“The fireflies are leaving the city, looking for a new home. Let your touch guide them as they soar through the skies and dance among the trees” is the description of an experimental video game ‘Flight of the Fireflies’ by Jonathan Hise Kaldma that takes you on an atmospheric journey through places and emotions. The focus of the game is not on the challenge – but on the experience.�

Continue reading.... Flight of the Fireflies – “Atmospheric journey through places and emotions” [iPad, Games]

(This essay was commissioned by Centre national des arts plastiques for Graphisme en France 2012)

- Edited by Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams -

Technical mastery and innovation are part of the rich history of visual design. The printing press is the quintessential example of how a shift in design technology can ripple through society. In the Twenty-First Century, innovation in design often means pushing the role of computers within the visual arts in new directions. Writing software is something that’s not typically associated with the work of a visual designer, but there’s a growing number of designers who write custom software as a component of their work. Over the last decade, through personal experience, We’ve learned many of the benefits and pitfalls of writing code as a component of a visual arts practice, but our experience doesn’t cover the full spectrum. Custom software is changing typography, photography, and composition and is the foundation for new categories of design practice that includes design for networked media (web browsers, mobile phones, tablets) and interactive installations. Most importantly, designers writing software are pushing design thinking into new areas. To cut to the core of the matter, we asked a group of exceptional designers two deceptively simple questions:

1. Why do you write your own software rather than only use existing software tools?

2. How does writing your own software affect your design process and also the visual qualities of the final work?

Continue reading.... Designing Programs [Theory]

Stilla is a new collaboration between Patrick Juchli and Bernhard Frey, an iPhone app that combines photography with 3d projection. The app allows you to take multiple photos from different views, remembering your orientation and positioning those photos in 3d space related to another another. Not to be confused with traditional panoramas, Stilla allows you to blend multiple images in 3D space on the same axis.

Continue reading.... Stilla [iPhone]

In the last few years we have  seen a number of projects that utilise delaunay triangulation to translate photographs into their geometric representations. Jonathan Puckey’s Delaunay Raster was the first to utilise this combination of delaunay triangulation with manually placed points and color averaging. Jonathan’s images, most of us have seen already, have inspired a wave of projects.

Latest project that utilises a very similar technique is DMesh, a custom software made in Cinder by Dofl Yun that analyzes an image and generate a triangle meshes with points. Included in the app is also manual mode so a user can add more points to get more detail or delete existing points. Users can also export an image as either a bitmap image or a vector image. See video below.

Continue reading.... DMesh [Cinder, Mac]

Once in a while comes a photography app that does something really different. If you’re a fan of action sports or just like to take pictures of moving objects you’re definitely going to like this. Nabit lets you catch the right moment and turn it into an action sequence photo like we’ve seen in skateboard/snowboard/BMX magazines.

Nabit lets you capture action sequence photos with your iPhone. The next time your buddy nails a switch inward heel or your dog snags a Frisbee mid-air, Nabit and share it on Facebook and Twitter. Whether you nail it or bite it, nothing beats capturing it with an awesome sequence shot.

Continue reading.... Nabit [iPhone]

Pierre Commenge aka Emoc creates knitted like photographs using Processing. The application, with no UI, follows deterministic rules where every pixel of the picture is given pictorial qualities from its components in a color space.�

Continue reading.... Paysages [Processing]

Aleph is the graduation project of Tiemen Rapati. A combination of imagery driven by generative processes in perspective to create representations of memory and mental association.

“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded.” 
— Jorge Luis Borges - “El Aleph” (1945)

Continue reading.... Aleph [openFrameworks, Processing]

Concentrated Geographies is Toronto media artist Tori Foster’s first solo show and—making good on its name—the assembled work carefully considers the nature and representation of urban experience. The show features four projects, all of which rely on Processing to manipulate footage of everyday city scenes to explore and abstract movement, routine and emergent behaviour. Movement Portraits intersects street photography and the slit-scan technique to create compelling images of mid-motion pedestrians and vehicles. The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian expands this technique to derive side-scrolling ‘timelines’ of distinct routes through the city, stacked in a vertical array and displayed in a custom-aluminum case. One Kilometre, Two Minutes adopts footage of an aerial view of the Gardiner Expressway to analyze traffic patterns and represent this ‘density data’ on a gallery wall with 4,700 map pins. Her most recent work, Pulse Crowds, captures crowd and vehicle movement in dynamic public spaces and uses this footage to create eerie meta-composites – check out the video embedded below.

Concentrated Geographies is showing at WARC (#122 – 401 Richmond Centre, Toronto) through June 4th – see Foster’s website for more info on her work and note the detail shots of the current show and related projects below.

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.

Created by onformative, Berlin based studio founded by Julia Laub and Cedric Kiefer, Fragments of RGB is a project that explores the nature of digital image, it’s construction and interaction with it. By segmenting the RGB pixels in the image and associating it to users by their proximity, the project aims to elevate individual relationships and perception of “point of view”.

We became interested in the observer’s personal view and in »re-projecting« this. The installation reacted to and changed with the viewer’s movement and, hence, his perspective and point of view. The illusion of a LED screen was destroyed and the RGB elements dissolved to form new, translated images and, thus, a transformed »reality«.

Beside the installation that illustrates the sensitive interaction between person and image, fragments of RGB is also intended as a photographic series in which the transformations that occurred on the display were photographed.

View fragments of RGB Flickr Set + Project Page