School of Design, Department of Visual Arts Records

The Department of Visual Arts offers courses in animation, art education, art history, ceramics, computer graphics, drawing, film, illustration, interactive design, graphic design, mobile app design, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and web design. The collection is composed of departmental records

Ant Tribe

Ant Tribe describes the post-80s generation university graduates who live together in poor conditions without Social security in communities around China\u27s major metropolises. They dream of a better life in big cities but struggle with low-paying jobs. These struggling elites have become the fourth weak Social group, after peasants, migrant workers and unemployed people. The reason why these college graduates are compared to ants is that they are like ants: clever, hardworking, politically weak and living in groups. The real world is always different from the ideal world of the Ant Tribe in China. They often lose their purposes in a complex society. It is more important for them to recognize the distance between the real and imaginary in order to rethink whether it is a right choice to stay in a big city and try to realize their dreams. The intention of the Ant Tribe installation is to explore the process and concept of changing between the real and fantasy. In the installation, I hope to portray the Ant Tribe phenomenon widely and deeply from an artist\u27s perspective. The most important thing for me is using my artistic practice to investigate the power of the media over the contemporary subject in order to activate the viewers to question some Social issues regarding humanity consciousness. My artwork should be thought - provoking for them. I would like to use my visual language to convey specific Social issues to inquire how far the viewers are from their dreams. I hope they think about themselves in their complex society physically and psychologically when they go through my work

Maintaining authenticity: transferring patina from the real world to the digital to retain narrative value

This research is concerned with utilizing new technologies to harvest existing narrative, symbolic and emotive value for use in a digital environment enabling "emotional durability" (Chapman, 2005) in future design. The projects discussed in this paper have been conducted as part of PhD research by Rosemary Wallin into 'Technology for Sustainable Luxury' at University of the Arts London, and visual effects technology research undertaken by Florian Stephens at University of West London. Jonathan Chapman describes vast consumer waste being "symptomatic of failed relationships" between consumers and the goods they buy, and suggests approaches for designing love, dependency, and even cherishability into products to give them a longer lifespan. 'Failed relationships' might also be observed in the transference of physical objects to their virtual cousins. Consider the throwaway nature of digital photography when compared to the carefully preserved prints in a family album. Apple often use a skeuomorphic (Hobbs, 2012) approach to user interface design, to digitally replicate the patina and 'value' of real objects. However, true transference of physical form and texture presumably occurs when an object is scanned and a virtual 3D model is created. This paper presents three practice-based approaches to storing and transferring patina from an original object, utilizing high resolution scanning, photogrammetry, mobile applications and 3D print technologies. The objective is not merely accuracy, but evocation of the emotive data connecting the digital and physical realm. As the human face holds experience in the lines and wrinkles of the skin, so the surface of an object holds its narrative. From the signs of the craftsman to the bumps and scratches that accumulate over the life of an item over time and generations, marks gather like evidence to be read by a familiar or a trained eye. According to the time and the culture these marks are read within, they will either add to or detract from its value. These marks can be captured via complex 3D modelling and scanning technologies, which allow detailed forms to be recreated as dense 3D wireframe, but the result is often unsatisfying. 3D greyscale surfaces can never fully capture the richness of patina. Authentic surfaces require other qualities such as colour, texture and depth, but there is something else - more difficult to define. Donald A. Norman expands on the idea of emotion and objects by describing three 'levels’ of design "visceral, behavioural and reflective". Visceral is based on "look, feel and sound", behavioural is focused on an object’s use, and reflective is concerned with its message. New technology is commonly seen in terms of its ability to increase efficiency, but this research has longer-term objectives: to repair or even rebuild Chapman's 'broken relationships' and enable ‘emotionally durable' design. The PhD that has formed the context for this paper examines the concept of luxury value, and how and why the value of patina has been replaced by fashion. Luxury goods are aspirational items often emulated in the bulk of mass production. If we are to alter behaviour around consumption, one approach might be to use technology to harvest patina as a way to retain emotional, symbolic and poetic value with a view to maintaining a relationship with the things we buy

