Mitchell Whitelaw, #climatedata proposal (2009)

One of the most articulate and accessible voices within the generative art scene is undoubtedly the Canberra-based scholar/practitioner Mitchell Whitelaw. Given his relative (internet) silence over the last year, news of an interview—conducted by Paul Prudence, no less—published in the most recent issue of Neural magazine, is cause for minor celebration. Mitchell posted the transcript of this conversation to his blog last night and it is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the opening response about the utopian nature of software art acknowledges some ideological underpinnings that are seldom discussed – and Paul’s query as to “where is the dystopian software art?” is both provocative and on point. Secondly, the comments about look vs. process and how even the glossiest eye candy often embodies a “narrative of systems” is a useful means of considering the ‘performative’ capabilities of generative art. Finally, Mitchell’s description of algorithm popularity as ‘a memetic ecology unto itself’ is exactly the kind of meta-commentary that is desperately needed in (generally) uncritical software art circles.

A particularly sharp passage on system design and pedagogy:

The link there for me is a sense of “procedurality” or “processuality”. In Casey Reas’ work we can see a strong relationship between computational and non-computational procedures such as those of Sol LeWitt. In teaching programming to designers, I have students write and execute a LeWitt style procedure, with pencil and paper. Digital generative systems are just formal procedures, executed by machines. Treating processes as human-executable helps unpack the black boxes of generative systems mentioned earlier, and hopefully reveal them as contingent and hackable.

This notion of “human executable” procedures is a handy frame of reference in introducing agency into system design…

Otherwise: the joy of materiality. Generative art and design covets the lush tangibility of traditional media; and with the wave of interest in fabrication we are seeing ever more generative work realised in “off-screen” forms. The challenge then, for pasty code-artist types, is to match the craft skills of hands-on makers in realising the work.

…and serves as a perfect segue into Mitchell’s thinking about transmateriality (craft/making/material culture). Read the full conversation between Mitchell and Paul here.

BERG today released details of their concept “printer”, one that together with the “Berg Cloud” service behaves like a physical hub to your digital content. They describe it as:

BERG Cloud is our technology to move the smarts of products onto the internet. We think of it as the nervous system for connected products. Built to run at scale, BERG Cloud could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future. Little Printer is the first of our family of connected products for the home.

..and in particular the “Little Printer”:

Little Printer holds a compact, inkless, thermal printer. Its zero-configuration wireless connection to the Web (via the Bridge unit, included) lets you place it wherever you have a power outlet. Little Printer is constructed in high-gloss injected moulded plastic and the brushed steel faceplate holds the paper, framing each delivery as it prints. Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper. 

See video below.

Continue reading.... Little Printer [Objects]

Following from Glitch Reality No1 commissioned by It’s Nice That for Nike, Glitch Reality 2 by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and David Gardener is a new iteration of exploring physical objects in glitch form. The process is an interesting one, applying digital methodology to alter physical objects. Matthew Plummer-Fernandez explains:

A tea set was created by purchasing non-matching tea set components, scanning them with a Z-corporation 3D scanner and roughly repairing the digital mesh files. The mesh files are then 3D printed to create an instance of this tea-set data that inherits the glitches from the analogue-to-digital-to-analogue translation.

Also below is short animation experiment Matthew made using a crude 3D scan of his friends baby Harriet.

The meshing algorithm curiously created a caccoon from fragments of scanned baby pram, which inspired the title of the piece.

Continue reading.... Glitch Reality II [Objects]

‘Cell’, Initial concept design by James Alliban and Keiichi Matsuda. Photograph by Ghaasan Daghestani

“The idea that digital is something new and transformative is now quite old. So the question for most creatives is not about going digital – it’s about making it feel less digital, about making participation and interaction feel post-digital; making the tech less techy. We see this reflected back in the freshest creative and cultural work and Alpha-ville is probably where you see that most vividly in this country.” Tom Uglow, Director of Creative Labs at Google.

The 2011 edition of Alpha-ville Festival provides an online and live platform to explore, test and disseminate new ideas, emerging trends, collaborations and groundbreaking works. Running from 22-25 September in London, the programme presents social media and interactive art, open labs, meet-ups, talks, workshops and screenings alongside with live music, visual performances and parties.

Gathering artists, creative coders, new media technologists, designers, architects, professionals, musicians, researchers and academics, some of the key names are: Tom Uglow (Google Creative Labs), Marius Watz, Filip Visnjic (CreativeApplications.Net), Man Bartlett, Daito Manabe, Moritz Stefaner, Keiichi Matsuda, James Alliban, Pantha Du Prince, Jon Hopkins, Jacaszek and Kangding Ray.

This year’s programme addresses the transition from a digital to a post-digital culture, that looks beneath technology at how human behaviours such as collaboration, participation and interaction have redefined the creative practice and society itself, and at how the physical boundaries between reality and online are being blurred. 

Not to miss:  Alpha-ville Symposium: FROM DIGITAL TO POST-DIGITAL - Friday 23rd September – featuring:

Filip Visnjic – Architect, Lecturer and Founder of Creative Applications Network
Tom Uglow – Director of Creative Labs Europe, Google
Patrick Hussey – Digital Director at Arts & Business
Mortiz Stefaner – Information Designer
Martin Ahe – Business Development at Stiktu
Keiichi Matsuda, Designer and Film-maker
Bill Thompson – Technology Writer at BBC
Drew Hemment – Director & Founder of Future Everything
Katy Beale – Founder / Director at Caper

More details and to get your tickets available here: www.alpha-ville.co.uk

Teaser stills by Graphset

Created by Matt Ruby, ALT CTRL is a series of works that examine the way we interact with digital systems through the use of experimental interfaces. The three major works in this series are Excitebike, Sympathy for Pacman, and Swap Meet. All three works appropriate an early video game: Excitebike, Pacman and Pro Wrestling as the content for interface. The controls of each game have been subverted to create new experiences with these existing systems.

