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As 2015 winds down we look back at almost 200 extraordinary projects we’ve covered this year on CAN. And as is the case every year, picking the ten ‘best’ is hard if not impossible, as each of them has driven the conversation around the state of art and design in their own unique way. And yet, the following ten works stuck with us and, if anything, make great starting points for reflection and inspiration as we head into the new year. Until we continue our coverage in early January: happy holidays and thank you all for a great 2015!
23/12/2015Superflux are a design and foresight consultancy based in London. Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Arden in 2009, the studio produces prototypes and films that are simultaneously prescient, and playful—and now they can add ‘magazine publisher’ to that list of outputs. A few weeks ago the studio announced the first edition of Superflux, a Warren Ellis-edited periodical that would mutate with each edition. The first issue is a handsome A1 poster expanding on their recent work with drones and the duo has engaged in an interview with CAN about their new project.
20/05/2015At CAN we don’t really care for lists. But as we look back as the year winds down, we’re known to make an exception. To keep up with our tradition, we present our most memorable projects of the year.
18/12/2014Created by Kyle McDonald, “Sharing Faces” uses a megapixel surveillance camera and custom software to match the face locations of the persons looking at the screen. As the person moves, new images are pulled from the database matching the new location and create a mirror-like image of yourself using the images of others.
27/08/2014An abstract representation of this landscape is created from a matrix of 529 acrylic pipes piercing the ceiling between the first and the second floor, creating organic rock-like formations on the first floor reflected as an ocean surface on the second.
18/08/2014Through an inspiring tutorial with 26 code examples Amnon Owed shows you how to use Processing to explore the creative possibilities of generative typography.
22/07/2014Lunar Surface is the latest in the series of projects by the Kimchi and Chips duo investigating digital light as a semi-material to articulate digital visual mass in physical space.
19/06/2014Weird Second-order Loops is a series of computer-generated animation loops that never repeat. Each of the loops is centred around a playful and simple cyclical idea that is a procedural reinterpretation of a long existing animation cliché, potentiating it ad infinitum.
18/06/2014Created by London-based creative agencies Squint/Opera and Hirsch&Mann, Discovery Wall is a wall-sized installation created from thousands of tiny screens and lenses.
06/06/2014Video projectors are one of the most important tools for creators of interactive installations. The information for projectors is available on various websites, but this 2 part guide will focus on their use in production and interactive environments.
14/04/2014Google’s got a new consumer hardware initiative is a mobile phone with machine vision eyes, ultra-fast inner-ears and spatially aware brains. And around that 5″ Android reference hardware, could this be all your AR Kickstarters come true?
24/02/2014Created as a collaboration between between Radiohead, Nigel Godrich, Stanley Donwood and Universal Everything, Polyfauna is a living, breathing, growing touchscreen environment, born from abstraction of the studio sessions from King of Limbs and the organic drawings of Stanley Donwood.
11/02/2014‘Your Line or Mine’ is an interactive installation in the Stedelijk Museum comprised of three continually changing crowd sourced animations drawn entirely by the museum’s visitors.
24/01/2014Karsten and Ricardo bring you this comprehensive introduction to Clojure and functional programming. From syntaxes, symbols, vars & namespaces to data structures, sequences, recursive processing and destructuring.
28/12/2013It’s that time of the year when we take a week break and unplug from the internet. Before we step away, it is our duty to highlight some of the projects that we found to be the most memorable.
20/12/2013‘Type/Dynamics’ is a new interactive installation by LUST for the exhibition of work by the graphic designer Jurriaan Schrofer (1926-1990) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
20/12/2013CAN goes in-depth with the Paris-based ‘anticipatory’ design studio N O R M A L S to learn about their forthcoming dark, dense, and dizzying graphic novel series. Working process, representational techniques (that bridge illustration and code), and a critical reading of contemporary design fiction.
06/12/2013The Raspberry Pi is a very exciting low cost computing platform aimed at the educational market. It offers reasonable performance in a small package at a price of $25, making it very attractive for creative computing projects. Here we show you how to run openFrameworks on the Raspberry Pi.
