Larger than life
larger than life Heading link
Three UIC faculty members, including Professor Daria Tsoupikova and Assistant Professor Fabio Mirandafrom UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, and the School of Design’s Professor Sharon Oiga, had their work displayed in a larger-than-life public art installation downtown.
Chicagoans and visitors enjoyed Chicago Design Through the Decades, a project credited to Tsoupikova, Oiga, and Guy Villa Jr. of Columbia College Chicago, from the Chicago Riverwalk at the end of 2022.
The display was part of Art on theMART, a public art project that features moving, digital art across the façade of theMART, a two-block long 1930s building along Chicago’s Riverwalk. It is the largest permanent digital art projection in the world, with a 2.5-acre canvas.
Images were created by 24, 30,000-lumen projectors and beamed across the river onto the building façade. The images are projected via 3-channel 3D architectural mapping and then blended to create a seamless image.
Chicago Design Through the Decades looked at the last hundred years of the history of Chicago design and is based on the collection of the Chicago Design Archive, a permanent online record of design in the city. The archive currently holds thousands of examples of work from over 1,100 Chicago designers, including posters, books, and other publications, with works from the 1820s to the present day.
“What we intended through the project is the human-centered approach, how the key characters and depictions of characters changed throughout the decades,” Tsoupikova said. “For the last decade, the 2020s, we used machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to design animated renderings.”
Miranda provided the algorithms used in creating the final image, which is a tribute to Chicago as the home of neural networks. In 1943 Warren McCulloch, a neuroscientist at UIC, and Walter Pitts, a University of Chicago logician, proposed the first mathematical model of neural network, which is the foundation of contemporary machine learning.
“We developed the project to promote Chicago design as art, and Chicago the city as the center of modern design,” Tsoupikova said. “It’s really exciting, it’s a collaboration between design and computer science.”
Tsoupikova said the project also signifies the future for CS + Design students. The major debuted in fall of 2022 and UIC is the only public university that offers the undergraduate degree.