Last September, GML group launched The GML Field Recorder Challenge. The project was an invitation to artists and hackers to design a DIY hardware and software solution for unobtrusively recording graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city. The winning project would receive 1,200 euros.

Earlier this year, our guest writer and contributor Joshua Noble took on the challenge by creating a custom piece of hardware for recording graffiti tags that costs no more than $170.97 or 126.81 Euros. The setup is simply based around using an optical mouse that knows how it’s being tilted. The ultra-bright LED was installed to ensure that the mouse can read properly off the wall, a combination of special lenses, acrylic cut casing, batteries, SDCard slot, Teensy++ board, and a bunch of wires. Once you have your tagged data saved on the SDCard, it’s easy enough to use it in one of freely available GML processing/openFrameworks apps to visualize or cut templates.

Continue reading.... µtagger Alpha: A GML Field Recorder [c++, Objects]

Created by Tangible Intervention (the public art arm of Tangible Interaction) in collaboration with origami artist, Joseph Wu, Jelly Swarm is a public artwork for the Vancouver Aquarium in BC, Canada.  The installation features 94 folded origami jellies, each containing an LED light module, suspended from a custom aluminum structure.

Inspired by the luminescent jellies found off the British Columbia coast, Jelly Swarm mimics their natural, reactive light behaviour.  It allows visitors to excite the origami jellies into creating beautiful colour and light patterns from a touch screen controller.  When left undisturbed by the public, the jellies interact with their closest neighbours, triggering random generative displays of coloured light.

Continue reading.... Jelly Swarm [Air]

‘Monolith’ is the latest project from the London based design studio Signal | Noise. The team collaborated with the Swiss design studio Unit for the french luxury label Hermés, and their new flagship store in Geneva. The theme for the evening was the meeting of handcraft and technology and in the first room they created an iPad application which invited guests to leave their hand print on the evening, wheres the second installation, shown here, included a six metre interactive object that allowed visitors to control strips of light passing through it.

Continue reading.... Monolith [vvvv, Objects, Arduino]

Created by Andreas Müller, the lamp North is based around the simple idea that wherever you are in the world, there is always another place out there that is important to you and you have a relationship with. The lamp visualises this relationship by giving out more light the more directly it points towards this location, the (magnetic) north pole in the case in the case of this lamp but idea is that a future version will allow you to specify the lat/long coordinates of a place in the world, where a loved one lives or the place you were born, to use as it’s point of reference.

More details + video below.

Continue reading.... Lamp North [Arduino, Objects]

The Hanging Garden creates an array of LED lights when plants ask for water. Using the moisture sensors and an ardunio, team in the office are able to know the aproxímate level of moisture contained in the plants which therefore tells them when the plant needs water. Each plant has an independent LED Light, creating an array of lights over time.

Movie clip + more images after the jumpÂ

Continue reading.... The Hanging Garden [Arduino]

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

Created by Dominic Harris and Cinimod Studio, DJ Light is an immersive public sound and light installation that gives visitors the power to orchestrate performance of light and sound across a large public space.  It was created for energy company Endesa as the cornerstone of their Christmas celebrations in Lima, Peru. The installation allows one person to take control over a massive space and manipulate the incredible array of light and sound by using just their body.

The installation consists of 85 giant globes of light, each capable of displaying millions of colours.  As the “guest DJ” assumes their position on the podium, they can use their arms to point and gesture.   These movements are translated in real-time into beautiful movements of light and generative sound across the space.

HARDWARE
Each of the inflatable globes were designed and fabricated bespoke for the project. They each contain a DMX controlled 4-sided custom LED lighting strip which is suspended within the globe and fabricated from aluminium profiles for minimal weight and maximum thermal performance. Each lighting strip is individually controllable and energy efficient (typically globes of these sizes are illuminated by a 500 watt single-colour light source, where as Cinimod have achieved the same brightness in full RGB at a fraction of the power consumption. Each globe has a unique identity that allows the colour to be controlled from the main DJ podium.

Suspended above the podium is a high accuracy thermal tracking camera that has been developed for Cinimod to allow for live tracking of the “guest DJ”. By tracking every movement of the person below, this camera communicates control signals to the main software programme that is responsible for the live sound and light generation.

The audio component to the installation is as important as the visual illumination, and is comprised of 8 channels of sound output to a matching number of powerful outdoor speakers. The sound is output via a MOTU 12 channel firewire device connected to the central windows-based controlled system.