21/11/2013John Lennon: The Bermuda Tapes in an interactive Album App that tells the story of John Lennon’s life changing journey sailing through a mid-Atlantic storm to Bermuda in June 1980, the creative discovery during his time on the island and the artistic collaboration from abroad with wife Yoko Ono at home in New York.
15/11/2013inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way.
13/11/2013Hyperfeel is a series of four video artworks by FIELD produced for the launch of the Hyperfeel shoe for Nike. Animated in Houdini using procedural/generative processes, pieces capture “macro-textural, sensual aesthetic” – describing emotions of running on different terrains: on sand, grass, tarmac and trail.
29/10/2013Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures by Quayola and a contemporary homage to Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”.
25/10/2013In this tutorial we will show you how to create an application using Cinder that grabs photos from Instagram to create real-time animated kaleidoscopes. We’ll look at the technical details of the (simplified) version that is now included as a sample with Cinder (0.8.5+).
17/10/2013Benedikt Groß is a speculative and computational designer whose work is often featured on here on CAN. We recently interviewed him in order to glean a little insight about Benedikt’s thoughts his recent work, ‘outsider’ cartography, and generative strategies.
11/10/2013The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner made entirely of Lego, but if you take a photo of it with a smartphone, and thanks to openFrameworks and openCV all of the events and timings are synchronised to an online, digital calendar.
30/09/2013CAN gets a sneak peak of the new installation by Universal Everything opening this week at the new Media Space gallery at the Science Museum in London. We also speak to Mike Tucker about the project development, concepts and the ideas leading up to the final install.
18/09/2013Landscape Futures is a recent book edited by Geoff Manaugh that unpacks the wildest intersections of landscape architecture, technology and perception. CAN interviewed Manaugh about the book last week to provide a window into this ambitious curatorial (and now editorial) project.
12/09/2013Developed as a collaboration between Quayola & Sinigaglia, Dedalo is a collection of custom developed vvvv engines (and a toolkit) to generate, exchange and map data between a series of graphics modules and a rendering engine used for live performance.
05/09/2013This project, a collaboration between Dentsu, Honda Motor and Rhizomatiks brings back Senna’s engine sound from that lap 24 years ago in the form of an installation set on the original Suzuka circuit that uses light and sound.
12/08/2013rymdkapsel, ‘Excellence in Design’ winner from IGF is now available for the iOS. rymdkapsel is a game where you take command of a space station and its minions, explore space and build the best base possible.
01/08/2013As 2015 winds down we look back at almost 200 extraordinary projects we’ve covered this year on CAN. And as is the case every year, picking the ten ‘best’ is hard if not impossible, as each of them has driven the conversation around the state of art and design in their own unique way. And yet, the following ten works stuck with us and, if anything, make great starting points for reflection and inspiration as we head into the new year. Until we continue our coverage in early January: happy holidays and thank you all for a great 2015!
Tags: 2015 / art / best of / Digital / interaction / interaction design / interactive arts / performance / projects / science / software / virtual reality / vr
Superflux are a design and foresight consultancy based in London. Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Arden in 2009, the studio produces prototypes and films that are simultaneously prescient, and playful—and now they can add ‘magazine publisher’ to that list of outputs. A few weeks ago the studio announced the first edition of Superflux, a Warren Ellis-edited periodical that would mutate with each edition. The first issue is a handsome A1 poster expanding on their recent work with drones and the duo has engaged in an interview with CAN about their new project.
At CAN we don’t really care for lists. But as we look back as the year winds down, we’re known to make an exception. To keep up with our tradition, we present our most memorable projects of the year.
Tags: 2014 / art / best of / conceptual art / Digital / featured / Games / interaction / interactive arts / iPad / performance / projects / science / software
Created by Kyle McDonald, “Sharing Faces” uses a megapixel surveillance camera and custom software to match the face locations of the persons looking at the screen. As the person moves, new images are pulled from the database matching the new location and create a mirror-like image of yourself using the images of others.
Tags: APAP / camera / computer vision / data / debug / debug screen / face tracker / history / Inspiration / Kyle McDonald / location / mirror / network / node / place / process / Reference / ycam
An abstract representation of this landscape is created from a matrix of 529 acrylic pipes piercing the ceiling between the first and the second floor, creating organic rock-like formations on the first floor reflected as an ocean surface on the second.
