Communication Design | @iAleJukebox

The aims of my design activity identified in these attributes:

• rational
• bright
• elegant

Identifying the rules of transformation for my design process

In this first phase, I found the characters of my three attributes in the following works by Piero della Francesca.

Rational

Bright

Elegant

I then defined rules of transformation as my interpretation of the characters, a process of abduction.

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Generative Art International Conference 2015

For this year’s Generative Art International Conference, we were asked to design a generative poster to exhibit. The Conference will take place in Venice and so the poster, once seen at the exhibition, will make Venice more Venice than before.
Also, the theme is “Futuring Past”. I linked my design to the Italian proverb “Chi dorme non piglia pesci”, that for the meaning that I associate with it, it could be translated in English with the quote “There is no substitute for hard work” by Henry Ford. This proverb played in the past and still plays today an important role in my life, so I wanted it to be the core of my work for the poster.

For the design of the poster, I have identified my catalyst in the painting “La città ideale” by Piero della Francesca.

The paradigm is my logical interpretation, the abstraction of the topological structure of the catalyst. It represents the relations of the elements and I assigned to each element one of my attributes.

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For the transformation of the letters, I made multiple copies in paper and folded them. In my personal interpretation, each iteration of this process made the letters more elegant.

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This is the evolution of the poster, transformation after transformation.

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Finally, this is the final version, presented at the GA2015.

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In this section, I would like to discuss some of the presentations of the Conference that I found the most interesting (in a good way and sometimes in a bad way).