SOFTWARE
The core interactive system is programmed with MAX/MSP running on a windows 7 computer. The software was created as a series of inter-connected modules which can be categorised as:

1) Thermal Camera feed interpreter: establishing hot and cold zones of movement, and vectors of movement
2) Interaction Module: taking live feed of body movement interpreter and processing into a series of behaviours, moods and scene settings
3) Generative Sound Module: a highly complex series of audio systems that generate a real-time 8 channel sound track to the installation. User interaction controls not only the type of sounds heard but also their positions within the space.
4) Globe Lighting Mapper: generations of the colour behaviours for each globe, sent by standard DMX (via multiple splitters) to the large array of globes. The lighting control is itself generative, taking not only the direct movement of the ‘dj’ but also accepting recursive feeds from the audio and animation subsystems.

Project Credits:
Concept design, realisation and implementation: Cinimod Studio (London, UK)
Software programming: Cinimod Studio with Henrik Ekeus (London, UK)
Local project management: Claudia Paz for CAM (Lima, Peru)
Local production team: Arquileds and Consetec (Lima, Peru)

Dominic Harris is an interactive artist whose chosen palette of materials is lighting, interaction design, and electronics. Dominic designs and fabricates his artworks at  Cinimod Studio,  a multi-disciplinary  practice he founded in 2007.  This studio is comprised of a dedicated team with diverse backgrounds including architecture, product design, electronics, programming, graphic design, and workshop skills.

cinimodstudio.com

Created by Martin Bircher, “Type Case” is a low-resolution display embedded in an old printers’ type case with 125 rectangular pixels of different sizes. These are formed from the reflecting light of Processing controlled LEDs, embedded in each section of the case. Images are converted and fed to the case via arduino.

Due to the standardized fragmentation of its compartments, the density of visual information is decreased towards the objects’ centre. Viewed close by, it is nearly impossible to recognize more than a flicker – however after moving some distance away, it becomes distinguishable, that the lights and shadows give a representation of the latest headlines.

The Processing script is fetching an RSS feed of an online newspapers headlines. It stores the title and description of the ten latest entries into a variable and rendered in the serif font Caslon, which is scrolled horizontally on the top of the window. Every frame the pixels of the middle section of the scrolling text are stored in an array (1600 pixels) and displayed on the left. These pixels are then reduced to an array of 20 x 10 pixels (also on the left of the window). Since some of the compartments are the doubled or quadrupled size of the smallest units, these pixels have to be reduced again. On the biggest part of the window there is the simulation, which represents the gray scale values of each pixel of Type Case.

Project Page

Martin Bircher, born 1978 in Aarau, Switzerland, served his apprenticeship as an electrician and studied Fine Arts. In 2006 he migrated to Kouvola, Finland, where he works as a media artist and a full-time lecturer for Digital Media. The interest in his artistic work lies in combining antiquated items and cutting-edge technology in order to create objects with new purposes. (Cartes)

See also on CAN:
Parallel Image [Environment, Objects]
The Stealth Project [Environment, Objects]
Swarm Light [Inspiration, Events]

Created by W+K in partnership with Marvellous and Greyworld, Spit Paint is a recent installation at the Nokia World held only few days ago in London. Shown at the show was an app running on a new Nokia N8 allowing you to apply digital paint to a wall, in this case a 6m by 3m wall of LED lights. You could also apply paint via a “digital bucket of paint” provided at the installation with a specially designed control panel to record a face over which the paint would be applied (see videos below).

The N8 app includes three modes: “tap” – where you use the device’s touchscreen to dab paint on the wall,
“throw” – which uses the device’s accelerometer and the N8′s nicely accurate compass to flick paint on the wall and “blow” – which uses the device’s accelerometer, compass and the microphone to spit the paint.

The app is still in beta, so no date yet for when it will available through the Ovi store.

(Photo by Toastwife)

(Photo above by Toastwife)

Somewhat inspired by the IQ Font, BalletFont is a project to create a typeface “Ligne” from dancer’s movements in space. Three versions of software called “Chireo” (chirography + choreography) were developed using openFrameworks. “capture” did the initial motion and video capture. “augment” let the team clean up the data and export the font and rendered videos. “live” is the real time motion tracking / augmented reality software which was used for the realtime demo. The team used watch batteries, infrared LEDs (ripped out of a prototype touch table), and a PS3Eye cam to create a 2D motion tracking system. These little devices were taped to ballet dancers and had them perform moves which formed letters. The tracked data was exported to SVGs which were used to create a headline font called “Ligne”.

The video below shows a few letters being performed where the team used the tracking data to overlay FX. The stroke width is controlled by the speed of movement.

For more videos, the process + download the font see balletfont.com

BalletFont is the work of Weiden + Kennedy’s WK12 with Fashionbuddha and Oregon Ballet Theatre.