Tags: Abida / acrylic / architecture / Design Group / featured / installation / Intek & Ctrl+N / kinect / landscape / making of / mechanical / ofxAssimpModelLoader / ofxKinectCommonBridge / ofxMultipleKinects / ofxOpenCvsensors / ofxUI / pc / process / responsive / simulation / visualisation
Through an inspiring tutorial with 26 code examples Amnon Owed shows you how to use Processing to explore the creative possibilities of generative typography.
Tags: 3d / agents / aggregate drawing / Amnon Owed / code / example / fonts / generative / generative typography / Geomerative / Hemesh / learning / open source / pdf / Processing / reaction diffusion / tutorial / typography / voronoi
Lunar Surface is the latest in the series of projects by the Kimchi and Chips duo investigating digital light as a semi-material to articulate digital visual mass in physical space.
Tags: 3d / Elliot Woods / Environment / generative / image / Kimchi and Chips / kinect / long exposure / Mimi Son / photography / projection / space
Weird Second-order Loops is a series of computer-generated animation loops that never repeat. Each of the loops is centred around a playful and simple cyclical idea that is a procedural reinterpretation of a long existing animation cliché, potentiating it ad infinitum.
Tags: animation / c++ / canvas / code / featured / generative / html5 / loop / lua / Matthias Dörfelt / moka / mokafolio / paperjs / process / programming / realtime / software studio / ucla
Created by London-based creative agencies Squint/Opera and Hirsch&Mann, Discovery Wall is a wall-sized installation created from thousands of tiny screens and lenses.
Tags: Daniel Hirchmann / display / hacking / Hirsch&Mann / installation / ipod / iPod nano / resolution / reverse engineering / screen / Squint/Opera
Video projectors are one of the most important tools for creators of interactive installations. The information for projectors is available on various websites, but this 2 part guide will focus on their use in production and interactive environments.
Tags: Blair Neal / crt / dlp / guide / how to / information / installation / lcd / learning / portable / projectors / tutorial / vga
Google’s got a new consumer hardware initiative is a mobile phone with machine vision eyes, ultra-fast inner-ears and spatially aware brains. And around that 5″ Android reference hardware, could this be all your AR Kickstarters come true?
Tags: Advanced Technology and Projects Group / Android / computer vision / cv / google / Johnny Chung Lee / mobile / research / spatial
Created as a collaboration between between Radiohead, Nigel Godrich, Stanley Donwood and Universal Everything, Polyfauna is a living, breathing, growing touchscreen environment, born from abstraction of the studio sessions from King of Limbs and the organic drawings of Stanley Donwood.
‘Your Line or Mine’ is an interactive installation in the Stedelijk Museum comprised of three continually changing crowd sourced animations drawn entirely by the museum’s visitors.
Tags: conditional design / drawing / Events / exhibition / installation / Moniker / nodejs / paper / paperjs / Stedelijk Museum / unity
Karsten and Ricardo bring you this comprehensive introduction to Clojure and functional programming. From syntaxes, symbols, vars & namespaces to data structures, sequences, recursive processing and destructuring.
Tags: Clojure / education programming / functional / functional programming / Java / karsten schmidt / learning clojure / Lisp / Ricardo Sanchez / tutorial
It’s that time of the year when we take a week break and unplug from the internet. Before we step away, it is our duty to highlight some of the projects that we found to be the most memorable.
Tags: 3d printing / art / collection / installations / interaction / interaction design / Interface / light installation / list / mapping / News / projects / technology
‘Type/Dynamics’ is a new interactive installation by LUST for the exhibition of work by the graphic designer Jurriaan Schrofer (1926-1990) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Tags: data / data visualisation / Events / exhibition / installation / Jurriaan Schrofer / kinect / LUST / museum / process / representation / Stedelijk Museum / visualisation
CAN goes in-depth with the Paris-based ‘anticipatory’ design studio N O R M A L S to learn about their forthcoming dark, dense, and dizzying graphic novel series. Working process, representational techniques (that bridge illustration and code), and a critical reading of contemporary design fiction.
