Learn from artists

At Multi-Mania I’ve seen the presentations of two inspiring “technology artists”.

The first was Joshua Davis, joshuadavis.com,a New York based artist, designer, and technologist producing both public and private work for companies, collectors, and institutions. Currently residing at Code and Theory, codeandtheory.com as creative director of physical installations.

Apparently he and I have one thing in common. We started using Flash at about the same time. But I did those annoying “skip intro” stuff with it, while he was producing wonderful random art with it.

What makes his work even more interesting is that he stepped away from Flash some time ago (as even Adobe doesn’t know what the future of it is) and restarted his artistic development in JavaScript and is working on an open-source framework (Hype) which will allow him to generate the same - but other - art.

An other interesting session was from Jan De Coster: after starting a deep dive into the virtual world in the mid 90?s, in more recent years, Jan has re-emerged into the physical world, with online installations that you can actually feel, smell and experience.

He talked about his work of creating a robot for a commercial project for Delhaize. The robot on that website is not a 3D animation, but video footage taken with the robot made by Jan. The goal was to create a robot with a personality from parts of kitchen devices, for instance his body is the base of a blender.

Why is an artist capable of creating a robot which you instantly like and feel connected too, while engineers are struggling with this for decades? Just compare some images …

Do we really need humanoid, but creepy robots who will cooperate with us in the future? Don’t we rather interact with a thing that has feelings, or can pretend it has, even when it is a bit “clumsy”?

Visit his website for this and a lot of other cool projects!