‘How much should we let algorithms shape our lives?’ is the question at the heart of Ed Finn’s recent book “What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing”. Scanning Silicon Valley, computer science, and the cultural sphere alike it offers a smart and accessible reading of our current moment.

This summer, visitors to Sao Paulo’s Itau Cultural Gallery find themselves face-to-face with a host of artificial life forms. Amongst them is a new version of artist Ruairi Glynn’s interactive installation ‘Fearful Symmetry’, which was first shown at the Tate Modern, London, in 2012.

Created by California-based artist Sterling Crispin, Cyber Paint is a freshly-released VR painting app for Google’s Daydream platform. Not so much a painting simulator, its creator describes it as a “laboratory for algorithmic mark-making.”

Created by Ted Davis, XYscope is a library for Processing to render graphics on a vector display (oscilloscope, laser) by converting them to audio.

Created by Thomas Grogan, Floral Automaton is a sculptural device that grows flowers digitally. Using various sensors taken from Smart Cities technologies, it reacts and adapts itself to its environment in real time.

Developed at Strelka during the ‘The New Normal Program’ in 2017, ‘SHIFT’ (Arthur Röing Baer, Christian Lavista, Dmitry Alferov, Liza Dorrer) is a project that engages with stages of automation of the trucking industry in Russia, working with the socio-political, physical, and spatial particulars of logistics in the country’s vast territory.

Neural Network experiment by Eddie Lee uses evolutionary NN to simulate AI path finding of Froggy-style game mechanic. Every generation, it chooses the “fittest” critters and asexually reproduces them.

Created by Manuel Jiménez Garcia and Gilles Retsin, ‘Voxel Chair’ is a first prototype designed using a new design software specifically developed for robotic 3D-Printing which rather than using pre-defined forms and then “slicing” these it into toolpaths or triangular patterns, allows to design and control thousands of line-fragments.

Created by Philipp Schmitt (with Margot Fabre), ‘Computed Curation’ is a photobook created by a computer. Taking the human editor out of the loop, it uses machine learning and computer vision tools to curate a series of photos from an archive of pictures.

A follow-up to the influential 2012 booklet series “Critical Making,” “Disobedient Electronics: Protest” is a new zine by Vancouver-based theorist and educator Garnet Hertz that uses dissent as a lens to survey electronics-based projects and practices.

Created by Marion Pinaffo & Raphaël Pluviange, ‘Papier Machine’ is a booklet gathering a family of 13 paper-made electronic toys ready to be cut, coloured, folded, assembled or torn.

Created by Leslie Nooteboom, komorebi is a platform that uses a robotic projector and generative projections to replicate the natural reflections and shadows of sunlight. komorebi can create sunlight filtering through leaves or a dance of light and shadow.

Created by London based convivial studio, Kinedioscope is a technique used to create animated depth effects on static photographs. The process is comprised of reverse-engineering the technology of photogrammetry in order to perfectly align the photography with the perspective of the 3D model and create depth and masking effects.

‘Technological Nature’ is a recent short film by media artist and designer Daria Jelonek exploring the emulation of natural phenomena with technology. Auroras, rainbows, and glaring sunlight, are all recreated with everyday materials in an eerily empty domestic environment.

Created by Belarusian composer Ales Tsurko, ‘microscale’ is a music album generated from random Wikipedia articles where letters are the sequencer steps and the track titles are regular expressions that switch the steps on and off.

Created by London-based musical duo the Network Ensemble, Selected Network Studies is a series of audiovisual pieces created using network data collected from a number of locations across London, Berlin and Rome. It is released as limited edition UV-printed, vacuum-sealed mylar package containing a 2GB SD Card with one hour of video material and 45 minutes of sound material.

“Reflective Sculptures: A Critique of Binary Beliefs” is a pair of kinetic sculptures by the Ontario-based artists St Marie φ Walker. Produced as part of their MFA show, the motorized devices sit halfway between poems and machines.

Created by Technical Earth (Mo H. Zareei + Jim Murphy), interference [dac] is an audiovisual installation that explores the combination and interaction of waveforms in one medium with those of another. In the installation, which includes a linear array of four miniature projectors  affixed to loudspeaker cones, sound waves affect light waves while analogue elements alter digital ones.

Created by the Responsive Environments team at the MIT Media Lab, the ‘FabricKeyboard’ explores the concept of stretchable fabric “sensate media” as a musical instrument. The work is a response to the current developments of textile sensors, stretchable nature of knitted fabrics, and vast growth of new digital music instruments.

Created by Martin Backes, ‘I am sitting in a machine’ is a two part work algorithmic work consisting of a dubplate vinyl and a webpage containing 32 tracks selected from 3000 successive iterations of MP3 encoding.

“Queer Games Studies” is a recent collection of thematic essays published by the University of Minnesota Press that schematizes LGBTQ approachs to thinking about – and making – videogames.

Created by Matthias Dörfelt, ‘Block Bills’ is a series of 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain. Each banknote represents one block in the chain and the whole series consist of 64 consecutive blocks starting at block #456476.

Guillaume Massol’s openFrameworks app titled “All work and no play” watches videos coming from different training datasets and generates sentences loosely based on what is happening on the screen, sometimes creating pearls of wisdom by coincidence.

NODE17 x FRAMED are calling for vvvv artwork submissions for the forthcoming festival taking place in Frankfurt/Germany from 26 June until 2nd of July, 2017.

Created by Mike Hogan, Karen Hogan and Orkan Telhan, ‘Microbial Design Studio’ is a countertop biofabrication machine that brings together the capabilities of a biology wetlab into a single inexpensive piece of hardware to design, culture, and test genetically modified organisms.

Created by the R&D team at the creative technology agency DT, Anti AI AI is a wearable  neural network prototype designed to notify the wearer when a synthetic voice is detected in the environment.

Created by Refik Anadol in collaboration with Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program, ‘Archive Dreaming’ is a 6 meters wide circular installation that employs machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,700,000 documents.

In just a short few weeks, NODE is back for another edition and invites you to take part in a week long exploration of creative technologies.

Created by Seoul based duo Kimchi and Chips, “The Light Barrier Third Edition” is the latest and largest in the series of works by the studio to create volumetric drawings in the air using hundreds of calibrated video projections.

Created by Román Torre and Ángeles Angulo (Rotor Studio), THERO is an object designed to allow users to manage and be aware of their data traffic in a (literally) physical way.