The series builds on the premise that our relationship to the systems that we use is an fundamental part of who we are and how we understand the world. The focus is on experimental interfaces that attempt to push the boundaries of comfortable interaction by challenging the user with foreign and difficult controls. These interfaces provoke foreign and expressive interactions in hopes of inspiring viewers to question their role as participant.

Excitebike is a piece that replaces hand controller with a helmet embedded with a microphone to control original Nintendo game Excitebike. Sound generated by the user is sent to openFrameworks app for analysis. Volume controls the gas buttons and frequency/pitch controls the lanes up and down.

Sympathy for Pacman is a piece that attempts to recreate the life of the Pacman character. Users must turn around the television to rotate the onscreen character, confronted by an oncoming stream of cheese puffs.

Swapmeat is a piece that includes stripped down Nintendo controller requiring user to moist their fingers tips to allow button presses to be registered (if I read this right). In any case, new behaviour requires user to rethink operation of the interface.

More information as it becomes available on altctrl.matt-ruby.com

Matt Ruby is a designer living in New York City. He is working towards his MFA at Parsons the New School for Design. Skills include logo, identity, print, web, three-dimensional and interactive design as well as producing fine art.

Organic Electric by Jason Krugman is a series of works composed of hand soldered LED mesh, folded and shaped into 3-dimensional illuminated forms, animated and touch responsive.

It is an exploration into the possibilities of 3-dimensional electro-luminescent LED structures. There are myriad possibilites for LEDs as a physical media, going far beyond their traditional use in Times Square type, 2-dimensional information displays. The concept of LED Weaving, is new and uncharted territory. Expanding on the custom switches that are the basic unit of “Firefly”, Organic Electric seeks to create organically shaped, responsive LED forms, rooted in analog and digital building techniques.

Project Page

/via Zach

Particles is the latest installation by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi currently on exhibit at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]. The installation centers around a spiral-shaped rail construction on which a number of balls with built-in LEDs and xbee transmitters are rolling while blinking in different time intervals, resulting in spatial drawings of light particles.

This is an art installation which is able to create a visionary beautiful dots pattern of blinking innumerable illuminations floating in all directions on the air. The number of balls with a built-in LED, pass through one after another on the rail “8-spiral shape.” We see this phenomenon like “the light particle float around” because the balls radiate in various timing.

The openFrameworks application controls both the release of “particles” as well as their glow based on the information read within the application. The image below shows perlin noise being translated into particles, giving each one glow and position properties.

The position of each ball is determined via total of 17 control points on the rail. Every time a ball passes through one of them, the respective ball’ s positional information is transmitted via a built-in infrared sensor. During the time the ball travels between one control points to the next, this position is calculated based on its average speed. The data for regulating the balls’ luminescence are divided by the control point segments and are switched every time a ball passes on a control point.

The audiences can select a shape from several patterns floating in aerial space using an interface of the display. The activation of the virtual balls on the screen are determined by the timing which a ball moving on the rail passes through a certain check point on the rail and the speed which is calculated by using average speed values. The sound is generated from the ball positions and the information of LED flash pattern and is played through 8ch speakers. The board inside the ball is an Arduino compatible board based on the original design from Arduino

Exhibition page: particles.ycam.jp/en/

Date & Time：March 5 (sat)−May 5 (thu) , 2011　10:00−19:00
Venue: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] Studio B
Admission free

Images courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] Photos: Ryuichi Maruo (YCAM)

A small LAN party in a warehouse in Pittsburgh is staged. Gamers actions (jumps, kills, bullets, grenades, etc) are transposed into a graphical score for a percussion ensemble to play back in realtime. OSC out of Source Game engine >> Ableton Live >> Notes Quantized to 1/16 >> MIDI out to OpenFrameworks for graphical score on each musician’s screen.

Percussion //
Lisa Pegher, Gordon Nunn, Ryan Socrates, Peter Roduta

Gamers //
Alex Klarfeld, Alex Wachsman, Rachel Tadeu and Dinesh Ayyappan

By Riley Harmon with support from Marynel Vazquez.

More images on Flickr

Back in 2010, trying to find a flat screen for his final project, Ishac Bertran found one on the trash that seemed ok. Unfortunately the VGA connector was broken but he managed to use the DV only to realise that the screen was also cracked. As it was useless (for normal purposes) he cracked it a bit more, pushing the liquid crystal move along the cracks with a screwdriver and produced these beautiful images below.

More interesting projects @ ishback.com

Created by Joshua Noble, Chris Bierbower and Mette Lyckegaard, The Binary Counter is an interactive display and teaching tool for kids to explore the most basic building blocks of digital information: 1′s and 0′s. The team broke a byte into its 8 bits and gave each a physical and visual representation using motors and LEDs.

The Binary Counter uses movement to show the pattern of changing values for each location in the byte as the exhibit counts up. Kids watch as the card for each bit flips in front of them as they spin a large dial incrementing the decimal number on the screen. As they begin to understand the pattern, they can press corresponding buttons to change the value of each bit and see the resulting number calculated instantly.

This is a CIID Physical Computing project created under Massimo Banzi, David Gauthier and David Mellis.

Photos by Chris Bierbower