Avant-Garde Art / Wk 5 / Draft for Final

| A-M Gallero

INITIAL IDEA:  My original thought was to create a p5 or processing sketch with 3 boxes across a canvas with a line of text inside each box (similar to Jenny Holzer’s Truisms or Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen ‘s Listening Posts and using colors inspired by Byron Kim’s Synecdoche). After seeing ICP’s Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change, Thomas Dworzak’s “Instagram books” collection and taking Allison Parrish’s Twitter Bot class, I thought it would be interesting to explore the Twitter API and extract snapshots of tweets associated to particular words. I wanted to take an issue like immigration or skin color and search for particular words like “immigration,” as well as words associated to it like “better life” and “dreams” on the Twitter API and display the tweets in each of the 3 boxes.
 

DRAFT:

TWITTER 3.9.17 / 11am

 

PROCESS:
1. In an effort to learn and practice my Processing & P5 skills, I decided to work in this medium as my final project.  Since I’m still learning how to code and parsing data, it’s taking me a while to make the code work and look the way I want. The draft above was actually done in Indesign and Photoshop, but I’m determined to code this in p5, so the API or a text file of tweets loads into the canvas automatically.
2. Extracting data from Twitter API. My initial idea was to have 3 panels, flashing different shades of skin tones with twitter feed info of the words: ‘brown’, ‘white’, ‘black’ in the tweets. These particular words are so general that they convey a wide range of meanings from actual color to people’s names, so I decided to change the word search to ‘immigration’ and the things that migrants strive for like ‘second chances’, ‘dreams’, ‘better life’, ‘happiness’ to see more positive tweets. After seeing the results for these word searches, I felt like I needed to filter out a lot of information like retweets, the user’s Twitter name and abundance of mean or negative tweets.
3. Design – 3 boxes of text vs 1 box. It’s probably better to focus on 1 line/ 1 box of text at a time. I also want to add more design elements or more animation to this so it’s something that I need to work on, as well as figuring out the coding for this.

 

 

Piecing It Together / Wks 5 & 6 / Gear Box Midterm

| A-M Gallero
WEEK 5  (Prototype)
I decided to focus on the Karakuri mechanical box, so I can explore the mechanics of gears and translate the paper form to a wooden version. To help me get started, I used the paper templates from the book, Karakuri: How to Make Mechanical Paper Models Move. I was able to cut and assemble a paper model of the box and gears as the start of my prototype.

 

• • • • •
WEEK 6  (The Construction)
The next steps for me was to draw the flat pieces into a digital vector format so I could easily adjust the pieces into an updated design using wood with a 1/4″ thickness.

1) Taking the box apart and measuring the individual pieces to translate them into a vector form in Adobe Illustrator. (TIP: When I used a regular ruler to measure, it was a little frustrating to get precise measurements. Instead, I used a precision ruler that I’ve had for years to help me measure the exact fractions. And when I need to convert the fractions to decimal points quickly, I keep a conversion chart of fractions to decimals by my desk and in my sketchbook.

2) Template in Illustrator and making gears:  I struggled with drawing the gears but after watching some YouTube videos, I figured out some quick and less frustrating tips in gear making. Start with 2 circles (diameter, diameter with length of teeth), then a star (to help guide the placement of the teeth), use the ‘Outline’ tool in the ‘Pathfinder’ tab, ungroup and set the stroke to Black, and delete the lines that are not needed.

3) Testing the template on a vinyl cutter: I tested the template on a vinyl cutter first. This helped me correct template by adding or removing lines that should of been cut versus needed to be perforated. Adjusting my template before trying the template on a laser cutter definitely helps save time. When using the vinyl cutter, I first started off with 100# Bristol paper which required a deep cut blade and I experimented with cutting the template on wood paper as well. The wood paper has a nice finish, but it’s too flimsy and the vinyl cutter didn’t cut all the way through so I needed to over the edges with an Exacto knife. I also need to figure out the correct settings to get the vinyl cutter to cut through thick sheets—I had the same issue with the 100# paper stock.
4) Testing the template on the laser cutter and more prototypes: Translating the flat pieces to something that has depth, particularly the 1/4″ thickness of the wood. I first tried cardboard and then wood. The challenging part of this task was recreating the box without the paper flaps. After seeing a rough prototype of the wood version and how I glued it together, the thickness of the wood added to the length of the cube and if I glued it that way,  I would need to make some ‘sides’ shorter in order to compensate for the added depth.  (NOTE: the laser cutter didn’t go through the wood completely after 3 passes and needed to run through the laser cutter a couple more times to cut through the wood. Also book enough time to do this.)

