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• Actelion Imagery [Processing] Created by onformative, studio founded by Julia Laub and Cedric Kiefer in Berlin, Actelion Imagery is an application built for Actelion, a biopharmaceutical company that researches, develops and markets medicines for diseases that still lack adequate treatments. Project brief was to create a new identity for their brand without touching the logo, but in keeping with Actelion activities. The team developed a custom Processing application that builds on a range of algorithms to generate both still and animated assets for brochures and website. The new imagery is based on the smallest possible unit: digital molecules. These capture the magical moment when new medicine arises from molecules; innovative design for a company that supplies the world with innovations. We worked closely together with Interbrand in creating the graphic imagery and developed a tool for automatic image generation that enables the generation of a unique, in-itself homogeneous graphic image world out of heterogeneous visual material.  The Processing-based software was developed especially for Actelion. It enables the targeted creation of graphic images based on photographs, where pixel information is translated into graphic elements such as points, lines and curves building on-top of new and familiar algorithms. There are a number of presets and vast number of possibilities – through expanded editing and settings – for making fine adjustments on individual graphical elements. The software allows both the print vector data and the information for digital media to be exported. The new corporate image was created for the publication of the company’s 2010 business report and continues to evolve in its updated website. Project Page see more images on […]
• The Color Project at IFP Media Center by MPC New York Project explores narratives through colour, line, and form found in geographic satellite imagery. Utilising Google Earth together with custom software, the final install spans over 27 HD screens pointing locations of the films that have been produced by […]
• Magic and Storytelling at TED / Collaboration: Marco Tempest, onformative + checksum5 "Magic and Storytelling" is an interactive presentation about the history of storytelling augmented with virtual magic in real-time. Performed by the New York based cyber illusionist Marco Tempest, the presentation combines a number of realtime technologies delivering a homogenous and magical look in realtime.  The project was produced and created by Marco Tempest in collaboration with onformative and checksum5. In order to achieve this 'magical' combination of  digital and physical, onformative developed a variety of proprietary particle systems. These include "global magic dust", which is based on and controlled by the Kinect depth image, the "hand magic dust", that they placed particle emitters via hand-tracking onto Marcos hands for to emphasize his movements, and the "custom magic dust", which allowed them to picture very different elements, as for instance appearing party guests, typography or flying fireballs and bullets made out of particles. The main task was to bring together a very long list of demanding interactive real-time effects – such as hand-tracking, face-tracking, face substitution, particle systems, elements in 3d space – with the exact course of a six minutes show, timed by the given soundtrack. For the development onformative together with checksum5, the developers of vvvv. Likewise Tebjan Halm and Enrico Viola provided additional vvvv development and preliminary studies done in openFrameworks. The aim in »Magic and Storytelling« was to find a magical and engaging way to enhance a live performance with interactive graphics. The live component could be anything from a lecture to a performance. The augmentation layer is not pre-rendered. It is generated by a data flow system in real time and in reaction to the live elements. I think that this type of magic can help us to map out what that part of the future might feel like, where 3D projection and gestural sensing are intelligent and ubiquitous. The collaboration with onformative and checksum5 created the perfect synergies to explore my vision. vvvv proofed to be the ideal tool to develop this graphics and computational intensive app. Magic and illusion are a good sandbox for creativity. Adding the element of illusion to an existing technology allows us to create things that are otherwise not possible. An illusion takes a technology beyond its natural boundaries. Magic is a unique tool for pre-visualization. - Marco Tempest Hardware: One PC, Kinect, HD Camera, Two Monitors. Software: openFrameworks for preliminary studies, vvvv for final. Project […]
• Making Images Computationally – JiGaZo [oF, Games] Back in 1966, Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon were experimenting with photomosaic, creating large prints from collections small symbols or images. In Studies in Perception I, they created an image of a reclining nude by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities. It was printed in The New York Times on 11 October 1967, and exhibited at one of the earliest computer art exhibitions The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, held Museum of Modern Art in NYC from November 25, 1968 through February 9, 1969. He writes in his essay On The Frustrations Of Collaborating With Artists: ..I was developing experimental programming languages and methods — terms loosely defined, in those golden days of Bell Labs, and thus "artistic applications" was a plausible use of part of my time. I did not have to defend that interpretation in detail to my superiors, which was fortunate because I'm not sure that any of us really knew what we were