Digital Stone Exhibition: The Intersection of Art & Technology

Digital Stone as a concept is based on the fusion of CAD technologies with traditional stone carving. Digital Stone Exhibition featured four digital sculptors: Bruce Beasley, Jon Isherwood, Robert Michael Smith and Kenneth Snelson, who designed five sculptures each utilizing CAD technologies. All sculptures in this exhibition were designed and developed first in virtual space of software programs. Physical models were printed by rapid prototype machines which became a metaphorical hand of the computer to produce an actual sculpture from the virtual sculpture. The RP models were sent to China to be enlarged in granite at Dingli Stone Carving Company in Fujian Province. An accompanying indoor exhibition of smaller artworks, e-form , educated viewers to the various steps of computer design, rapid prototype manufacture, and the relationship of 3D visualization/animation to the development of Digital Stone . This exhibition included a documentary film, digital prints, rapid prototype models and animation clips produced by more than thirty international digital sculptors. Autodesk sponsored the production of the bi-lingual (English and Mandarin) video documentary “Digital Stone Exhibition: The Intersection of Art & Technology” that accompanied the traveling exhibition and now to be presented at this conference

MoSculp: Interactive Visualization of Shape and Time

We present a system that allows users to visualize complex human motion via 3D motion sculptures---a representation that conveys the 3D structure swept by a human body as it moves through space. Given an input video, our system computes the motion sculptures and provides a user interface for rendering it in different styles, including the options to insert the sculpture back into the original video, render it in a synthetic scene or physically print it. To provide this end-to-end workflow, we introduce an algorithm that estimates that human's 3D geometry over time from a set of 2D images and develop a 3D-aware image-based rendering approach that embeds the sculpture back into the scene. By automating the process, our system takes motion sculpture creation out of the realm of professional artists, and makes it applicable to a wide range of existing video material. By providing viewers with 3D information, motion sculptures reveal space-time motion information that is difficult to perceive with the naked eye, and allow viewers to interpret how different parts of the object interact over time. We validate the effectiveness of this approach with user studies, finding that our motion sculpture visualizations are significantly more informative about motion than existing stroboscopic and space-time visualization methods.Comment: UIST 2018. Project page: http://mosculp.csail.mit.edu

Grand Illusions: Large-Scale Optical Toys and Contemporary Scientific Spectacle

Nineteenth-century optical toys that showcase illusions of motion such as the phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope, have enjoyed active “afterlives” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contemporary incarnations of the zoetrope are frequently found in the realms of fine art and advertising, and they are often much larger than their nineteenth-century counterparts. This article argues that modern-day optical toys are able to conjure feelings of wonder and spectacle equivalent to their nineteenth-century antecedents because of their adjustment in scale. Exploring a range of contemporary philosophical toys found in arts, entertainment, and advertising contexts, the article discusses various technical adjustments made to successfully “scale up” optical toys, including the replacement of hand-spun mechanisms with larger sources of motion and the use of various means such as architectural features and stroboscopic lights to replace traditional shutter mechanisms such as the zoetrope’s dark slots. Critical consideration of scale as a central feature of these installations reconfigures the relationship between audience and device. Large-scale adaptations of optical toys revise the traditional conception of the user, who is able to tactilely manipulate and interact with the apparatus, instead positing a viewer who has less control over the illusion’s operation and is instead a captive audience surrounded by the animation. It is primarily through their adaptation of scale that contemporary zoetropes successfully elicit wonder as scientific spectacles from their audiences today

The artistic use of parallax and lenses revealing the invisible in holography

There are many artistic resources offered by holography: third-dimension registration and reconstruction, immateriality, color interpretation, holographic space, realism, etc. But there are a few of them which are very characteristic and singular of that media such as the inversion of parallax, and the possibility of making invisible to turn into visible. Current paper aims to discuss key issues concerning with the aesthetic use of those special features. It is based on theoretical as well as critical analysis of the production by some of the most outstanding holographic artists who have made use of such interesting resources