5) Constructing Boxes with Interlocking Edges: I actually tried to construct this last semester for my PCOM midterm (and before I learned how to use the laser cutter), but I couldn’t get the grooves to match perfectly and ended up buying an acrylic cubed enclosure from The Container Store. I tested a rough version on cardboard with the laser cutter first, but ran into the same problem of figuring out where things should interlock, so I carefully worked on laying out the  interlock in Illustrator and spacing the grooves apart by 1/4″ (which is also the same size as the wood thickness).  In Illustrator, I also laid out each side of the box like a cross so I could easily see what was connected to what and tested the grooves next to one another. After each round, I tested a paper version on the vinyl cutter a couple times, taped the pieces together and was able to mark with a Sharpie, what grooves were unnecessary or missing to adjust my template.

6) Laser cutting with the final template on “wood”: For this latest version, it took an 1 hour to do 9 passes through the laser cutter. It did cut through to almost everything except for 2 gears with the longer teeth, which were luckily my backup pieces that I didn’t need). I was very happy that the sides interlocked with no missing pieces and decided not to use wood glue to lock them together cause the interlock fits tightly together. On my template, I tried to keep the pieces interlocked while it was laser cut, so the sides would fit together smoothly when constructing the box.

7) Work in Progress: In order for the gear mechanism to work better, I need to make the holes (or squares) in the center of the inside gears and the big circular ‘turner’ smaller and the long beam a little thicker, so it has more tension and doesn’t allow the gear to slide around as much. In the paper version, there were small paper tabs to glue onto the beam to keep things in place. By making the holes a little tighter, I’m hoping that it will keep things in place better. I also want to add a top piece to the box and attach it to the gear mechanism. I was thinking of trying to animate the wheels of a Mars Rover and have little human figures inside the ‘gear’ box, standing on and around the gears to convey the idea of them controlling the Rover’s “movements.”

Avant-Garde Art / Wk 4 / Conceptual Art

| A-M Gallero

Conceptual Art Research: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1085 and #46

Research & Photo Sources: Dia: Beacon, MASSMOCA

• • • • •

PROPOSAL FOR FINAL: In researching the evolution of Neo-Conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer’s work from her Truisms of the late 70s to her current LED sculptural installations mixing text and art to call attention to important social issues, I plan on creating a series of p5 sketches using social media data like the Twitter API combined with graphic design elements (and some Sol LeWitt influence) to create computer generated snapshots of culture and news now. I’m envisioning 3 rectangular panels containing the pieces of text that will constantly change. The idea for the format was also inspired by a class field trip to see Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s artwork, Movable Type in the lobby of The New York Times. Hansen and Rubin’s piece consists of 560 small screens (280 screens on each facing wall) revealing data feeds of the NYTimes content and it’s archives.

• • • • •

INSPIRATION: Jenny Holzer’s artwork

Research & Photo Sources: Jenny Holzer, MOMA, Whitney, Lustmord, Art History Archive, NYTimes, Walker Art Center, Protect, Protect, Wikipedia, Lucy Lippard’s “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object”

Twitter Bot / Wk 6 / Final: What’s Going On?

