Author: Rachel Yang | MIT News correspondent<\/p>\n
Chelsi Cocking is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the human body with the help of computers. For her work, she develops sophisticated software to use as her artistic tools, including facial detection techniques, body tracking software, and machine learning algorithms.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Cocking\u2019s interest in the human body stems from her childhood training in modern dance. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, she equally loved the arts and sciences, refusing to pick one over the other. For college, \u201cI really wanted to find a way to do both, but it was hard,\u201d she says. \u201cLuckily, through my older brother, I found [the field of] computational media at Georgia Tech.\u201d There, she learned to develop technology for computer-based media, such as animation and graphics.<\/p>\n
In her final year of undergrad, Cocking took a studio class where she worked with two other students on a dance performance piece. Together, they tracked the movements of three local dancers and projected visualizations of these movements in real-time. Cocking quickly fell in love with this medium of computational art. But before she could really explore it, she graduated and left to start a full-time job in product design that she had already lined up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cocking worked in product design for four years, first at a startup, then at Dropbox. \u201cIn the back of my mind, I always wanted to go back to grad school\u201d to continue exploring computational art, she says. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t really have the courage to do so.\u201d When the pandemic hit and everything moved online, she saw an opportunity to chase her dreams. With encouragement from her family, she sought out online courses at the School for Poetic Computation, while still keeping her day job. As soon as she started, everything clicked: \u201cThis is what I want to do,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Through the school, Cocking heard that her current advisor, Zach Lieberman, an adjunct associate professor in the Media Lab, had an opening in his research group, the Future Sketches group. Now, she spends each day exploring new ideas for making art through computation. \u201cFun is enough justification for my research,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
A long-awaited return to computational art<\/strong><\/p>\n When Cocking first joined the Future Sketches group last fall, she was filled with ideas and armed with strong design skills, which she had developed as a product designer. But she had also been on a four-year hiatus from full-time coding and needed to get back in shape. After consulting with Lieberman, she set out on a project where she could ramp up her coding skills while still exploring her interests in the human body.<\/p>\n For this project, Cocking delved into a new medium: photography. In a series of images entitled Photorythms, she took photographic portraits of people and manipulated them using techniques from facial detection. \u201cWithin facial detection, you get 68 points of your face,\u201d she says. \u201cUsing those points, you can manipulate how the image looks to create more expressive portrait photography.\u201d Many of her images slice portraits using a particular shape, such as concentric rings or vertical stripes, and reassemble them in different configurations, reminiscent of cubism.<\/p>\n Through Photorythms, Cocking also adopted a practice of \u201cdaily sketching\u201d from her advisor, where she develops new code every day to generate a new piece of art. If the resulting work turns out to be something she\u2019s proud of, she shares it with the world, sometimes through Instagram. But \u201ceven if the code doesn\u2019t amount to anything, [I\u2019m] sharpening [my] coding skills every day,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Now that she\u2019s reacclimated to intensive coding, \u201cI really want to dive into body tracking this summer,\u201d Cocking says. She\u2019s currently in the ideation phase, brainstorming different ways to interactively combine body tracking and live performance. \u201cI am half-scared and half-excited,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n To help generate ideas, she\u2019s participating in an intensive five-day workshop in early July that will bring together artists interested in computational art for dance. Cocking plans to attend the workshop with her best friend from college, Raianna Brown, who\u2019s a dancer. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be there for a week in Chatham [UK], just playing around with choreography and code,\u201d she says. \u201cHopefully that can spark new ideas and new relationships\u201d for future collaborations.<\/p>\n Spreading love for coding and design<\/strong><\/p>\n Throughout her circuitous and hard-working journey to computational art, \u201cI\u2019ve never taken the position that I was in for granted,\u201d Cocking says. She recognizes the value of having access to opportunities from her own experience, with a self-sustaining cycle of access in one place opening doors for her in another place. But \u201cthere\u2019s so many people that I\u2019m surrounded by who are intelligent and talented but don\u2019t have access to opportunities,\u201d especially in computer science and design, she says. Because of this, since college, Cocking has devoted some of her time to providing access to these fields to children and young professionals from underrepresented backgrounds.<\/p>\n This past spring, Cocking worked with fellow Media Lab student Cecil\u00e9 Sadler to develop a workshop for introducing kids to coding concepts in a fun way. The two partners taught the workshop in parallel at different places in May and June: Sadler taught a series in Cambridge in collaboration with blackyard, a grassroots organization centering Black, Indigenous, and POC youth, while Cocking returned to her home country of Jamaica and taught at the Freedom Skatepark youth center near Kingston.<\/p>\n To get the workshop curriculum to Jamaica, Cocking reached out to her friend Rica G., who teaches computer science at the Freedom Skatepark youth center. Together, they co-taught the curriculum over several weeks. \u201cI was so nervous [the kids] would just walk out,\u201d Cocking says. \u201cBut they actually liked it!\u201d<\/p>\n Cocking hopes to use this workshop as a stepping stone to someday establish \u201ca core center for kids in Jamaica to explore creative coding or computational art,\u201d she says. \u201cHopefully people will see coding as a tool for creation and expression without feeling intimidated, and use it to make the world a little weirder.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"