news

Our Exquisite City

2012-04-07T12:33:48Z

Recently I volunteered to run an art project for my daughter's Kindergarten class as part of a fund-raising event where the piece will be auctioned. What an experience! Over the course of two in class visits, a take home exercise and additional in class exercise we explored surrealism and urbanism and collaboration. The 27 students in the Coonley Options Kindergarten class used "Exquisite Corpse" techniques to illustrate the city of their wildest imagination.

"Our Exquisite City" close-up

To begin I gave them a presentation on the Surrealists and the history of their games, notably the “cadavre exquis” or "Exquisite Corpse" group drawing excercise. Then we looked at the city from the sky via google in a way Charles and Ray would love, followed by a practice round of corpse making at each table. The afternoon's activities laid the foundation for the take home.

Starting with the street grid of an interesting section of San Francisco , I generated vector lines, and a 7x4 grid to subtract out all but 1/4" margins from the street lines. This generated the point-of-departure for the children to use to draw their section of the city, while maintaining at least a directive sense of continuity and connectivity. Each square a masterpiece unto itself, the 27 student drawings and the collection of signatures form a beautiful rendition of the city of their dreams.

"Our Exquisite City" pencil drawing by student

Upon completion of the pencil drawings I scanned each drawing and converted the pencil lines to vector art. On a second visit to the classroom I demonstrated to the students how to use a digital painting program to paint the vectorized version of their pencil drawings. As you might imagine an edeavor of this craziness magnitude was a bit optimistic. Without mice on the laptops it was a bit challenging. Many were succesful ... unfortunately many were not. To remedy the painting learning curve, we colored the vector drawings with a reduced color palatte of markers.

"Our Exquisite City" colored drawing by student

The result was imho wildly succesful. The variety of the sections, changes from plan to elevation, and much more are really enjoyable. After combining the original vectorized art, over the top of a slightly desaturated version of the colored drawings, each student drawing was printed on pre-stretched 6"x6" canvas. The finished piece being a grid of 28 canvases with one being used for signatures.

"Our Exquisite City" illustrations together

"Our Exquisite City Combined"

Help Wanted

2012-01-23T16:53:17Z

wanted: responsible + professional, programmer for tool development project.

context:

Space to Play consulting is creating tools to develop semanticaly rich, topologically aware, immersive digital city models and is looking for part time development/programming assistance. Work can begin immediately and will span through march with potential for additional contracts to follow succesful completion

skillset:

must be an effective programmer in some significant object oriented programming environment, preferably with a degree in CS, software engineering or related discipline, Mature students with demonstrable abilities are encouraged as well

Ideal candidate would have experience working with any of the following technolgoies:

C++
3ds max SDK
FBX import/export
Geo-spatial data/media
PostgreSQL
database integration
Unity 3d
must feel comfortable with basic file i/o, data parsing,

# Hours and compensation dependent on qualifications

Please send information to Thomas Kearns thomas [at] simocc [dot] com

The OHP has left the building

2011-08-31T23:06:35Z

I sit here on the loading dock at Adams and Halsted, on top of the last remaining articles of the de-installation of the Hellenic Museum's Oral History Project. Somewhat bittersweet, the new home is massively better, though the new form the exhibit will take due to bad planning by the architect of the new building is not as exciting. Nonetheless keep an eye out for pics from the re-installation in the coming weeks. Much simpler, quick to install, and fits the space nicely. Grand opening of the new museum at Halsted and Van Buren, Sep 21

mentoring @ MSI App Challenge

2011-08-20T21:20:00Z

This saturday is my second and final day of mentoring for the Museum of Science and Industry High School App Challenge. With colleagues from Google, Motorola, + DePaul, we are helping area highschool students design and develop protoypical mobile applications, for iOS + Android. Objective of the apps are to get kids outside, active and more healthy. Hope they have been working hard, excited to see what they have!