| A-M Gallero

PROCESS:
My original idea was to generate a more visual twitter bot, but after last week’s discussion about getting out of your bubble and Trump’s constant repetition of the words “fake news” towards media coverage that he doesn’t like, I decided to focus my attention on news sources who do ‘fact check.’ Another source of inspiration for this idea came from listening to a Design Matters with Debbie Millman podcast interviewing Anil Dash, who had a hand in creating Internet technologies in the last two decades. Millman’s question of “…how do we use technology to combat alternative facts and false news?” struck a chord with me. Dash’s response to that question was, “People consume, amplify and believe fake news, alternative facts as a matter of identity…to belong to a community… the only way to uproot someone from that is to speak to the values that they have disconnected them from that group.” Empathy and trying to understand these differing viewpoints is something that we can strive towards to unify the current division. My new Twitter Bot idea titled after “What’s Going On?” (also the title of a Martin Gaye’s song which stemmed from Four Tops member, Renaldo “Obie” Benson who witnessed police brutality and violence committed on anti-war protesters who had been protesting at Berkeley’s People’s Park during “Bloody Thursday”)  is a space to collect a wide range of credible new sources, including local publications that have verified twitter accounts and tweet a link to the news source in a random way and accompanied by a computer generated piece of art. To gather the credible new sources, a journalist friend wrote this article, 10 Journalism Brands Where You Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts and it gave me a base of news sources to start with.  This article not only provides a  little more insight into these top 10 news sources, but suggests subscribing to your “local newspapers as well.”  This led me to the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site to get the whole list of publications around the United States. To combat fake news and get out of the “bubble” is a “lifestyle change” that I hope this artbot can start a conversation on or give empathy for.

 

#1) Collecting Data: I first started collected a list of all the 2017 newspaper publications that were in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers‘s records, which I added to an excel file. The problem with this is that there were so many publications for each state and my goal later would be to go through the list and find out whether each news publication has an online website or twitter account that I can add to the Twitter Bot. Because there is so much data (19,165 rows) to parse and click through individually, I did not include it in this current bot. The LOC site did have JSON files to download, but when I checked for a specific publication, I didn’t see it so I didn’t trust the filter searches on the site. Instead, I started with a more smaller and manageable list on national news sources from the article, 10 Journalism Brands Where You Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts.

#2) Researching different art bots with Generative Art: I initially thought the bot would be a little more whimsical with generated art of a sunrise to go with your morning cup of news, but I couldn’t decipher the code for the softlandscapes bot and tried to find an easier way (with my beginner coding skills) to add the visual images. I did find this nice article on art bots and then I turned to Shiffman’s online Twitter Bot tutorials of creating the images in Processing and bringing it to the node program. This is something that I would like to add to this Twitter Bot, but was unsuccessful in merging it together with my current code. Part of the problem was the spaces in the naming conventions of my folders for the file path.  I need to get in the habit of naming my folders with underlines instead of spaces, because the processing sketch will not work in the terminal.  I also need to rethink an image and learn how to map the data of the “Scoreboard” to an object that will be tweeted along with the news source.

#3) The Coding: I wanted to understand how to search the Twitter API and used Allison Parrish’s in-class example of the “scoreboard” to assign the key word a number rather that retweeting the tweet or the person’s twitter name. I substituted key words to “fake news” vs “real news”. By doing this, the bot and tweets are pretty straightforward giving current tallys of the word usage of ‘REAL NEWS’ vs ‘FAKE NEWS’ with a direct link to the twitter homepages of the news sources to read the ‘REAL NEWS’.

SOURCE CODE:

Illustration Credits: HEADER: Rawpixel Ltd/iStock by Getty; ICON: filo/iStock by Getty

Piecing It Together / Wk 4 / Midterm Sketches

| A-M Gallero

For my midterm project, I was thinking of creating a mechanical piece of artwork inspired by Francis Picabia’s Dada Movement drawing. I want to reinterpret it in today’s fast paced information age of social media and the internet using wooden gears and pulleys in a 8″ x 10-7/8″ space. This would be an exercise for myself in making a physical and moving editorial illustration.

INSPIRATION: Francis Picabia’s drawing on the Dada Movement

• • • • •
Below are my initial sketches and in doing these, I realized that I need to research the topic more to map out the system. I also got a couple of books (Karakuri: How to Make Mechanical Paper Models That Move and Making Wooden: Gear Clocks) to help me understand how gears work and the workings of a clock. If all else fails with my initial idea, my fall back plan is to do to something more straightforward like a Karakuri piece or attempt wooden clock making).

