Schmidt & Pohflepp: Social Collider / William Forsythe & ACCAD: Synchronous Objects
A disclaimer is in order: The following post is not original content, rather it is a collection of links provided by various people on a private mailing list. The initial request (from Memo Akten) was for “really hot data visualization”, and the following suggestions were made by some fairly knowledgeable people.
They are presented here as an unedited list of links, they are listed in the order they appeared on the list. Some are fairly new projects while others are well-known canonical works. Two new favorites are shown above, namely Social Collider and Synchronous Objects.
Some pseudo-random Info Viz links
- Tom Carden: “As always VisualComplexity and Infosthetics are good places to start.” Tom’s Delicious bookmarks on the subject is a treasure trove in its own right.
- A good survey article by Mitchell Whitelaw: Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice
- Data Flow is an excellent book from Die Gestalten presenting an unconventional eye to visualization practices.
- Karsten Schmidt recommends:
- The ever-present Ben Fry: benfry.com/projects (Ben’s blog is an excellent read, by the way)
- Martin Wattenberg et al.: History Flow
- Marius Watz: Knight Capital Group
- Tom Carden’s work, see Stamen and www.tom-carden.co.uk.
- Karsten Schmidt & Sascha Pohflepp: Socialcollider (a Twitter visualization made as an experiment for Google Chrome)
- Karsten Schmidt: Base-26
- William Forsythe and ACCAD (lead generative designer Matthew Lewis): Synchronous Objects
- Emily Gobeille & Theodore Watson: Zanyparade (programmed elements combined with hand-drawn forms)
- Syl Eckermann & Gerald Nestler: Plastic Trade-Off
- Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum
07:52
Fischer & Maus: Reflection, Widrig & Booshan: Binaural
5 Days Off MEDIA: Frozen
Wed 2 through Sat 26 July 2008
Melkweg Mediaroom & Paradiso, Amsterdam
- Andreas Nicolas Fischer & Benjamin Maus (DE)
- Leander Herzog (CH)
- Marius Watz
- Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan (UK)
- Sound: Freiband / Frans de Waard (NL)
- Sound: Alexander Rishaug (NO)
Frozen (part of the 5 Days Off MEDIA festival) is an exhibition of experiments in the representation of sound in media beyond the auditory. It examines the sound signal as a virtual space, presenting possible mappings that visualize or interpret the structures contained within the soundwaves.
Frozen was proposed and commissioned by Jan Hiddink and the 5 Days Off MEDIA festival in Amsterdam, and consists exclusively of original work. It was conceived with Generator.x 2.0 as a conceptual reference (all four artists in the show were also involved in Generator.x 2.0), but with a clearly defined focus: The representation of sound as spatial structures, realized as physical objects through the use of digital fabrication technologies.
For more information, see the documentation in the Frozen Flickr set, Leander Herzog’s FFT set or the blog posts by Benjamin Maus and Andreas Nicolas Fischer.
Leander Herzog: Untitled / Marius Watz: Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto)
Over the past years, there has been an enormous development in the field of live-presented audio-visual performance art. Owing to digital techniques, image and sound are connected in a way that was previously unthinkable. Frozen is headed in the opposite direction. Frozen pulls the plug and presents audio art, prints, and sculptures as independent, but interconnected works of art.
In the Mediaroom at the Melkweg multi-channel sound pieces can be experienced over an advanced speaker setup, accompanied by sound in a "frozen" form: Images and sculptural objects made using sound as input. These artworks use audio analysis and custom software processes to extract meaningful data from the sound signal, creating a mapping between audio and other media. Frozen will feature digital prints as well as four "sound sculptures" created using digital fabrication technology such as rapid prototyping, CNC and laser cutting, which allow for the direct translation of a digital model into physical form.
Frozen arose in collaboration with the Norwegian artist and curator Marius Watz, whose Generator.x project investigates the implications of generative systems and computational models of creation. The recent exhibition Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen brought together artists and architects to explore the potential of this new mode of creation.
