object to be held by audience members during a dance performance that gives haptic feedback relating to my moving body. This idea arose while ideating on a choreographic speculative design project centered on asking what will it mean to be human when machines outstrip our minds and bodies with the proposal that we might bioengineer organs for our (to be determined) 6th, 7th, and 8th organs. My vision is to have oversized pneumatic fictional organs hanging in the space with matching squishy ones handed out to the audience. I still need to work out what my fictional organs will look like and what they will do. But for now, I have some ideas for how I can actualize this by focusing on the human heart first.

My concept is to wear a heart rate sensor that wirelessly sends a signal to a vibration motor in the silicone heart so that as I dance, the viewer holding the heart can feel my heart beat. The goal is to amplify the kinetic qualities of dance for audience members who typically must depend solely on their visual and auditory apparatuses to experience a dance performance.

Below is a simple diagram made on Rhino expressing my idea. To make it, I worked with primary shapes and in the "top view" only.