SKETCH 1: Initial Idea

SKETCH 2

SKETCH 3

SKETCH 4

SKETCH 5: back-up plan

Twitter Bot / Wk 4 / Proposal for Final

| A-M Gallero

I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do for my Twitter Bot Final, but I do know that I want to explore the more visual tweets, like GIFs or an abstraction of an image, like Great Artist (@greatartbot) and soft landscapes (@softlandscapes).

After watching Christoph Niemann story on Netflix’s Abstract, I was thinking that my final project bot could be an art task reminder, to give an art exercise of the day, similar to Art Assignment Bot (@artassignbot). However in the tweeted instructions, I would have the bot pick a random everyday object, like “banana” or “coffee” for a person to use in their art exercise.

!

A post shared by Christoph Niemann (@abstractsunday) on

I’m also curious about viewing specific moments through hashtags and understanding how to use the Twitter APIs after seeing Thomas Dworzak, a Magnum photojournalist’s ‘instagram book collection‘ at the International Center of Photography’s Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change exhibit. Dworzak explored hashtags on instagram to capture his screen shots of the hashtag and created a series of books documenting that moment. Seeing and hearing the thought process behind this art piece, makes think about how we get so many different perspectives of a moment through social media and photos and how can we push the awareness further.

Avant-Garde Art / Wk 3 / The Fluxkit & George Maciunas

| A-M Gallero

The Fluxkit / George Maciunas


In my curiosity to examine George Maciunas’s design work and his systematic processes behind gathering the Fluxkit and his historical charts, “Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms,” I choose to research the ‘Fluxkits’ which he designed and assembled. Enclosed in a black attaché case and priced at $100, the Fluxkit was a collection of small art objects made by various Fluxus artists ranging from Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls, Ay-O’s Finger Box, Mieko Shiomi’s Endless Box, George Brecht’s Games and Puzzles, Nam June Paik’s film loops and others. These pieces were originally intended to be a part of the performance art pieces but since they were cheap to mass produce, it branched off into it’s own series of Fluxus Publishing. This Fluxus anthology of interactive boxes, games, film and a Fluxus journal, allowed the masses to explore the pieces on their own time, so as not to be reliant on “the authority of museums” who can “determine the value of art.” As multi-sensory art pieces, they were to “merge art and life towards an ideal of unfragmented enlightenment” and experience “concrete art” through everyday objects that we don’t think twice about and for what it “is.” Maciunas coined the name ‘Fluxus’ after seeing the word “flux” in a dictionary as a noun, a verb, adjective and a total of seventeen different meanings, which he used as a base for his 3-part Fluxus Manifesto of ‘PURGE’, ‘TIDE’ and ‘FUSE.’

 

RESEARCH SOURCES:
MOMA INTERACTIVES
MOMA
georgemaciunas.com/education
georgemaciunas.com/diagrams
georgemaciunas.com/learning machine
georgemaciunas.com/manifesto
medienkunstnetz
wikipedia
The Fluxus Experience by Hannah Higgins

Avant-Garde Art / Wk 2 / An Algorithmic Dérive

| A-M Gallero

“To be lost is to be fully present, to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery — REBECCA SOLNIT, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

I originally planned on following the Dada route of creating a chance collage with some elements inspired by Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Francis Picabia’s Dada Movement piece, but at the last minute I switched gears and decided to delve into the Letterist and Situationist International’s dérives that “sought to intervene in public process of “consuming” the “spectacle” of daily life... ” With the internet and social media, present day has even more chatter than the moving images and new cinema of the 50s and 60s. Part of the thought process for my algorithmic dérive is to go back to the mindset before smartphones and wifi, to be without the immediate responses of finding a destination quickly with Google Maps or sending a photo or a status update right away to all your friends and families, which in effect keeps you from being fully present or letting your mind wander to welcome happy accidents or chance encounters. I was also drawn to the psychogeography maps and the contemporary works of Sophie Calle’s photographs of re-familiarizing herself with the streets and people of Paris, as well as Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York City is very familiar to me, so the idea of getting lost and discovering new things about the city is something that I want to recapture and to also reveal inspiration for writing, photography and new meanings.

