Final Assignment Research

This work is done by Aaron Koblin Janet Echelman in 2014. It is a giant sculpture made of ropes in the middle of a city. People can use their mobile phones to connect and add layers of sparks to the sculpture in real time. This sculpture is amazing because of its giant size and how it breaks the rules of sculptures(usually hard and still). It's flowing in the sky and asks people to stop and look up and then participate. The only shortcoming of this project that I can think of is that it can only be view from the ground. People from the buildings around the sculpture may not see the effect because the projectors are facing upwards. Aaron Koblin is a digital media artist who's good at collecting and visualizing data. This work is very similar to his previous work Flight Patterns (shown below) in which he visualized paths of air traffic in color and form. I want to make an interactive media playground in my final assignment, and I think the way Koblin created this sculpture as a playground is inspiring. 

The second work I research is one I encountered before in Module 2.1(research-reproduce). In this website- http://jacksonpollock.org, one can create his/her own Jackson Pollock styled painting by moving and clicking with a mouse. This work is very simple but a lot of fun. The shortcoming is that the colors are entirely random and can't be changed once drawn. I'm not sure what inspired this work but is seems that it is quite similar to all of the drawing software and programs. This work inspires me by showing that using the simplest way of interaction-clicking and moving the mouse, one can create something fun.