Tags: book / comic / complexity / featured / fiction / future / future scenario / graphic design / graphicdesign / illustration / interview / N O R M A L S / networks / normals / speculative / speculative fiction
The Raspberry Pi is a very exciting low cost computing platform aimed at the educational market. It offers reasonable performance in a small package at a price of $25, making it very attractive for creative computing projects. Here we show you how to run openFrameworks on the Raspberry Pi.
Tags: Andreas Müller / code / download / github / Jason Van Cleave / learning / openFrameworks / raspberrypi / tutorial
John Lennon: The Bermuda Tapes in an interactive Album App that tells the story of John Lennon’s life changing journey sailing through a mid-Atlantic storm to Bermuda in June 1980, the creative discovery during his time on the island and the artistic collaboration from abroad with wife Yoko Ono at home in New York.
Tags: AppStore / Design I/O / interactive / ios / iPad / John Lennon / openFrameworks / storytelling
inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way.
Tags: Daniel Leithinger / Hiroshi Ishii / Interface / medialab / projection / projection mapping / research / screen / Sean Follmer / tangible / Tangible Media Group
Hyperfeel is a series of four video artworks by FIELD produced for the launch of the Hyperfeel shoe for Nike. Animated in Houdini using procedural/generative processes, pieces capture “macro-textural, sensual aesthetic” – describing emotions of running on different terrains: on sand, grass, tarmac and trail.
Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures by Quayola and a contemporary homage to Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”.
Tags: Eindhoven / Events / gallery / installation / Julien Vuillet / maps / Matt Swoboda / mu gallery / Natan Sinigaglia / process / quayola / realtime / rendering / robotics / sculpture / vvvv / zbrush
In this tutorial we will show you how to create an application using Cinder that grabs photos from Instagram to create real-time animated kaleidoscopes. We’ll look at the technical details of the (simplified) version that is now included as a sample with Cinder (0.8.5+).
Tags: barbarian group / Cinder / Greg Kepler / images / instagram / kaleidoscopes / learning / mirror / process / tutorial
Benedikt Groß is a speculative and computational designer whose work is often featured on here on CAN. We recently interviewed him in order to glean a little insight about Benedikt’s thoughts his recent work, ‘outsider’ cartography, and generative strategies.
Tags: Benedikt Groß / book / generative / interview / landscape / mapping / publishing
The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner made entirely of Lego, but if you take a photo of it with a smartphone, and thanks to openFrameworks and openCV all of the events and timings are synchronised to an online, digital calendar.
Tags: calendar / lego / mobile / Objects / office / opencv / openFrameworks / Productivity / tangible / time management / vitamins / vitamins design
CAN gets a sneak peak of the new installation by Universal Everything opening this week at the new Media Space gallery at the Science Museum in London. We also speak to Mike Tucker about the project development, concepts and the ideas leading up to the final install.
Tags: Andreas Müller / Chris Perry / installation / Matt Pyke / media space / Mike Tucker / science museum / Simon Pyke / Tim Gfrerer / unity / Universal Everything
Landscape Futures is a recent book edited by Geoff Manaugh that unpacks the wildest intersections of landscape architecture, technology and perception. CAN interviewed Manaugh about the book last week to provide a window into this ambitious curatorial (and now editorial) project.
Developed as a collaboration between Quayola & Sinigaglia, Dedalo is a collection of custom developed vvvv engines (and a toolkit) to generate, exchange and map data between a series of graphics modules and a rendering engine used for live performance.
Tags: ableton / DirectX11 / gpu. audio-responsive / performance / quayola / realtime / rendering / Sinigaglia / Sound / vvvv
This project, a collaboration between Dentsu, Honda Motor and Rhizomatiks brings back Senna’s engine sound from that lap 24 years ago in the form of an installation set on the original Suzuka circuit that uses light and sound.
Tags: analysis / code / Daito Manabe / data / dentsu / formula 1 / Hidenori Chiba / Hiroyuki Hori / honda / mapping / MaxMSP / Muryo Honma / open frameworks / Qosmo / racing / representation / rhizomatiks / Satoru Higa / Shipoo / Sound / Tomoaki Yanagisawa / visualisation
rymdkapsel, ‘Excellence in Design’ winner from IGF is now available for the iOS. rymdkapsel is a game where you take command of a space station and its minions, explore space and build the best base possible.