doing, or why. As Yogi Berra (is reported to have) said: If you don't know where you're going, you'll surely end up somewhere else. Yes, indeed, for better or worse. Anyway, from these experiences, I think the issues and caveats cited in my intro above have turned out to be more or less valid, for reasons that I would now say come from the nature of art and the nature of people. Few years ago, Zach Lieberman met Ken Knowlton through a magician, Marc Settaducati, who is also a toy designer. The three of them, Marc, Ken and Zach decided to collaborate on bringing the idea of something magical to the masses inspired by Ken's previous work. This project was really about Ken, and Ken's artwork. He's been doing mosaic work since the 60s, when he came to Bell Labs and saw different ways of making images computationally Zach writes. Marc's role was to turn those creative ideas into a toy.  Zach's job has been to push Ken's algorithms, modernize his code, and to try to get the software to give the best possible results. The system was developed in openFrameworks to adjust and tweak the software. Team developed three different toys so far -- a monochrome version of the Jigazo (which is out in Japan and now US/Canada), a color version which takes a images such as a painting and rearranges. What it is really significant about JiGaZo puzzle (meaning "self portrait" in Japanese) is that you can realize almost any image, with the enclosed 300 pieces of puzzles. The puzzle uses rotating method to generate 4 different pixels out of each puzzle piece. So, for the first 2 pieces, the total number of pictures is given by 4 x 4 = 16. Now, if you do the same thing with the third piece, you would have made 4 x 4 x 4 = 64 different pictures. So if you keep multiplying that how big a number is 4^300? It is about equal to this number: 10^180 - or the number 1 followed by 180 zeros, larger than the number of protons in the entire known universe (source). The projects began with code that Ken has written in C / Dos (16 bit variables, text mode, etc). Zach ported this code to OF, and expand on the algorithms with alternative approaches. The team use the ofxControlPanel gui, and did a lot of adjustment and tweaking.  They also use a fair amount of opencv to process incoming images to make them work better in the system. In Japan, that code is then made to work on a server, and all the interaction is through cell phones / email.  You take a photo of your face – or whatever you want to make a puzzle of and send a blank email to iphone@jigazo.com with the photo as an attachment. An email will arrive from info@jigazo.com after about ten seconds. Open it, click the hyperlink in the email, and wait for your browser to navigate to the page where you can progress to the image with a 15-by-20 grid of symbols that correspond to the symbols printed on the pieces of the puzzle. Line up the pieces according to the grid on the page to recreate your photo. In the hasbro version of the software, there's a cd-rom with a flash port of the code, done using alchemy, which allows chunks of the algorithm to be written in native code. The puzzle is currently available in Japan and finding itself on the european and north american shelves thanks to Hasbro. Japan import is available on Amazon and Hasbro version via their site. To learn more about Ken's work see: knowltonmosaics.com. Made with openFrameworks JiGaZo Puzzle videos on YouTube and here is a video of Ken in his studio shot by Zach. […]
• ‘Second Moon’ by Katie Paterson now on a journey around the Earth 'Second Moon' is a project by Katie Paterson that tracks the cyclical journey of a small fragment of the moon as it circles the Earth, via air freight courier, on a man made commercial […]
• “unnamed soundsculpture” by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer / Kinect Produced by onformative and chopchop the "unnamed soundsculpture" is a project by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer, building from the simple idea of creating a moving sand sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For the work the team asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect) using Processing, in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud) in 3D Studio Max, so they were able to use the collected data throughout the further process. The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective. The body – constant and indefinite at the same time – “bursts” the space already with its mere physicality, creating a first distinction between the self and its environment. Only the body movements create a reference to the otherwise invisible space, much like the dots bounce on the ground to give it a physical dimension. Thus, the sound-dance constellation in the video does not only simulate a purely virtual space. The complex dynamics of the body movements is also strongly self-referential. With the complex quasi-static, inconsistent forms the body is “painting”, a new reality space emerges whose simulated aesthetics goes far beyond numerical codes. Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the “alternative worlds” we project (Vilém Flusser) and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again. nominated for the for the MuVi Award: kurzfilmtage.de/en/competitions/muvi-award/selection.html see video in full quallity: daniel-franke.com/unnamed_soundsculpture.mov Recorded at: LEAP - Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance music: The Naked and Famous - "The […]
• Maps by Kim Asendorf – Colour and Topography Kim Asendorf uses Google Maps to explore incomprehensive complexity of landscape as colour and […]
• 4010 Facebook Tree by Onformative Onformative bring online discussions back into the 4010-Store by developing a data visualisation generated from all their Facebook […]