Media Arts and Technology

11.25: Final Project Presentations[/b]

Post your final project here with a brief paragraph introduction, possibly some images and links, and then attach the pdf presentation

Cybernetics is fundamentally about human relationships to machines and computation. Though it was founded on the command and control systems of the US military, there have been moments of rebellion, where different approaches to the development of computational technologies were possible.

My presentation shows how the Environmental Ecology Lab as they set up to develop a completely different approach to computation and machines.

They believed that humans are not machines, but complex living organism. Their ideas of intelligent environments and soft infrastructure would ultimately be repurposed by the MIT Architectural Machine Group and developed into tools of surveillance.

The command and control philosophy of cybernetics won the day holding the institutional belief that humans are part of systems and little different than machines. But human beings are not machines.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d ... sp=sharing

Algorithmic art is created through explicit rules, procedures, or algorithms, blending mathematics, computer science, and creative expression. In this practice, the artist’s role shifts from composition to designing the algorithm and its parameters. Within this context, two major mid-century digital aesthetics emerged: the grid and the vector. The grid accounts for early generative art’s pixelated character, while the vector—a simple connecting line capable of bending and curving—produces clean shapes and rhythmic patterns (Caplan et al.).

Generative art often yields “visual pluralism,” generating multiple variations of the same underlying idea. Early algorithmic work was also closely linked to Minimalism, Op Art, and Conceptual Art, all of which emphasized logic and order, seriality, systems and processes, and the use of information as a structural element. Algorithmic art reveals the meeting point between systems and creativity, where new forms of expression can arise. It has served as a means to critique society, embrace chance, and invent new visual languages. Ultimately, it highlights the complexity that can emerge from simplicity—how compositions built from just a few lines of code, grids, and vectors can yield intricate works.

This lecture introduces the principles of algorithmic art and explores the contributions of the artists who played central roles in its development, such as Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, Lillian Schwartz, and Jospeh Nechvatal.
Walk Through Raster Series 7.3.3-1 (1967) by Frieder Nake Schotter (1968-1970) by Georg Nees Corridor (1966) by Georg Nees Googolplex by Lillian Schwartz

From Spatial Perception to Machine Vision: How Machines Understand Space
Zixuan Zhang — MAT 200A Final Project

The research focuses on the existing gaps between human spatial perception and machine vision systems, drawing insights from the realms of artificial intelligence, media art, and robotics studies. The research makes a point to show how human spatial perception involves the senses of sight, touch, and smell. Machines have their own way of perceiving space in terms of numbers, code, and computation. By choosing the artworks of artists such as Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen, and Hito Steyerl to analyze in the research, one gets a clear insight into how machines decode space. The analysis also makes reference to how machines convey space in their own language. Finally, I provided a case study from Xue Gao and me. This really shows a robot incorporating a machine vision system enabled by the ArUco marker detection system, integrated into a Raspberry Pi setup mounted on a ZUMO robot. The research brings to the fore how machines will shape the future of space design.


1. Farocki — Eye/Machine https://ropac.net/exhibitions/398-harun ... griffith-s
https://greenenaftaligallery.com/exhibi ... n-farocki3

2.Paglen & Crawford — ImageNet Roulette https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/tre ... rk-times/
3.Hito Steyerl — How Not to Be Seen https://momus.ca/to-cut-and-to-swipe-un ... to-be-seen


https://www.canva.com/design/DAG6agJxo8 ... harebutton

Data-Visualization: Art, Technology and Meaning
Data visualization transcends mere listing of data and metrics by acting as a powerful tool for visual discovery and communication. It utilizes visual properties like length, color, and position to instantly reveal complex patterns, trends, and anomalies that are otherwise hidden within spreadsheets. What you see is the structure and relationship among data points, allowing the human eye to quickly grasp magnitudes and proportions, thereby addressing the crucial "so what?" behind the numbers. The data effectively communicates its underlying narrative—be it a clear correlation, a seasonal cycle, or a critical outlier—transforming inert figures into actionable insights. Experimental data visualization pushes this function further, exploring abstract or high-dimensional data through novel visual metaphors. Its reasoning is to bypass conventional limitations by connecting disparate ideas through visual data structures, often revealing previously unseen connections and hypotheses by offering fresh, intuitive perspectives on complex information.

"Immersive Sound and the Construction of Presence in Digital Media” - Gevher E. Karboga

This presentation begins by explaining the concepts of spatial, emotional, and embodied presence, and explores how sound shapes presence and embodiment in immersive environments such as VR, AR, and interactive installations. It also references historical precedents in early multimedia art, as well as contemporary approaches to spatial audio and sensory design.

"A recent history of Immersive audio experiences" - Lucian Parisi

This presentation covers a recent history of HCI, Urban Sculpture, AI/ML, and XR, through the lens of audio. I cover spatial interaction, spatial audio, and physical interaction.

"Chaos Theory: a Tool for Creation and Critical Framework" - Fiona Irving-Beck

This presentation first covers a general basis of chaos theory. It then presents a few artworks that explicitly use chaos in their depiction of complex systems. Finally, chaos theory is presented as a framework to gain insight into modern human-tech interaction.

"Aesthetics of Rationality in Early Ages of Computational Art" -- Felix Yuan

Now we're in a frustrating state of debating how AI shaped our life and art expression. But at the early age artists faced the same situation as computers came in. They discovered amazing aesthetic from the machine materials -- algorithms, computations, robots, which eventually formed an aesthetics of rationality.

In 2020, Peter Weibel, director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, delivered an insightful speech in the context of the Biomedia exhibition that brings us to the theory of holon and holarchy. Holon means an independent unit as well as a part of a larger whole (such as molecules, cells, organs, and organisms), and holarchy is a layered system composed of many such holons. Media systems function as dynamic environments, as Edward Shanken notes, and operate much like ecosystems that sense, respond, evolve, and reorganize themselves. This holon theory is important for analyzing digital ecosystems because information, behavior, and decision-making are distributed across many small units, and large-scale patterns emerge from their interactions.

In the presentation, I gave a few examples of digital ecosystems through the lens of holon theory:

• Boids, created by Craig Reynolds in 1986, models bird flocking with simple local rules that collectively generate complex emergent behavior.

• Karl Sims’s Evolved Virtual Creatures shows digital organisms that adapt and transform through simulated evolution, allowing novel forms and behaviors to emerge.

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room from 2006 turns individual heartbeats into a collective field of light, creating an environment whose form emerges from the presence of many participants.

• Ian Cheng’s Emissaries presents a continuously running virtual world where AI-driven characters generate evolving narratives through their interactions.

View details in the final presentation's pdf attached below.