Is post social media friendship an emotional investment of diminishing returns? It really depends who you ask. Midwest-based designer Colin Pinegar’s recent BFA project Best Friends definitely calls the authenticity of ubiquitous connectivity into question, or at least adds some nuance to qualifying these relationships. Pinegar created a ‘scorecard’ for his Facebook friends that awarded each online connection 1-25 points based off a range of criteria (do I know this person’s phone number? can I recognize this person by their name alone? etc.)

Continue reading.... Best Friends – Casting in wax 451 connections on Facebook [Objects]

A few months ago, Marc Tiedemann got asked to come up with an animations for the upcoming documentary ”DAIKU | 10000 Japaner singen Beethovens Neunte” to be aired 31.12.2011 15:20 on ARTE. They required a main title and graphics within the movie. Friedemann Hottenbacher, the director of the piece, showed him the work of Malinowski which turned out to be the key inspiration for the graphics.

Thinking of Japan and Osaka, big cities as well as tradition came to mind. So the result should in a way resemble both while still keeping the aesthetics of a notational system. So I started to program my very own Music Machine based on a simple FFT analysis via processing and played around with shapes and the depth in 3D space.

Continue reading.... Daiku [Processing, Sound]

Solyaris by Beat Raess is an “exploration into organic information design to visualise movies, actors, directors and their relationship”. The application for iPad made in Cinder allows you to search the entire Open Movie Database (TMDb) collection for movies, actors or directors. Expand nodes to gather information about their connections. Learn about the cast and filmography.

Continue reading.... Solyaris [iPad, Cinder]

What is a truly realistic portrait? This question inspired a project about going beyond physical appearances and attempting to render the interior world of a human being, through memories, emotions, relationships and personal story.

These are the questions that concern Sergio Albiac, which he attempts to answer in his latest project “Videorative Portrait of Randall Okita”. A progression from “Content is Queen: a generative video painting”, like it’s predecessor, it paints a Videorative portrait (a generative, narrative and interactive video portrait). The software starts with collecting personal videos of the person portrayed, tagged by him/her with relevant concepts and descriptions. Then, using the Processing application, the user “paints with meanings” and generates a video portrait, subtitled with generative personal narratives.

Continue reading.... Videorative Portrait of Randall Okita [Processing]

Baroque.me by Alexander Chen visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites by drawing notes as strings. Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.

I created eight strings, as the Prelude’s natural phrasing is in groups of eight notes. The orbiting nodes pluck the strings, like a rotating music box. The user can also grab and throw the nodes off track, and watch the system slowly regain its rhythm. A harp is built around string length, with strings shortening as they ascend in pitch. This piece behaves like an impossible harp, as strings morph to the needed lengths. The looping, eight-note pattern is something we see all the time in grid-based drum sequencers. Bach’s Prelude is actually very grid-like as well. At every moment, the piece shows a visual snapshot of an arpeggio. It shows which notes change from bar to bar, and which stay the same.

Continue reading.... Baroque.me [Javascript, Sound]

T(ether) is a novel spatially aware display that supports intuitive interaction with volumetric data.

Created by  Matthew Blackshaw (@mblackshaw), Dávid Lakatos (@dogichow), Hiroshi Ishii and Ken Perlin, the display acts as a window offering users a perspective view of three- dimensional data through tracking of head position and orientation. Virtual objects can be created and manipulated through gestures made using the hand. Likewise, multiple people can edit the same virtual environment.

T(ether) creates a 1:1 mapping between real and virtual coordinate space allowing immersive exploration of the joint domain. Our system creates a shared workspace in which co-located or remote users can collaborate in both the real and virtual worlds. The system allows input through capacitive touch on the display and a motion-tracked glove. When placed behind the display, the user’s hand extends into the virtual world, enabling the user to interact with objects directly.

Continue reading.... T(ether) [Cinder]

Created by D3, digital production company based in Sao Paolo, ‘Circle of Trust’ shows your asymmetric relationship network at Google Plus.

Is there a way to visualize how each person is using and constructing this social environment?

The team wanted want to create a good real example of how the brand new Google+ API could be used. The project was inspired by Jack Byrnes, character of the movie Meet the Parents. Interpreting Jack’s theory, the team made a simple algorithm to visualize who are the people that are inside your circle of trust and who are the people out. In the visualizations the green are the people you have circled and they have circled you back, yellow is for people that you cared to circle but they didn’t, and red is for people that have circled you but you didn’t care to circle back.

Continue reading.... Circle of Trust [Javascript]

Created by Émile Sacré, Kulbuto is an installation and an instrument, exploring possibilities of non-uniform compositions by both visualising what is being created and using the visual content as the driving force behind the rhythmic cycles.

The formal outcome of Kulbuto is based on principles of changing rates, determined by graphic collisions at speeds. We are facing environment created by tensions, where some variations of unstable rhythmic cycles are synchronized and de-synchronized in time. The composition appears “wobbly” which varies across different types of sequencing. In a way, we can say that this device is the opposite of the principle of arpeggiator, controller and tool rack of from the rhythmic point of view.

Continue reading.... Kulbuto [Quarz Composer, Sound]

Created by Matthias Dörfelt, Handwritten Invoice is a response to the mundane task of writing invoices, replaced by computer generated visualisation of moneys owed as well as a handwritten typeface.

After I set down and started working on my first invoice design using a template file of apples famous text processing software pages I quickly felt very bored. I asked myself how I could create something that rather fits the rest of my work and that does not look like any other vanilla invoice paper. I thought that something more personal would be great which does not look like a computer written document. Everybody likes handwritten letters. Their individuality gets rarer and rarer in the digitialized world and thus I decided I want handwritten invoices

Continue reading.... Handwritten Invoice [Python, Nodebox]