Yan Yan @ ITP

LED that blinks with your heartbeat

2008-08-28T20:59:00.001-07:00

Concept of Organic Wall Paper

2008-08-28T15:15:00.001-07:00

Fabricating Information

2008-08-28T15:10:00.001-07:00

3D Animation/Modelling

2008-08-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

Simulation of hybrid city

Max et Li Li

Drawing of an eye

Big Screen Final Documentation

2007-12-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

Concept:
[Painting with words] We are familiar with it when words starts to speak to us and tinkle our senses, but it does not seem enough, we would love to see them in movements.
Revisiting the idea of drawing in the space with words. Only this time, with more animation and a chance to traverse through the space. This project uses texts as if they are paint brushes. It creates a playful experiment with the audience, we scribble, we draw and we write, but are we more intrigued by the visuals or more captured with the words? Do they work well as a symphony altogether?

[Process]
I started with creating a 3D landscape made out of words and although it creates quite a nice effects on my local laptop, the camera movement didn't really work well across 6 screens with mpe library. Anyway, here I am posting the videos showing my work with the 3D virtual camera written with OpenGL.

After knowing that acquiring a smooth visual experience with OpenGL on the big screen was impossible, I came up with an alternative solution. This time, I started with a poem and express the meaning with both image and words, so the idea of making animation using texts was finalized. Here is some experiments with text showing in different scale.

After a storyboard was sketched up according to Tagore's poem, the sketch was made and this time without freezing problems or any of the sorts.

And this is the video of the screening at IAC.

Urban Memory

2007-12-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

Project Initiatives:

To create imagery that is familiar to city dwellers in New York. Playing back time in a random sequence triggers memory that we all have while we traverse the city and dissolves into the streets.

Below is some preliminary experiment with the projection materials. It seems that brighter projectors produces effective reflections while making the foreground image less clear.

Collage image result

2007-10-28T17:54:00.001-07:00

This project started with a one day long observation of the crowds at astor place, the conjunction of multi-way pedestrain crossing. Video was setup from different angles of the site, and some mundane activities are captured.

Click To Play

During the course of the observation, I found myself indulged in the act of observing, finding people who are daydreaming in the city, finding people who are lost, finding people who are just busy crossing the road, as mundane as it may seem. What if we all take the moment to observe each other, when the eyesight crosses, what might happen? On that day, I was hiding behind a camera, recording, what if I could give the pleasure of observing to other people? This is the initiative of the project.

I have also looked at the photo streams posted on flickr. The imagery created was amazing. It was a life recording of the people, of the place. What has happened there, day and night, rainfall or sunshine was so incidental and beautiful.

I decided to build a monument for the place, and for the pedestrains who are just passing by, giving them the opportunity to stay a little longer, project their observation onto the screen, and be seen by other people who are nearby.

Week7- Your Mug

2007-10-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

Inspired by objects embraced by our body.
Design for our body. Emotional Design
everyone has the desire to have their personal shape imprinted, casted

IMPRINTS = MEMORY
in the old days, people also have their baby's face casted, if they died in their early age. Hence, I came up with the idea of a mug which has our personal finger prints. Basically pressure maps from the finger over time on a mug is casted into a mug. I decided to make this using rapid prototyping technology. This is a model from Maya.

Work in Progress

2007-10-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

Portrait of Strokes

2007-10-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

< Portrait of Strokes >

Initiatives:

What is a character? Is character a form recognized by human as familiar object that resembles us or can it be something else? We asked ourselves these questions when we started the project. We set out to investigate the very basic forms, such as the sound made while writing, to ask the question what is the most reduced form that can be recognized as a character. Does it have to be expressive? Does generative forms help?

Description

< Portrait of strokes > is a project where we attempt to make aural multi-layered compositions using pen strokes as they are drawn on paper. Two people sketchglyphs and in the process record the sound the marker/pen makes using a microphone. The sound made by drawing each of the glyphs turns into an individual sound sample which we then layer with other previous glyph samples.

Each sampling of the glygh can be pretty distinctive through its rythm, whether its a dot drawn repeatedly, or a curev drawn swiftly across the paper. By layering up the repeated samples, we are able to get a jazz-like rythmic composition.

We were interested in constructing something larger through repetition of smaller discrete elements. To us, doing this illustrated the idea of building a character- a process that involves iterations in form of editing, removal and addition of elements that eventually give characteristics (make the character). The initial idea was to explore how hand drawn typographical characters/alphabets translate to unique sounds and compositions. We expanded this idea to further include abstract shapes and strokes because it gave us the freedom to explore and construct a larger gamut of sounds and glyphs.

Throughout the project we found it hard to locate the 'character' of a piece. The piece was a whole was somewhat non-deterministic through performance. Each recording we experimented with have very different qualities. So it will be helpful to define shapes or elements reflect a certain sound quality that can be used in future composition.

What we consider as an interesting residue were the left over pen drawings- glyphs/strokes. We weren't sure what to do with sheets of paper. They did represent the process in discrete steps and served as manuscript of the composition/performance. We feel these could have been a much more important part of the performance if we had used a larger surface (like a whiteboard) to draw.

Feedback from Class Critique:

- This was an interesting framework for further exploring gestures, drawings and sound.
- Interesting because our building blocks were natural sounds of the stroke and not computationally synthesized sounds

- It will be helpful to define more shapes, elements or drawings that reflect a certain sound quality, which can be used in future composition. Instead of making the composition abstract, we could consider giving performance that actually portrays a particular sound: ie: raining, birds in the forest.

