visualization tool - need feedback

Hi everyone!

After today's class I realize that I might need more feedback from others to complete my short paper and to tweak my project. Since I am actually creating a tool, I want to know what you guys see as problems with image editing programs. Are the options in them too varied? Does the machine ultimately have too much control of your image? Are you an author or a co-author?

I have a problem with how image editing programs work. Most of them seem to revolve around editing photos, not creating new works of art. While, I use Photoshop to present and "clean up" finished drawings, I rarely use it as a tool for creating compositions. Does anyone else have this problem? It does not really serve me as an artist. It seems like you have to adapt to them, rather than they suit your needs. I am creating a program/software/application that can organize and reconfigure my own artwork, sort of like a new collage tool. Simplicity is key for me. I want to create new work from my own sketches.

I want it to be more intuitive and easy to use, Perhaps one day another artist would want to work this way with their own artwork. Or, I could easily collaborate with other artists by combining my artwork with theirs. What would you like to be able to do?

information anxiety

Hey everyone! Below is a rough write-up of my idea. I would really like some feedback on what you guys like/don't like about the idea and any questions. Thanks so much.

We are constantly bombarded with information. We are suffering from image anxiety. I check twitter too much. What if their was a way to gauge how active twitter was by looking at a visualization?

Using the data from twitter I want to make spontaneous generated murals. Murals are already somewhat immersive because of the relation of size to a human. This mural would change every time someone tweeted and also change due to topics that are currently trending. That way you wouldn't have to look at twitter to know that a new topic has broken.

I want to use my aesthetic in the art piece I create. I am interested in nondigital art as well as digital (including painting, drawing, & printmaking) so I would like to create interactive pieces that still have that artistic sensibility. I am interested in mark-making that still looks handdrawn or painterly. A lot of my pieces have texture and visual movement so I would like to try to translate that to the immersive environment. Patterns created could also be exported and used as digital design elements, printed artwork, or textile design.

Transparency and Sustainability

Image Source:http://graphico.free.fr/hfr/pollution.jpg

Last class we briefly mentioned the issue of responsibility as designers, and I asked about the carbon footprint of an avatar (which you can see here) as an example of the kind of issues which designers/engineers of this New Millenium must be aware of.

Leonardo Bonnani who teaches Future Craft: Radical Sustainability in Product Design at MIT Media Lab has created Sourcemap, an open source project that is a model of transformative Design.

Where do things come from and what are they made of?

Growing A ToonLoop Animation

In answer to Nick's slip-n-slide posting, here is the one I came up with in class. ToonLoop was a pleasure to use because of its simplicity. Since I am interested in heuristic learning, it makes sense to me that now that I have been able to produce something that I had fun with on my first pass, I am that much more motivated to try another more involved stop motion project. If I had hit a technological wall or steep learning curve the first time, that impression might have colored my idea of stop motion animation forever after. Thank you to the ToonLoop programmers for understanding that sometimes less is more.

Arthur Ganson,Machines & the Breath of Time

This a talk by a man who has been the artist-in-residence at M.I.T. that Arturo and I were talking about during our last class. His work is hard to describe, but it is a perfect blending of engineering and aesthetics which creates a sense of wonder in the viewer of his work.