Art Made of Data

After discussing data visualizations and the intersections of art and technology/science, I began researching interdisciplinary artists and came across a Ted Talk by Nathalie Miebach, an artist who translates meteorological data into sculptures. I found her process to be super intriguing–Miebach translates the weather data into musical scores then translates the music into sculptures. In…

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the MoMA and was drawn to the typography featured in the Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented exhibit. Instead of arranging text in symmetric columns, designers of the New Typography movement organized text in asymmetrical blocks. Sans serif typography and intentional white space were emphasized in prints, brochures,…

Natalia Seth: A Digital Artist Using Social Media To Express Herself

This week’s Surrealist Photoshop Exercise reminded me of Natalia Seth, a digital artist and photographer who explores magical realism through her works. In her works, she is able to challenge people to think about things from new perspectives, with works ranging from quirky self portraits to informative works that bring attention to important societal issues….

The Surging Popularity of GIFs In Digital Culture

Upon creating my first GIF on Photoshop this week, I began thinking about how GIFs rose in popularity and changed how we communicate with one another. Personally, I often send GIFs to summarize complex feelings, like the anxious satisfaction felt after submitting an important project. GIFs allow us to simultaneously express our emotions through Internet…

The Accessible Icon Project

From listening to Susan Kare’s talk on iconography to applying what I learned about icon design to my Speculative Design Manual, a concept that didn’t cross my mind was activism. The Accessible Icon Project was launched to introduce icons that portray people with disabilities in a new light–dynamic and in motion–to provoke questions and discussion…

How Ikea Designs Its (In)famous Instruction Manuals

After watching Susan Kare’s talk on her career as an iconographer and starting my research for the Speculative Object Manual, I began thinking about how IKEA designs its manuals with the goal of simplifying assembly directions to their core essence–how each page captures a frame of the assembly process and maintains an unchanging point-of-view. However,…

The anamorphic sculptures by artist Michael Murphy

During class, while observing and critiquing each others’ Field Recording Gestalt studies in breakout rooms, a big point of discussion was how our brains perceive and interpret objects from different perspectives. Working on my next 3 field studies, I was reminded of Michael Murphy’s sculptures, spatial experiments that look abstract from certain angles and become…

What Is Ikebana? The Japanese Art That’s Making a Comeback

As I read Arranging Things, my mind immediately went to ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement that seeks to express emotion and communicate the inner qualities of flowers, bringing together nature and humanity. This article details how each flower stem is measured, cut, and angled precisely to achieve different effects—different emotions the ikebanist wishes…