The first thing that I noticed is that the generative process was approached by people coming from many different fields of study, hence the multitude of many projects and artworks of different nature. There were prints, video, sound, 3D printed objects, paintings, drawings, clothing, and so on. It was fascinating to witness the interest in the same subject approached by people from so many different fields (visual artists, designers, architects, mathematicians, teachers, chemists, movie makers, sound artists, environmentalists, and students like myself.) I can tell that the presentations offered a lot of points of interest that generated questions and discussions to evolve the subject and produced new ideas for future projects.
One other thing that I have noticed is that sometimes different definitions and interpretations to the term “generative art” were given. In some cases, the definition given by professors Soddu and Colabella was maintained, other times transformed if not ignored. I will give some examples for both cases, starting with the talks that in my opinion followed the definition for “generative” that we share in class at Politecnico di Milano. On the first day of conference, Jean Paul Courchia talked about his analysis of the work by the painter Johannes Vermeer, calling him a “generative artist”. He showed us how Vermeer was painting supposedly in the same rooms, but each time offering variations of those places; sometimes even inside the same painting (i.e. the reflection of the lady in the mirror hanged on the wall in the back of the room.) On the second day of conference, Anna and Michael Chupa in their talk “Juxtaposes: Visual Granular Synthesis, Vernacular Architecture, and Girih Tilings” presented their artworks which reflected very well the poetic logic behind the work. All the pieces, the tiles, of the mosaics were the result of their research and collection of parts of a city that, in their personal interpretation, represented it very well. Furthermore, the assembling of the tiles followed specific rules. On the third day, Ernest Edmonds gave my favorite talk above all: “From interaction to influence: generating form and space.” From his work, you can tell that he is a true experimentalist but also that he developed a strong personal poetic logic through the years of his career, and this really resonates in his work. Here’s a quote from his talk: “The art was writing the rules rather than making the visuals practically.” I liked this talk the most because it was inspiring to see how he managed to find solutions and realize his work despite the technological barriers he faced in the past.
In contrast, there have been talks that assigned the term “generative” to works that were the output of code. I think there is a thin line here, between what is and what is not “generative”. Obviously, if something is built with the use of code, it’s been “generated” by it; but “generated” doesn’t mean “generative”. In example, every digital interface or artifact that we see or use has been “generated” by lines of code; I think there must be a reason why we do not call the operative system of a computer “generative”, we don’t even think about it that way and this is because it is not “generative”, although it’s the result of zillions lines of code. At the same time, it is true that the output of a generative process is the result of algorithms, but they offer variations to express the poetic logic behind it, the algorithms are the tools that allow us to apply the transformations of a generative process — and these aren’t necessarily digital.
In my opinion, some of the talks at the conference didn’t really distinguish between the two terms and this led to some confusion. I will give a few examples. On the first day, there was the talk titled “Ice Core Modulations: Performative Digital Poetics” by Andrea Wollensak and Bridget Baird. What I found very interesting was the approach to the writing of the poetry: they stated that “it was written with the generative process in mind, so that a lot of attention was put in designing how it would sound without knowing exactly how it would be read.” Although, the main part of the project was the visual representation of the piece, hence the (misunderstood) generative process was identified in the software used rather than in rules of transformation or in an actual poetic logic. A more clamorous example of this approach, was given by Pelin and Oğul Göçmen with their presentation “Recall the Past: An Interactive Visual Story Telling Simulation of Deterioration of Semantic Memory in Alzheimer Disease”. Their project was basically the construction of an interactive object that would recognize if the picture showed to the camera was in color or in black and white. Nothing of their process was controlled by a generative approach, and it was very clear how they mistaken the terms for a code-generated output. On the last day, another talk got me wrong: “Generative solution to planting design” by James Basson and Fred Eichelbrennen. I didn’t see any hint to a generative process in their presentation, and once again there must have been a wrong interpretation of the definition of the title of the conference. For what I have understood, their project was a calculation system based on a lot of data about how plants grow in specific environments and conditions. It was a simulator that showed how a garden would look like in a given period of time. The software they built doesn’t create nor generate a garden, it just calculates on data from the database. I might be wrong with these comments and if so I would like to discuss in class about this.
Lastly I will talk about a few talks that made me think about how it could have been done better. On the first day, the presentation “Generating Affect: Applying Valence and Arousal values to a unified video, music, and sound generation system” rose a big discussion in the audience. Perhaps the way the project was explained was very technical and hard to follow through, but it was very clear to me – indeed, this might be why many from the audience asked things that were already explained well in the presentation. What I’d like to say about it is that first of all, it was a piece of art, not an instrument of measurement of the reactions of the public, and nighter it was designed to be universally acceptable or moreover universally effective. I think a lot of people in the audience didn’t understand this. What I liked about this project is that it reflects the aims of the artist because the scenes were assembled the way he intended, but unfortunately the process of selection and association of video and sound is not controlled by the artist’s poetic logic, instead it is done by the computer independently. I would improve this project by defining one or more rules to refine the chain process of video and sound based on the artist’s poetic, because for now it is somewhat fruitless to see an automated process of association left alone.
On the second day, the presentation “An online short-film editing machine with a fixed structure and pseudo-infinite combinations” by Quelic Berga had many interesting points. He designed a structure that generates short-films using variations of the same scenes recorded multiple times. The storyline is fixed, but every time you watch one of the short-films you’ll see a variation of the previous one. This is a coherent system because it assembles the short-films on a well defined structure, there are rules behind it. Anyway, given the limited amount of recorded variations, the number of combinations of the generated short-films will be limited, albeit a very large number. This might be interpreted in two ways from the point of view of generative design: it is very good because every time I watch a different short film I see a variation that empowers and confirms the idea of the artist/designer behind the project, but at the same time it is not an open system, given the limited amount of possible variations. A possible way to improve the further development of this project and perhaps make it more generative, would be to actually film the scenes each time that one presses the play button. Granted, it would be very impractical for a number of reasons, but ideally this structure would give unlimited variations generated by the same rules of direction and montage.
In conclusion, I enjoyed attending the conference very much. It surely offered a lot of insights and inspiration for my work. I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the people who were there, and who knows, this might lead to some future collaborations.

Extempore Project

My project will be a generative digital cover for a book. This is still in progress. I will update this page with my work soon.