‘Audio sculptures’ will be on display by Andreas Nicolas Fischer (DE) & Benjamin Maus (DE), Leander Herzog (CH), Marius Watz (NO) and Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan (UK). These sculptures are based on audioworks by Freiband (Nl, Frans de Waard), and Alexander Rishaug (No).
Frozen is presented in the Melkweg Mediaroom and at Paradiso.
5 Days Off MEDIA is part of the 5 Days Off festival for electronic music from Wed 2 through July 6. 5 Days Off MEDIA presents three themes: Crosswire, Frozen and Roots. Locations: Melkweg, Paradiso, Dutch Institute for Media Art and Heineken Music Hall.
21:04
Brandon Morse: Procedural animation
The stark videos of Brandon Morse present the viewer with excercises in tension, set tableaux in which structures morph and twist under physical constraints. Stripped-down architectural forms that ought to exhibit the rigidity of highrise buildings instead engage in a tug-of-war, the result of a string simulation distributing kinetic force through a network of nodes.
Morse seems to delight in setting up scenarios where seemingly ordered constructs rapidly degenerate under the influence of virtual force, which can only be observed through the dramatic effects it exerts. The end result is a state of irrecoverable chaos, brought about by causal simulated chain of action and reaction.
Unlike software-based generative artworks that exhibit endless timelines, Morse’s videos (created in the high-end animation package Houdini) display a clear dramaturgy. But rather than being a side effect of their status as “canned” video, the presence of an explicit beginning and end is here part and parcel of the work’s logic, reinforcing the movement towards the inevitable.
Favorite setups include explosions and collapses, dryly observed through an impartial camera that merely records the inevitable. Work titles like Cumulus_1 and Big Bang refer to physical simulations. Others, like Preparing for the inevitable (a particle system tornado bearing down on a wireframe house), are more explicitly apocalyptic. But while the implication of doom is clear, the image is deliberately kept abstract and artificial. Lacking a focus for projected empathy, the viewer is left with the sense of observing a scientific experiment, a computer-generated Armageddon minus the carnage.
Brandon Morse: "¡" (still from procedural animation)
Brandon Morse is represented by Conner Contemporary. For more examples of his work, visit his site Coplanar.org.
The video shown above was posted on Morse’s Flickr stream as a test of the new Video on Flickr feature. Hopefully more videos will start appearing on the Generator.x Flickr pool as a result, although the Generator.x channel on Vimeo is still our official choice for posting animated work.
01:23
Generator.x 2.0: Disassembled / Theverymany: Aperiodic_Vertebrae
Saturday was the last day of the Generator.x 2.0 exhibition at [DAM]Berlin. The occasion was marked with an informal curator talk, followed by Q+A. The 1-month show has had a great reception, proving popular both with the Transmediale crowd and the general art viewing public. While it’s always nice to reach with a community of one’s peers, reaching “regular people” is extra satisfying.
A slightly less enjoyable task was the disassembly of the exhibition in preparation for shipping. It is always bittersweet moment to see an exhibition disassembled and stuck in the back of an old Toyota Corrolla. See the following image to get an impression of this anti-climactic view.
Thankfully, any sadness was alleviated by knowing that 24 hours after being packed into this car, the works arrived safely in Turin, Italy to be part of the SHARE Festival. Bruce Sterling is the guest curator of this year’s festival, the theme of which is “Manufacturing”. After Bruce attended to the opening of Generator.x 2.0 we started discussing the possibility of taking the show to SHARE, a plan that will come to fruition tomorrow when the exhibition re-opens in Turin.
Works from fabbing workshop at HyperWerk, Basel
A few of the pieces from Berlin won’t be on display in Turin, for instance Aperiodic_Vertebrae by Theverymany aka Marc Fornes and Skylar Tibbits. This ambitious installation turned out to be too complex for the show at [DAM]Berlin, and so we sadly had to display a creative deconstruction of the intricate polygon structure instead of the cantilever bridge-like form it was meant to be. But now there is the exciting news that Skylar and Marc are producing a reworked and more stable version for NODE08 in Frankfurt. We look forward to seeing documentation of it fully built.
A few pieces have been also been added, the results of a fabbing workshop at HyperWerk that followed on the heels of the Berlin workshop and featured some of the same people. Martin Fuchs has provided some intriguing polygon forms in paper and cardboard that he didn’t have time to finish in Berlin, and Leander Herzog has produced a selection of plastic branching structures that point towards an organic exploration of plastic as material.
As the project now finally winds down, we wish to express our gratitude to everybody who contributed to making Generator.x 2.0 such a great even, in particular the following:
- Club Transmediale, in particular the curators Jan Rohlf and Oliver Baurhenn who gave the project the green light and supported it wonderfully through its various phases.
- Anke Eckardt, for being an excellent producer both for the workshop and for the concert evening.
- [DAM]Berlin and Wolf Lieser, for providing the gallery space and much-needed help in turning a big mess into a presentable exhibition in the space of a single afternoon.
- The Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and its crew, for providing everything from technical support to much-needed coffee.
- Lasern and Martin Bauer, for making it possible to have a laser cutter on site, and for helping out with laser know-how.
- HyperWerk Institute for Postindustrial Design, for fabbing support and for contributing a quota of skilled students.
- The Office For Contemporary Art Norway for supporting the project financially.
- Bruce Sterling and Luca Barbeni of the SHARE Festival, for taking the show to Italy and showing it to a new audience.
Finally, we wish to thank all the participants for their enthusiasm and generous sharing of skills during the workshop. It was a pleasure to work with you. We can only hope that Generator.x 2.0 will result in new networks being formed, with interesting projects as a result.
12:18
Skot (Frank / Gmachl): aka (audio by General Magic) from Tina Frank on Vimeo.
We have posted about the Vienna scene and the Austrian Abstracts here on previous occasions, but the video work that was central to that movement has generally not been available for viewing online. Therefore, it’s with great pleasure we see that Tina Frank has posted some early videos to Vimeo. Let’s hope other artists follow her initiative, it would be nice to have an online archive of these early experiments somewhere.
Shown above is the video AKA by Skot, produced for Gasbook 4. Skot was the name used by Tina Frank and Mathias Gmachl for a number of collaborations from 1996 to 2000. Gmachl is also one of the founders of farmersmanual, a collective that was central to the Vienna scene. “Aka” means “red” in Japanese, and the video was made with Image/ine software from Steim, one of the very first softwares to support realtime processing of video on a regular computer.
Frank created the video "iii" below by taking digital audio files of the music by Peter Rehberg (Pita) and opening them as raw pixel data in Photoshop. An oval image mask was superimposed, giving a more specific form to the resulting video. The result is classic glitch, taking a signal of a given form and deliberately misinterpreting it as something else.
More videos on Tina Frank's Vimeo stream.
Tina Frank: iii (audio by Pita) from Tina Frank on Vimeo.
09:51
Concerts: Rishaug / Watz, Keiichiro Shibuya, alva noto
CTM.08 / Generator.x 2.0: Audio-Visual
Fri Feb 1st, 20:00 – 23:00, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse
- Alexander Rishaug / Marius Watz
- Keiichiro Shibuya [JP]
- alva noto [DE]
CTM.08 and Generator.x present an evening of audiovisual concerts, consisting of three projects that use generative methods for live performance.The artists’ work is based on program code that integrates processes that develop over time autonomously. Music and image are therefore not “composed” in the usual sense of the word; the artists at most structure audio and visual output but without determining its every detail. The visual and acoustic material available to them is not pre-processed; it exists rather, only as matter to be subjected to and modified by certain development principles and rules of transformation in real time. Therefore chance and stochastic processes are major factors, while images can be mapped on audio parameters, and vice versa.
