Connor Kirk - designer, fabricationist
Software ↓
Fusion 360, SketchUp, Blender, Illustrator, Affinity Designer, After Effects, Slic3r, Cura, etc.
Tools ↓
3D Printing(FDM, SLA, SLS, etc.)、Laser Cutting、CNC Machining、Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc.
PHYSICAL DESIGN
Paper Radio Tower (2018)
Collaboration with VOU & Frequency Punch Crew. Designed in Fusion 360, made with laser cutter.
VOU FM Radio Tower (2018)
Collaboration with VOU & Frequency Punch Crew. Designed in Fusion 360, made with laser cutter, 3D printer, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi.
sampler version 1 through 3
v1 (feb. 2017)
v2 (jul. 2017)
v3 (jan. 2018)
v3 shell
WOODS (2017)
山下耕平 個展 2017年11月～12月 TEZUKAYAMA GALLERY 大阪
For this project I worked with Kohei Yamashita to design and build motorized components for two of his most important works. Tools used include 3D printing, laser cutting, stepper motors, Arduino, and more.
Iguana Tokyo Prologue (2018)
「行為の編纂」 トーキョーアーツアンドスペース レジデンス 2018 成果発表展
I worked with Berlin-based Turkish film director Kaan Mujdeci and programmer Zack Aikman to design and build a machine which is meant to represent the homes of humans 3,000 years in the future. Tools used include 3D printing, laser cutting, stepper motors, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, OLED screens, molded glass, woodworking, and more.
Kyoto Univ. 超交流会 Booth for Makers Boot Camp
NTT Kumamoto Booth for Makers Boot Camp (2018)
The booth is made using these MDF modular joints, which take about 60 seconds to make and cost only a few cents.
KMG Reform Layouts
I designed and created these diagrams for a remodeling project at the makerspace I managed. The diagrams were given to a construction company which completed the work.
企画／direction
HTC Vive 体験展示 with Kyoto VR ＠MTRL KYOTO 2016年5月
I directed a promotional campaign coinciding with the release of the HTC Vive. The campaign was featured in one of Japan’s biggest online media outlets, TABI LABO, and attracted several hundreds of people who came to try this technology for the first time.
Gojo Palace Short Film Screening [September 2016]
Gojo Palace was something I planned and put together mostly by myself. The night featured screenings of four short films made by local filmmakers whom I invited to participate. Each screening was followed by an interview and a Q&A session. I worked with a local illustrator to create the logo which went through several iterations before we settled on the final version.
This was an interesting short documentary about a Noh theater production about the ghost of Elvis.
Talking with DP Tsuyoshi Ishihara.
Director Alan Algee.
I designed this commemorative flyer which everyone who came to the screening got to take home. The empty square on the bottom left is where I had the illustrator who designed the logo put her signature.
Laser Cutter Rubber Band Gun Workshop for Kids w/ Sauna no Umeyu [July 2016]
As part of the neighborhood summer festival, I planned a rubber band gun building workshop for kids which we held in front of Sauna no Umeyu, a local public bath house. The (semi and fully automatic) rubber bands guns were designed by me and all of the parts were cut out of plywood and MDF on the laser cutter.
This kid put his gun together in record time.
Kyoto Indie Meetup [April 2016 - April 2017]
Kyoto Indie Meetup is a monthly gathering of independent game developers to show the games they're working on, drink beer, eat pizza, and hang out. I was involved in the organization and promotion of the event.
After the presentations everyone gets a chance to actually play the in-development games that were shown.
Developers from at least ten different countries all drinking and playing games together. Some are freelancers, other work for local indie developers like Q-Games, Vitei, and 17bit. Occasionally we even get some ex-Nintendo employees!
Kyoto VR / Nuit Blanche Art Festival Satellite Event @ MTRL [October 2016]
In August of last year the director of the Nuit Blanche Art Festival, a modern art festival organized by the French Institute in Kyoto, came to me and asked if I'd like to co-produce an exhibition for their upcoming festival in October. I decided to rope in the Kyoto VR guys who were doing some interesting stuff using a 3D scanning process called photogrammetry to execute my idea of a VR exhibition of 3D scanned Japanese gardens designed by Shigemori Mirei, a gardener who designed some of Kyoto's most famous gardens. While I played more of a behind-the-scenes role, the Kyoto VR guys worked very hard to finish their models before the festival, and the results were pretty amazing. I also organized a panel discussion with the Kyoto VR team and several other creators who were involved in this project.
People were lining up to experience Kyoto VR's highly detailed 3D scans of Japanese gardens on the Oculus Rift.
The Kyoto VR team talking about the technical process that went in to creating their 3D scanned models.
The audience brought up some tough and concrete questions like, "How are you going to turn this into a viable business model?"
Their 3D models really are pretty astonishingly detailed though.
I 3D printed a few of the models they created and we displayed those along with their VR exhibition.
Indie Label Showcase [January 2017]
Indie Label Showcase is an idea I had around October of last year to create an event series showcasing small independent labels from both Japan and abroad, the aim being to build interest in the independent music scene, foster relationships between independent labels in America and other countries and record stores and music distributors in Japan, as well as try to elevate the status of Japanese music in the global indie music scene. The first installment will be held on January 17th and will feature two panel discussion, the first with Paxico, a small label from New York, and Dome of Doom, another label from California, and the second with Second Royal and Bud Music, two labels from Kyoto. My role in this project is as director, but I also enlisted help from Ally Mobbs, a local producer and sound artist, as well as one of my Japanese coworkers Tsutsumi.
