Michaella Janse van Vuuren

Michaella Janse van Vuuren matriculated at the Pro Arte High School for Art, Music Ballet and Drama. Students were given free reign, and Michaella experimented with puppetry, Video installations, body art, and was one of ten recipients of a Santam art bursary. The next few years were spent dabbling with various forms of art, live performance art, mural art, and a course in Desktop Graphics. This introduction to the silent companionship of the computer again led to a first year course in Computer Science at UNISA, which in turn led Michaella to UCT and the Engineering School.

Michaella received her BSc. Electrical Engineering in 1998, with a final year research project where she developed a software program for human eye detection and tracking in video footage. This interest encouraged her to enrol for the Masters degree, focussed on the development of a system for automatic human pose and action recognition in video sequences. The project required that a database be constructed consisting of a professional blue screen studio, 7 cameras and camera operators as well as eight actors. These elements had to be coordinated to produce a 24-hour video database. Michaella used negative space in her computer vision software to automatically identify the different poses and recognise the actions. During 2002 she received a Scarce Skills Scholarship (NRF), National Research Fund Bursary (NRF) and a de Beers Bursary for research in computer vision. Michaella received her PhD. in Electrical Engineering in 2004.

Research work done at the Meraka Institute of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) focused on an efficient information and communication system that would enable people with different disabilities to access information and services. It was the collaboration between the different disciplines, centred on the individuals’ needs that Michaella found most exciting during this period.

It was at Bloemfontein, 2007, during a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Central University of Technology that Michaella’s long suppressed artistic talents started to emerge again. The research focused on the development of custom implants using computer-aided (CAD), and computer-aided manufacture (CAM) methods utilizing CT and MR-scan data as reference. She also recognized the amazing opportunities that the 3D printers offered for realizing imaginative projects.

Highlights:

In February 2009 The Chrysanthemum Centrepiece wins the Design Indaba "Most Beautiful Object in South Africa" award.

"The Chrysanthemum centrepiece is a reversible design that can function as either a bowl or a candle holder, depending on which side of the design faces upwards.
The centrepiece reflects my passion for the textures, shapes and patterns found in nature. I especially like to interpret those objects that have a repetitive mathematically founded pattern"
The Chrysanthemum is directly manufactured with the EOS P380 using the PA2200 polyamide material.

The Pine Cone Light, a collaboration with Jan van Mol of Addictlab to form part of the Materialise.MGX 2009 christmas collection.