Reading on OpenSource

2007-10-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

The literacy of the word OpenSource emerges from software development world, “The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source” talked about how well the OpenSource model fit in the bussiness world. It is beneficial in the bussiness world that when non-differentiating intellectual knowledge is shared, we avoid re-inventing the wheels and risk and investment was reduced to the least compared to the retailed model. And efforts could be concentrated onto the differentiating part of the bussiness, which could provide customer with tailored service.

And now we see OpenSource is inevitably penetrating the design world. It was discussed in class the fashion products are being opensourced to the mass through stores like H&M the emerging modular electronics - like Lilipad Arduino made readily available to designers and developers. These activities foster a community for the technology and ideas that are being invented. The profit center has moved on from the direct technology/idea/products to the ability to communicate and the expertised consultancy. With the technology and product made available in the hands of a larger community, we benefit from the network effect, or the rippling effect of greater collaboration.

Network

2007-10-06T08:52:00.000-07:00

Big Screen II

2007-10-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

These are the videos of my program running on eclipse in a single screen mode. Strokes are generated in different directions to mimick the calligraphy effects. Every time a different pattern is generated.

Big Screen Progress

2007-10-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

My initial idea was to show the relationships among human writing, scribbling, drawing and how the quality of different medium are correlated to each other. Here is a presentation of my initial proposal and some visuals are shown here.

Exploded Comic

2007-10-01T01:01:00.000-07:00

Concept

We decided to use the folding of paper to tell stories earlier on in our experiments. Rob and I started playing with origami and found this basic origami shape quite appealing for our purpose to develope a narrative system of non-linear story-telling. These mini-sculpture reflects the structure of the story, i.e: one has to lift up the modules in particular order to reveal alternative outcomes to the story. The story could be present in linear style, with several alternative endings or in a loop.

We also found in our experiment that stories can be invented by reordering the drawings, so it could be used as a toy to tell stories between kids. Here are some of the drawings I made for telling the Aesop story "The crow and the fox".

And Rob developed another story on "The lion and the mouse". We had a lot of fun drawing and building the mini-scrulpture. Printing became a big technical problem, as we need to figure out the rotation of the drawing to fulfill a nice image when the viewer's looking at it when it's folded up.

We expect this to be playful and we have spin-off several ideas to take this further into an animation production and a toy project. Thoughts are given to alternative material, such as laser-cutted plastics and embed connectors between the modules etc. Looking forward to see the critiques.

Softness of Things III - Connector

2007-09-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

My idea is to connect people in close relationships who are far apart. Sometimes making connections to strangers are easy, but making real connections to who we really cared about is hard, it's especially difficult to synchronize with each other's daily activity when you can't see each other often. Intead of talking on the phone or chatting online while the other person's tired with perhaps 12 hours time difference, we just need to signal that we really care about each other.

This is basically what I want to express in this connector project. In the above images, I have demoed using a physical soft object to be the media (connector). When the heart is placed in both locations, some communciation protocal is established and maybe he can make a sound, blink one eye or make a hug. My goal this week is to setup circuits inside a soft object such as this. The fabric switch can be useful.

Another prototype I have in mind is for people in different location to coordinate and make drawings together, invoving a line and two nodes. The system will need to find a way to synchronize the move and when the line joins two nodes, it will give a song. The game could last for 5 mins or even a few days basically you can walk away from it and come back and continue. It just to symbolize the magic moment of connecting with each other when the drawing is made.

A video of experiment with magnet

Memory Map

2007-09-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

Our assignment was to create a memory map.

I decided to based the theme on my grandfather's past life, which is a piece of memory that's been lingering around lately. There are a lot of objects and images floating through my memory, like the casset that I repaired for him to listen to his favourite chinese opera, that cane he uses, and the fake teeth that he denied using, and brief conversations that we have encountered, but when I started to draw it on paper, it seems like it's not like an easy-to-interpretate map, more like an excerpt from a comic book, I'd say. All the meaning and my emotions for him was somehow lost in "translation".

But the idea of writing about him starts to lighten me up, I started writing about him in my native language, then I used images to depict what happened in the story, giving readers some clues to hold onto.

The reaction from the class was quite interesting, when people starts to frowned upon the piece and puzzled at what I was trying to say in the foreign language, they also try to figure it out from the little symbols I've made. Some people get the it, they can tell that I am telling a story about my grandpa's past life but more people get frustrated figuring out what was written in the original text. I am glad to see the efforts people put in to read the map, it is like what I was feeling when trying to pull strings together to describe my grandfather.

Throughout the process, I was struck by the difficulty to actually depict the memory map, to trace what I was thinking about him and to map that feeling onto paper and have others sense the feeling, with the constraints of just paper and pen. I have had some positive feedback and wonder if I would do this any differently. I would try to poke at this subject later as I always wanted to do a piece about him. This memory map is definatlely helpful in getting one step further.

Tactile Detector Prototype

2007-09-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

I intend to investigate sense of touch as a starting point of my project.
To build a detector for tactile, I need portable battery and microchips light/small enough to be held by hand. The flowing components is for considerations:

CR2032 battery To order

CR2032 battery holder

Conductive Fabric and threadlessemf

Solution for making fabric switch http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/diy/diy_e_sewing.html
Solution for sewing togher lithium battery. http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/diy/diy_e_sewing_old.html

Assignment One - Paper Flower

2007-09-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

Other possible things to do with it: these wires provide flexibility to shape the structure, also can think of them as conductors, maybe I can make the petals to move using a servo connected to the wires ? That could make the whole thing into an interactive system. But I'm not sure at this point, as it looks like as I'm changing through different ideas, it lost its aesthetics quite a lot.