Mimi Son

Mimi Son studied Interaction Design at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design since finished her MA degree of Interaction Design at the Landsdown Centre of Middlesex University in London. She has been teaching Interactive Storytelling at Kaywon School of Art and Design (Korea) for six years and has been working as an art director in her own studio, Kimchi and Chips, a Seoul based art and design studio she co-founded with Elliot Woods. They are known for discovering novel interactions involving people and media materials, discovering new technical and artistic paradigms.

Her artwork has been exhibited in Seoul, Tokyo, Barcelona and Arhus in Denmark. She is currently researching emotional and tangible interaction for future life and the effects of technology from a creative approach.

She is interested in exploring her surroundings with her eyes shining before creating something interactive and funny based on narrative snippets from her life. She loves to play with art and nature as well as technology, which all lead her into a creative world.



Workshop: Full Day - Digital Emulsion

This workshop invites participants to learn Digital Emulsion, a creative technique for projecting onto intricate physical geometry, superimposing digital and physical realities. We will explore new possibilities for drawing in the air, and ways to develop interesting volumetric canvases.

Participants will work in groups to conceive and build a model scene, using simple materials such as thread, paper and foam board, as well as Digital Emulsion materials using projectors, structured light scanning and volumetric shading techniques.

Participants can choose between engaging with graphic aspects (e.g. timeline animation, physical modeling), code aspects (GLSL shader code, openFrameworks) and mathematical aspects (multi-view geometry, volumetric rendering).

Requirements:
A working open source workflow is provided. Coding knowledge (GLSL, oF/C++) is not a requirement, but will be useful.

Participants will need a laptop (OSX, Windows) with a decent GPU (think MacBook Pro). Bring adapters to connect to a HDMI projector as required.

Extra skills, bits.
The following will come in useful to take the Digital Emulsion technique further:
- Skills with crafting intricate objects, e.g. using paper and thread
- Experience with openFrameworks multi-pass shader pipelines (or equivalent with another toolset)
- Interest in camera-projector systems (e.g. OpenCV calibration)
- If you can bring a Logitech C920 or C910 webcam, then that would save us from buying it
- If you can bring a Canon DSLR (that came out after 2009), then that would give you an advantage for the scanning (higher accuracy, speed of scanning).

Session: Drawing in the Air

Mimi Son and Elliot Woods talk about their ongoing wander between the realms of material and immaterial, creating speculative visual objects which poke at the unpredictable attributes of things when they are touched with technology. Without giving any fixed meaning to the act of 'drawing', they play with material, space and light, whilst developing new paradigms and theory for discussing emerging canvases. They study existing knowledge of drawing, material, space and motion, explore and investigate new technologies, and criticize the relationship between knowledge of reality and experience.