Rather than making a plain old flyer, I decided to come up with something a little more original and eye-catching so I made a cassette tape insert with all of the basic information for the event and left them at record stores all around Kyoto.
Other things I did at MTRL/ "Honorable Mentions"
There are just a few more things I have done/continue to do at MTRL that I want to mention quickly.
I organized a week long event at MTRL where people could come any time of day and make a pair of glasses with the laser cutter. The aim of the event was to get people to start thinking about potential and unexpected uses for laser cutters. Guests could choose from three varieties of glasses that I designed to be assembled with no glue or screws. This is one of the photos I took to promote the event.
In November 2016 a Tokyo based NPO called SafeCast came and held a workshop at MTRL. They also installed a fixed radiation sensor at MTRL and asked me to design and build a case for the sensor. I love building stuff like this so I happily made the case using plywood and our laser cutter.
In March 2016 is was asked to participate in a Panasonic internal hackathon that was held over two days at MTRL. My team came up with a concept for an augmented reality mirror that allows you to design your own clothes and have them "printed" and "un-printed" and recycled instantly. These are a few of the visuals that I came up with during that hackathon.
I give monthly lessons in Japanese on how to make data for and how to use the laser cutter. I also do a similar monthly lesson for 3D printing as well.
"Survival Blanket" a solo exhibition of contemporary art [October 1 - 10, 2016]
Last summer I was invited by the same French art festival that I partnered with for the VR exhibition to hold a solo exhibition of my own work. I accepted, and in three months, I worked like a maniac to produce enough work to fill a two-story gallery while also working a full time job. It was a very tight schedule for a solo exhibition even for a full-time artist, but I managed to pull it off with a lot of help from my fiancee and from five student volunteers.
One of the first things I did was to give a talk at Kyoto's Pechakucha Night event in August to promote my exhibition and talk a little bit about the concept behind it in front of an audience of about 100 people.
I wore an actual survival blanket during my talk as a sort of goofy "publicity stunt".
It took almost two days for the student volunteers and I to install the show.
Rather than using a paper map to display titles and information about the work, I decided to create an online guide that visitors could refer to as they walk around the gallery. One of my goals with this exhibition was to address accessibility in contemporary art (or lack thereof). My hope was that the exhibition would be challenging and open ended while also being engaging and enjoyable even for someone who often feels disengaged or isolated by contemporary art.
This is the exhibition flyer which I designed myself.
For as rushed as everything was putting this exhibition together, I'd say I'm more pleased with the outcome than I thought I was going to be.
HereNow / Cinra: Freelance Translation [June 2016 - now]
I've been working as a freelance translator for Cinra for the past nine months for their publication HereNow. Compared to translation work I've done in the past, the articles I translate for HereNow are all food, art, music, and culture related and are much more to my interests, which makes the job more enjoyable. Translation may seem like a fairly straightforward task, but actually it takes a lot of thought and research, as well as careful consideration for what type of person your readers are and how to make every article as readable as possible for them. I sometimes spend five or more hours in quiet concentration just to translate one article. Here are a few of the articles I've translated that I thought were particularly interesting.
Not just another Kyoto band – Homecomings discuss their new album and daily life
Cassette tapes: The key to the future of the music industry?
A tour of Kyoto’s famous Zen gardens – 2016 Edition
Sentos are back on the rise! Five spots to bathe and relax in greater Tokyo
Exploring the 2016 Singapore Biennale with artist Kelly Limerick
Hatena / Mackerel: translation, localization, and design [November 2015 to December 2015]
Hatena is a web application company that develops popular platforms like Hatena Blog (comparable to Blogger) and Hatena Bookmark (comparable to Reddit). I was hired as a translator for the team developing a new B2B server monitoring and data collection SaaS called Mackerel. After a few months I had gotten to the point where I would finish all of my work with plenty of hours in the day to spare, so I proposed to the director a series of animated graphic videos that would explain in broad strokes what it is Mackerel does and what makes it different from other monitoring services. I got the green light and started working on it, but shortly after that the director decided they weren't ready to invest any of their budget in video content. So these are a few of the visuals that I produced before the project was put on hold.
I made this animated logo with three colored lines representing the lines on Mackerel's graphs morphing into the Mackerel logo.
This was the first draft of the animated logo.
As a test I made this animation of the Mackerel agent character that our lead designer made. This guy represents the mackerel-agent program that gets installed on each server and collects metric data.
This is one page from the mockup/storyboard I made for the Mackerel animated overview video I proposed.
This was an interesting experience for me because normally I create my own parameters and then design from there, but in this case I had to pay careful attention to stay within the Mackerel design guidelines, color palette, and minimalist aesthetic which were put in place by another designer in the company.
Misc. Other Design
Lastly I'll put it a few things that I designed on my own time outside of work.
This is some branding design I did in 2014 for a friend who I was working with to start a project to improve the accessibility and cost of ESL education for university students and working adults in Japan.
Playing around with shapes and colors in Illustrator. [2016]
Again just experimenting with shapes and color palettes, this time playing off the idea of shapes that appear "fold-able". [2015]