The Real Beauty Industry

Sight, sound, motion, and more beauty than your beholder eyes can handle.

The notion of beauty is among the most subjective, abstract concepts out there. (Despite what the cookie-cutter “beauty industry” may tell us.) But every once in a while, something comes by that is so fundamentally sublime in concept, execution and emotional charge that it’s hard to contest its beauty.

Case in point: Advanced Beauty, an ongoing exploration of digital art influenced by sound. A collaborative project between artists, programmers, musicians, architects and animators, Advanced Beauty offers a wonderland of sight and sound through a series of audio-reactive “video sound sculptures,” creating a moving sensory experience in what’s become known as sisomo — the powerful intersection of sight, sound and motion.

And while the work by all the artists collaborating on the project is truly phenomenal, we particularly dig Fernando Sarmiento from Argentinian animation and character design get-up Pepper Melon (whom you may recall from the critically acclaimed Mama Lucchetti TV spot that made the creative rounds last month) and their fascinating sound sculpture for Advanced Beauty.

Another brilliant, could-be-a-bit-over-our-head-but-fantastic-nonetheless effort: Enerugii, a responsive, generative sound sculpture by Karsten Schmidt of London-based design studio PostSpectacular — a hybrid idea merging volumetric modeling with marker shapes that only respond to certain user-defined dynamics to produce a truly hypnotic piece that sweeps you up with sound, tosses you into a sea of shape and color, and leaves you floating in the fluidity of the moment.

Go ahead, explore the artists for yourself. And check out the Advanced Beauty podcast on iTunes, spotlighting some of the most compelling works from the project.

Thanks, Michal

Geek Mondays: Dating Data Art

Why 1.7 million people yearn to have their balloons popped every day and what the MoMA has to do with matchmaking.

Jonathan Harris, of We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt fame, is one of our all-time favorite data artists working in what we like to call “information aesthetics.” His ability to take pure information and transform it into pure visual magic is the epitome of modern concept art. And his last project is nothing short of that.

I Want You To Want Me explores our quest for love in the now mainstream world of online dating, which draws over 1.7 million web romantics every day. The project, commissioned by the MoMA, dissects the personal dating profiles, which themselves are meticulously curated presentations of how we’d like the world to see us and what we’re looking to find in it.

The interactive installation is displayed on a 56″ high-resolution touch screen hung vertically on the wall of a dark room. Visitors can control the weather on a digital sky, where hundreds of balloons float. Each represents a single dating profile and is coded for gender and age by color (blue=male, pink=female) and brightness (bright=younger, dark=older). Inside each balloon is one of 500 video silhouettes, showing a solitary person engaged in a particular activity listed in their dating profile — yoga, air guitar, jumping jacks, you name it. Viewers can move the balloons inside the sky at different speeds, activate thought bubbles for the people trapped inside them, and even pop them.

The installation pulls data every few hours from dating profiles all over the world. Each movement highlights a different facet of online dating: Who I Am explores the revelation of the self, Taglines takes the taglines of people’s profiles and puts them in a DNA-like helix symbolic of human identity, Matchmaker offers a “resolution” of sorts by algorithmically matching people based on data from their online profiles, and Breakdowns offers insight into larger population trends from the world of online dating.

The project aims to offer us a glimplse of ourselves as we peep into the lives of others — a quest for self in the quest for love. It was installed at the MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

It is part of the brilliant, brilliant Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition curated by the ever-amazing Paola Antonelli.

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