• • • • •

PROTOTYPE DESCRIPTION: An algorithmic dérive using a map of Manhattan, which is divided into 5″ x 7″ sections and shuffled together like a deck of cards.  The participant picks a card from the stack which will then decide the area of the city to explore.

THINGS TO BRING (and not bring):
– Paper and Pen
– An envelope with an address of a family member, friend, foe or yourself. Add a stamp to the envelope.
– Camera (Preferably film or instant camera. For more of a challenge, limit the number of photos you take to 24 exposures or less and don’t use the delete button)
*Note: Try not to use your smartphones, laptops and ipads. If you must take it with you, bury it deep within your bag.

DIRECTIONS:
1. Pick up a random card from the stack to reveal a piece of a New York City map.

2. Once you arrive at your destination, walk around and take note of the first word that you see or hear that captures your attention. Write down the first letter of that word.

3. Find a public space, like a park, bench or cafe, where you can sit for a bit.

4. Count the number of people holding their smartphones and write that number down on a piece of paper. If you can observe what each person is doing on their phone, write down whether they are sending an email, checking Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, looking at photos on their phone, looking at Google Maps, or are on a search engine?

5. Recall the first letter of the word that you wrote down. Take that first letter and think of a concept or idea that you can follow to help you explore your surroundings (Example: the letter “O” can be the word “Orange” ——> go around taking photos, drawing images or writing about or eating and tasting “orange” things that you see in your exploration of the area.)

6. Recall the number of people on smartphones that you saw when you sat down. That number will be the number of photos, drawings or lines that you need to write or capture on this journey. And if you were able to observe what a person was doing on their phone, reenact the action without a smartphone. (Example: replace the act of sending an email or text messaging with writing a letter or postcard to a friend and finding a mailbox to send it off; if you see someone on a search engine, keep your eyes out for a library).

7. At the end of the dérive, try to draw your path on the 5″ x 7″ map. Mark the spots on that map where you started and ended your journey, location of a mailbox if you mailed a letter, and anything that was significant to you.

DOCUMENTATION: By the end of the dérive, hopefully there will be a series of photographs, drawings or writing that transpired. Also by adding the path to the map, the participant can do a number of sections of the Manhattan map and piece them together in the sequential order of when it was done to create a brand new map or piece them together in it’s correct order for a personalized map. And adding a physical path on a map doesn’t necessarily have to be site specific, a mental psychogeography map can also be plotted instead.

INSPIRATION: Sophie Calle’s photographs in Paris

Twitter Bot / Wk 3 & 4 / A Bot that Responds

| A-M Gallero

MIDDAY TRAIN
The idea for “Midday Train” was inspired by the story behind Gladys Knight and the Pips’s “Midnight Train to Georgia“. The writer, Jim Weatherly originally titled the song “Midnight Plane to Houston” after a conversation with Farrah Fawcett (who was dating his friend, Lee Majors) about taking a midnight plane to Houston and visit family. It was later changed to “Midnight Train to Georgia” for Cissy Houston and was later sung by Gladys Knight. My original plan was to list of all the towns and cities in the United States and not just the major cities, so a person can imagine taking a train to all these places during the day, preferably during the 9-5 work hours. I eventually will gather that list of all the cities and towns, but for now I just used Darius Kazemi’s JSON file on US Cities.

As for adding the responsiveness to this bot, some parts work, but others don’t and I’m still in the midst of debugging my error codes like “ReferenceError: followerHandle is not defined”. I also intend to vary the statements more.

UPDATE:
With an extra week to work on this project and Allison’s ‘rollDice‘ in-class tutorial from last week and the simple chatbot example code on GitHub, I was able to randomize the initial tweets more and debug the code for better responsiveness when a user likes, direct messages and retweets. And I learned to use GitHub with a lot of help from a tutor, so the sample code for this bot is available online.

 

(Initial Tweet)

(Response after a user “likes” the twitter entry)

(Response after a user replies to a twitter entry)

(Response after a user follows the bot, but when I tried to change it to a different statement, like “You are welcome to come along,” the user name became “undefined” and the link to the user stopped working)

 

SOURCE CODE: