Machine drawn digital artworks based on nature itself. Originally created for the 1st Antarctic Biennale “Levitate” is an artwork visualising and interpreting natural phenomenons and systems, capturing the beauty and complexity of nature. Visual data captured around the globe forms the inspiration and foundation of each unique artwork. “Levitate” is a symbiosis between computer and…

In today’s mercurial, complex, and ambiguous world, our bodies oscillate between the virtual and the real more than ever. The world-famous collective Rhizomatiks is testing the web, presenting performances and experimental online-based systems, and approaching these situations from a variety of angles.

Field of Sounds is a pioneering audio technology designed by London-based studio Kai Lab. It is a wireless multichannel sound system that allows spatialised and perfectly synchronous audio playback. The unique system presents an enormous range of compositional and curatorial possibilities for sound designers, allowing for the presentation of three-dimensional sound works in any setting,…

How to materialize invisible data, inherent to wireless communication protocols? Author: Béatrice Lartigue, Lab212Commissioned by: ISDAT, Toulouse, FRACourse: Master DesignTopic: WiFi, “Wireless Fidelity” refers to a set of communication protocols used for wireless data transmission within a computer network. “Wireless communication is thus invading our functional space. Some people speak of an ambient network, like…

[objt] is a system that encourages people to browse news with different perspectives. Insight: As journalism became more influential so politicians battled to control it. Journalism nowadays is about power. Power over information, Holding power to account or providing propaganda. It claimed to make and break careers, swing elections and even start wars. Algorithms created…

HOLO is ending the year with a bang: a new website. Launched six weeks ago,
HOLO.mg expands the print magazine into a more robust, ‘always on’ editorial and curatorial platform. Already a hub of activity, two major research projects are underway, and a slate of new stories and favourites from the HOLO archive are due in 2021.

Sinusoidal Noise is a modular light installation that uses random oscillating patterns to create a larger sense of movement. The work comprises 98 pixels each of which fades on and off at a unique frequency. These slow, detuned oscillations create the illusion of shapes emerging, where light appears to pass between pixels as they move…

At every moment, we are surrounded by thousands of sounds too quiet to hear: bubbles in water, the movement of an insect’s legs, sand falling in an hourglass. Objects oscillating with undetectable amplitudes are creating symphonies all around us that we are deaf to. How can we tune into the secret sonic landscapes of the…

Wave Fragment is a kinetic light sculpture that is in the ability to display wind-related flow fields by the reflection of light, inspired by the continuous movement of water.

Passifolia is a collective experience, made-to-mesure for La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and made up of 16 interactive modules organically set up in space.

In November 2019, CAN joined the biannual ECAL Research Day to find out how methodologies borrowed from science and engineering can strengthen creative practice—and drive the conversation.

SFPC tutor Celine Wong Katzman reflects on yet another successful session at the artist run school in New York.

As per tradition each year, December is when we look back at the amazing work published on CAN. From ingenious machines and installations to mesmerising experiences that leverage new mediums for artistic inquiry – we added scores of projects to CAN’s archive in 2019. Here are some highlights.

‘Digital Fabrications’ is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline.

Created by Nicolas Boillot, ‘Vectoglyph’ is a project exploring both the behaviour and implications of GPT-2 AI, a text generating model developed by OpenAI that is able to generate coherent texts in English on demand (including “fake news”).

In Elektra’s 20th year common themes from throughout the history of the festival of machinic bodies and digital transcendence are explored in depth and pushed to their extremes.

Don’t miss the 9th installment of this inspiring Creative Technology Conference.

Created by Michael Sedbon, Alt-C is an installation that uses electricity produced by plants to power a single board computer mining a cryptocurrency. The project questions our relationship to ecosystems in regards to networked technologies and abstraction problematics.

In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton, english mathematician, physicist and astronomer published his highly influential book “Principia Mathematica”, introducing mathematical models for fluids that account for viscosity. Over 300 years later in 2018, his calculations are the foundation of a computer program designed as a drawing tool. Producing his own tools for creation, 1986 born German…

Questioning our notions of wellbeing to develop innovative tools in the intersection of medical and social sciences, Giulia Tomasello investigates the potential of biotechnology and living materials, proposing a biological and sustainable alternative for electronic textiles and more.

Created by Maria Smigieska in collaboration with Pierre Cutellic, Proteus project is an analog digital display that allows for interacting with matter. It is an experiment on the modulation of ferrofluid patterns controlled by both magnetic field and robotic interface.

Created by AnneMarie Maes, Genesis of a Microbial Skin is a mixed media installations and a research project exploring the idea of Intelligent Beehives with a focus on smart materials, in particular microbial skin. The project is about predominantly growing Intelligent Guerilla Beehives from scratch, with living materials – just as nature does. 

Review of the exhibition last month at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea – a collection of 12 works questioning the essential meaning and significance of the data world.

Created by the artist collective WERC, “Pixi” is a digital organism located in a dutch forrest, inspired by the complex patterns that exist in nature and questions whether a technical natural phenomenon can imitate the complex aesthetics of nature or interact with it.

Created by the SCI-Arc faculty Curime Batliner and Jake Newsum in collaboration with Paralelo Architectos, Anachronic Landscapes is a robotic system that lives inside of an abandoned industrial structure overgrown by nature. The system executes its daily routine, nurturing the plants with water and fertilising it with fluorescent fluids. While the machine keeps the plants alive it simultaneously ignites a process of transformation forcing the plants to adapt to the new condition.

Dan Tapper is a British artist based in Toronto that combines his interest in code and celestial form and his recent research project “Turbulent Forms” visualizes and sonifies various cosmic phenomena. To mark the recent exhibition of this work (and related collaborations with several composers) we present this extended conversation with the artist about cosmology and data aesthetics.

Created by David Colombini, The Weather Followers is a commentary on ‘smart’ applications and predictive, comfortable digital routines. Instead of relying on ‘accurate’ data, intangible algorithms and hidden lines of code-driven lifestyles, this device brings serendipity to your digital life, using constantly evolving weather data recorded by four weather instruments.

Created by Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch of Quadrature and currently on view within the Ars Electronica exhibition at the DRIVE Volkswagen Group Forum in Berlin, “Positions of the Unknown” is an installation of 52 custom-made mini machines that, ever so slowly, track unidentified objects (possibly classified satellites) in Earth’s orbit.

Mitchell F Chan’s “Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” updates the contract at the heart of an influential 1958 work by Yves Klein for the age of cyrptocurrency, the blockchain, and smart contracts.

AUDINT is a European artist collective working across animation, installation, and publishing. Drawing on excerpts from an extended conversation with the group, we unpack their vision of the dystopian future-present and the nether zones that can be conjured through sound and vibration.