Creative industries experts recognise exceptional student work at the UAL Creative Computing Institute Summer Festival
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This year’s Creative Computing Institute Summer Festival saw students from BSc Creative Computing, UAL Diploma in Creative Computing and UAL Diploma in Apple Development courses showcase their projects, uniting critical perspectives, computational skill and creative thinking.
For the first time, this year an invited panel of experts from across the creative industries met to tour the exhibition and award projects that demonstrated exceptional skill, creativity and innovation.
Student work was assessed against 6 awarding categories:
- Expanded Interface Award: Students awarded in this category explored novel forms of interface and interaction that expand how we mediate, manipulate, or engage with computational systems.
- Innovative Materials Award: Students awarded in this category demonstrated creativity in their use of materials. They showcased unique approaches to materiality, redefining the ways in which we use and conceive of the 'stuff’ of computing practice.
- Storytellers Award: Students awarded in this category crafted engaging narratives through immersive and innovative techniques. This award celebrates works that communicate complex problems to a wide range of audiences, inspire change, and challenge perceptions through computational technologies.
- Immersive Experiences Award: Students awarded in this category produced works that leverage computation within artistic, design and architectural contexts to create interactive and immersive experiences.
- Critical Perspectives Award: Projects awarded in this category offered insightful and thought-provoking viewpoints on contemporary que stions, challenging norms, and encouraging critical thinking.
- Dean’s Award: Projects awarded in this category exemplified the kind of work CCI students should aspire to produce and be acquired for CCI's collection.
Winners:
Expanded Interface Award: Diana Galindo, Debris Lore
Artist’s statement: Debris Lore is a smartphone app that uses machine learning and computer vision technologies to register and document the quantity and types of rubbish found on beaches. This app runs an object detection model using smartphone hardware to assist researchers and volunteers in classifying different types of waste during beach cleanup campaigns in citizen science-led projects.
Awarded by: Paul Kettle, Director/Co-Founder, Applied Works
Innovative Materials Award: Gus Binnersley, Kay Chapman, Rebecca De Las Casas, Talking to Strangers
Artists’ statement: Talking to Strangers explores early theories of language development and symbiotic interspecies communication. Inspired by the work of linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, this game of telephone explores his 'bow-wow' theory, which suggests that the beginnings of language involve progenitors mimicking sounds in their natural environment.
Awarded by: Matt Webb, Founder, Acts Not Facts
Storytellers Award: Rysia Anna Kaczmar, Matriotism
Artist’s statement: The simple phenomenon of doilies being put on top of old CRT TVs by older people when broadcasting became common around the '60s—'80s (much later in Eastern Bloc, hence the large bracket) is fascinating. Though in its nature, it served a simple decorative purpose, it can be viewed as the juxtaposition of two notions: the culture of making and passive receiving. A TV topped with a doily seems to embody a particular historical moment that cojoins the tradition with mass media. I've made those two objects become one interactive installation in hopes of sparking interest in the fading notions of tradition and making.
Awarded by: Nic Mulvaney, Director Applied Technologies, Normally
Immersive Experiences Award: Bailey Foot, Shauna Wright, Dulant Pang, Check Out Simulator
Artists’ statement: Combining a facial expression API with the task of inputting strings of 'product' numbers we allow the user to have a takeaway receipt of the robot's judgement of their ability in this supermarket till trial shift/recruitment simulator, wherein the product sold is the user as a human customer service worker. The inputs involve a camera to detect facial expressions (with anger/disgust, sadness, and confusion being identified as negative emotions) and a keypad for inputting numbers, with the outputs being audios of typical angry customer sayings or comments on the users' expressions, and the receipt printer.
Awarded by: Zara Kerwood, Senior Director of Creative Technology, George P. Johnson Experience Marketing
Critical Perspectives Award: Ondrej Zika, The Road Imperfection Finder
Artist’s statement: The Road Imperfection Finder is an investigative research project utilising the power of machine learning to explore how wealth distribution affects the quality of roads in two villages (Jaywick and Sunningdale) with large income disparities.
Awarded by: Ivo Vos, Design Director, Normally
Dean’s Award: Ivan Burdon, Post Artificial Realism
Artist’s statement: This showcase presents a body of work exploring cultural transmission, in the post-Guttenberg age - Through the lens of representations of Neo-Classical Sculpture made using A.I., specifically Stable Diffusion, in combination with Photo Etching - Highlighting distortions made by both man and process within art making and therefore the cultural landscape. The subject of this series being derived from Post-Artificial Realism or, Dialectical Immaterialism - A term coined by Burdon to describe a contemporary strain of art making, focused around the ideas of The Modernist Lineage in The Information Era.
Awarded by: Lawrence Zeegen, Interim Director of UAL Creative Computing Institute