Things I've seen recently that have made me want to drop everything and make something cool. Sometimes I did just that, but most of the time I was too busy and had to save the burst of inspiration for a rainy day.
Meow Wolf- Convergence Station
I was in Denver for a business trip and a coworker couldn't make it last minute. He offered up a free ticket to Meow Wolf, and I took it even though I had never heard of it. I was severely unprepared for what I walked into, but I loved it. An entire convention center was turned into a sprawling, interdimensional art experience.
The narrative was that several alien worlds/dimensions had collided with Earth at this point, Convergence Station. I strolled around in awe for a few hours, exploring all the installations that were hidden in nooks and crannies. There was an interactive component, where you had a card that you could use at ATMs to collect memories from residents of the alien worlds. Memories were supposed to be like currency, and they'd allow you to unlock the truth behind the dimensional collision. I had to leave before I was able to unlock the full story, but it was a cool way to inject storytelling and wayfinding into this unfamiliar space.
When I got off the elevator in the lobby, an employee said "welcome back to Earth." That honestly felt accurate.
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VR Painting and Animation
I attended a tech talk at work featuring Goro Fujita, an Art Director at Meta. He talked about virtual reality as a powerful tool for painting and animation through Quill, an app for Oculus VR. We watched him build a Snapchat AR face filter in realtime- he painted low-poly 3D antlers coming out of an avatar's head, with a birds nest in between. I've dabbled in 3D modeling with Blender and Maya in the past but was turned off by how heavy the UIs were. So I was blown away when I watched Goro paint complex 3D meshes with a few strokes of his VR controllers. He even animated the model so it looked like leaves were rustling in the breeze- Quill had tools to do that with just a few clicks. This is one case where I wanted to immediately stop working for the day and play around with painting in VR! Until I realized that Quill is only available for Oculus Rift, which I don't have.
I was also inspired by Goro's personal mission to make something with Quill every single day. (Which is why he made the Snapchat AR model look so easy!) Dedicating 30min each day to create something seems like a good habit, if I could make myself commit to that.
Future Arts Events
Future Arts is a group of creatives working with technology in Seattle. I volunteered at one of their recent events: AUGMENT Seattle. (Read more about that experience in my previous post.) They also helped curate an event called Forest for the Trees, during the Seattle Art Fair. An eight-story warehouse was converted into a group exhibition for local artists. I went without knowing what I was walking into (possibly a recurring theme for me) and spent the evening moving between floors to experience all the installations. There was a lot of chaotic energy in that building.
Moco Museum- Amsterdam
I took a solo trip to Amsterdam + Brussels this past Spring and didn't have a much of an itinerary. I ended up making a friend in my hostel and joining her on a visit to the Moco Musem. There were some cool infinity room exhibits, which I've wanted to see ever since I missed out on seeing Yayoi Kusama in D.C. in 2017. These exhibits remind me of augmented reality, because they're getting more out of a physical space than what actually exists.
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience
This exhibit is across the street from my office and I had been wanting to go for a while! I went on one of my days off, and holy sh*t. The majority of the exhibit was Van Gogh's paintings and facts about his life, but the last room was an immersive projection art experience. Everything was so seamless and was set to music- I wanted to immediately go home and learn about projection mapping.
I also learned that Van Gogh created ~2,000 paintings and drawings in 2 years, which averages around 1 piece of work every 2 days. Insane.