Alongside Alexander Rishaug’s audio miniatures in interaction with Marius Watz’s drawing machines, and Japanese Keiichiro Shibuya’s digital noise based on cellular automata, Carsten Nicolai aka alva noto will present his new project, “xerrox”, in which he explores the artistic potential and unpredictable results of copy processes. Nicolai demonstrates that the act of copying is itself a source of interesting, artistically valuable mistakes and mutations that permit each new generation of a copy to further liberate itself from the original and ultimately become an independent artwork with new meaning. In “xerrox” alva noto works exclusively with samples of Muzak – the wraparound sound ubiquitous in department stores, advertising, film scores and entertainment software – yet uses his own specially developed copying techniques to alter its melodic (micro-)structures beyond recognition.
Generator.x 2.0: Audio-Visual was curated by Jan Rohlf of the Club Transmediale.
[text from Club Transmediale]
01:03
John Maeda: Fireball
Here is an interesting John Maeda quote found over on Brian Steen's blog:
«My early computer art experiments led to the dynamic graphics common on websites today. You know what I’m talking about — all that stuff flying around on the computer screen while you’re trying to concentrate — that’s me. I am partially to blame for the unrelenting stream of “eye candy” littering the information landscape. I am sorry, and for a long while I have wished to do something about it.»
Now, the quote is from his book "The Laws of Simplicity", which gives some much-needed context. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting statement. Were it not for his status as a pioneer and his instrumental role in establishing the field of computational design, it would simply seem like hubris. In one simple statement, he not only takes credit for a field of work, but he also not-so-subtly implies that it has no value. That’s a tall order.
Even if one agrees with Maeda that the current interest in visual complexity is a bad thing, the whole debate around simplicity sounds strangely like the legibility wars of the 1990’s. Faced with digital typography that broke every rule and layered graphics that refused to obey any grid, the ruling masters of Modernism (including Maeda’s hero Paul Rand) denounced the new movement as style over substance – eye candy. However, the subsequent resurgence of Helvetica and diagonal grids showed that ultimately minimalism and maximalism are just styles, there for the choosing.
Maeda’s thoughts on simplicity are of course laudable, presenting a strategy for dealing with the difficulties of a technological society. But when applied to visual styles, it should be remembered that simplicity, like minimalism, can also be, well, boring. Not everyone likes their reality the same way.
Interestingly, the early work that Maeda seems to be disowning with the above statement is also the work his fame is built on. Compared to his more recent output such as the Nature series, the early pieces are visually much bolder and more vibrant. The sheer joy of form documented in his seminal Maeda @ Media book from 2001 seems strangely lacking in his newer works.
The derogatory term “eye candy” has plagued digital art since its inception, and has often been used to deride generative visuals in particular. It’s strange then to hear it used by an artist whose work is so firmly concerned with optical formalism. It seems much like throwing rocks while inside a glass house.
Still, a man should always be respected for trying to kill his darlings. We wish you luck, Mr. Maeda.
(Related reading: Mitchell Whitelaw: More is more: Multiplicity and Generative Art, Douglas Cedric Stanley: Complexity and Gestalt, The Cult of the Ugly)
18:45
Lia: Work from Turux.at
The early-to-mid 1990’s were an interesting time. “Multimedia” was a hot buzzword, and people were wondering if CD-ROM and Internet was here to stay. Macromedia Director ruled the world of interactive graphics, and World Wide Web and HTML was finally transforming the Internet into a visual environment.
Early experiments using the web for art purposes quickly became iconic: Jodi hacked HTML, Form Art was briefly defined as a genre, Net.art considered ironic approaches to art production via this new channel and artists like Stanza explored Director as a tool for generative graphics.
