UCLA SCI|ART NanoLab

Today was a nice change from the past few days of running around UCLA. I think today was a lot about interactivity because the presenter in the morning talked about his interactive exhibit, my group presented an interactive idea for our midterm, and the last presentation was about another interactive exhibit.

I was pretty excited to see another field that combined art and science in addition to the ones we’ve already seen this week with the talk on architecture. I loved his wave exhibit concept because it looks awesome and is a very common thing that most people don’t realize is art. The idea of making ocean waves interactive was really interesting to me because I have always loved standing next to the ocean and I often take pictures of the waves leaving patterns from shells and my own feet that are stuck in the sand.

My feet

When John Carpenter was talking about the building that his firm designed in Shanghai with an eco-friendly roof, it reminded me of the roof of a science museum in San Fransisco called the California Academy of Sciences. It was recently redesigned and emphasizes very heavily on its roof that is covered in native Californian plants and helps the museum save energy. The plants absorb sunlight which cools the entire building down since the roof no longer gets very hot. Also, the plants are on a hill which directs cold air down towards the museum and reducing the amount of air-conditioning they have to use.

I was very happy with our presentation today because we had two ideas that we presented to everyone and they were extremely helpful in helping my group decide which idea to go with. Our main idea was to make paint that responded to pressure stimuli and would change color based on the amount of pressure applied and could turn any surface into a painting surface. Our back-up idea that we liked, but didn’t know where to go with it, was to make a device that can interpret brain waves to record dreams and memories and then project them onto a wall. We had kind of hit a wall with the technological aspect of the dream projector and were fascinated with the color-changing aspect of our initial idea. After getting a lot of questions on the dream recorder, I started feeling like the color changing paint was kind of a half-baked idea that wouldn’t actually work, or rather, there were a lot of kinks to work out. My group eventually decided to combine the two ideas and make a dream recorder that could project on a wall that would use some form of the pressure sensitive nano-paint.

I was looking through old emails and I found a really interesting clip a relative had sent me a while ago about a guy at MIT that developed something called the Sixth Sense, no it is not related to the Bruce Willis movie about seeing dead people. It is actually a portable projector pack that can sense the user’s fingers and uses any flat surface as a screen to perform a variety of tasks like organize pictures taken by the device, search the internet, and other things. I thought that it related to our dream projection concept and something we could incorporate in our project.

The last presentation about the social sqncr was actually very interesting, but I didn’t understand it very much. I understood that it was an interactive art exhibit that used a computer program to render small fish-like things based on the user’s movements that then swum around a screen interacting with other fish-like creatures created by others. I didn’t quite understand the social aspect of it and how it reflected the personality of the user, it seemed to me like they made the fish-thing based on their knowledge of the program and what they were supposed to be doing. Also, I didn’t notice the musical aspect of it until Nick mentioned it towards the end. It was a great idea to incorporate music into an art piece that uses science/technology, but it wasn’t really emphasized enough to be noticeable. I still can’t wait to go see it myself next week.

The social sqncr program