Cocking's interest in the human body stems from her childhood training in modern dance. Growing up in
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.
Cocking worked in product design for four years, first at a startup, then at Dropbox. 'In the back of my mind, I always wanted to go back to grad school' to continue exploring computational art, she says. 'But I didn't really have the courage to do so.' 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
Through the school, Cocking heard that her current advisor,
A long-awaited return to computational art
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.
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. 'Within facial detection, you get 68 points of your face,' she says. 'Using those points, you can manipulate how the image looks to create more expressive portrait photography.' 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.
Through Photorythms, Cocking also adopted a practice of 'daily sketching' 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's proud of, she shares it with the world, sometimes through Instagram. But 'even if the code doesn't amount to anything, [I'm] sharpening [my] coding skills every day,' she says.
Now that she's reacclimated to intensive coding, 'I really want to dive into body tracking this summer,' Cocking says. She's currently in the ideation phase, brainstorming different ways to interactively combine body tracking and live performance. 'I am half-scared and half-excited,' she says.
To help generate ideas, she's 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,
Spreading love for coding and design
Throughout her circuitous and hard-working journey to computational art, 'I've never taken the position that I was in for granted,' 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 'there's so many people that I'm surrounded by who are intelligent and talented but don't have access to opportunities,' 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.
This past spring, Cocking worked with fellow
To get the workshop curriculum to
Cocking hopes to use this workshop as a stepping stone to someday establish 'a core center for kids in
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