During this (golden) period, Vienna was a hotbed of experimentation. A large group of artists pushed the boundaries of abstraction in visual art as well as music, often experimenting with code-based tools. It should be noted that the term “generative art” was not in use at the time. Nevertheless, the work produced at the time clearly articulated generative and procedural approaches to sound and image synthesis, prefiguring the current interest in such work.
Among this loosely affiliated group were artists like Farmers Manual, Tina Frank, Monoscope, Pure, Lia and Dextro. The music label MEGO and the film label Sixpackfilm provided publishing outlets. Norbert Pfaffenbichler put together an overview of the scene in the exhibition Austrian Abstracts in 2006, which expanded on the previous exhibition Abstraction Now, focusing specifically on the activities of Austrian artists.
Dextro: Turux piece / c079
Early pioneers of generative Director programming, Lia and Dextro quickly became influential both inside and outside the Director community. Their mix of crisp pixels, erratic animation and blurred surfaces was unique at the time, presenting a perfect visual counterpoint to a musical scene experimenting with glitch and sound defects.
Together, they produced Turux, a seminal web site which featured Director “soundtoys” and generative visual sketches. Thanks to the site’s intentionally cryptic interface design and the “anonymous author” fad popular with the Vienna artists (many of which used pseudonyms or group names), the authorship of Turux was unclear to outsiders. Often, visitors had no idea if Lia, Dextro or Turux were actual people or just project names. Nevertheless, Turux became an important reference for the nascent scene, its fame only heightened by its obscure origin.
When the collaboration ended some time later, Turux remained online practically unchanged. As a document of a specific time period, it became a time capsule of styles and strategies.
The original Turux.org is now offline for good, having been replaced by a placeholder. But Lia and Dextro have both set up their own archives. Lia recently launched Turux.at, a partial archive of her half of the project. Included are 21 works in Director, documented as stills and interactive Shockwave movies.
Dextro’s Turux experiments have been integrated into dextro.org, which presents his work chronologically organized from his early period up to now. See the Turux subpage for a list of sketches. For an example of his newer work, see c079.
22:55
![Lab[au]: PixFlow #2](http://www.generatorx.no/wp-content/uploads/071026_labau_pixflow.jpg)
Lab[au]: PixFlow #2
Our friends at Lab[au] have sent us an update on a recent project called PixFlow #2. This multi-screen piece explores emergent behaviors in particles moving through a constantly morphing vector field, producing complex behaviors over time. Particles migrate from screen to screen, hypnotically forming lines, eddies and vortices.
PixFlow was originally developed as an permanent 11-screen installation for the Grand Casino Brussels, but this new 4-screen version is slightly more portable. Designed as a modular system, it encloses the stripped hardware used in an elegant T-shaped perspex casing. The piece is run off flash memory so that it’s stable for long-term use. The architecture even allows switching to new software at a later date.
Based in Brussels, Lab[au] are veterans of media art and experimental architecture. They’ve made a mark in the past with their Mediaruimte showroom for electronic art and their collaborations with the Cimatics festival. They have also produced and curated several light pieces for the spectacular Dexia Tower media facade in downtown Brussels.
21:44
USGS Astrogeology Research Program: West side of the moon
30gms just posted a link to the work of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Research Program on mapping the Moon. The maps are based on data from lunar missions in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and show the geological composition of the lunar surface.
The maps are visually stunning in their abstraction. The many craters become clusters of colors, giving the appearance of a complex composition. The palette is striking and chosen for contrast, but avoiding primary color clichés. Interestingly, both the colors and composition make the maps somewhat reminiscent of the work of Joshua Davis. Compare for instance with his light box images for OFFF.
The USGS site generously offers digital downloads of the maps in a variety of formats. The PDF versions are full vector quality, and are amazing to look at in high resolution. Would-be astrogeologists should check out the USGS Planetary GIS Web Server, a project with the charming acronym PIGWAD.
USGS Astrogeology Research Program: West side of the moon
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