09:39
Amber Frid-Jimenez and Philip DeCamp: Shrub: Variations on tree structures
Shrub is a series of sketches of tree structures, by MIT Media Lab students Amber Frid-Jimenez and Philip DeCamp. It starts off looking as one would expect, then wanders off into the exotic. Some feel more like drawing than visualizations.
Both Frid-Jimenez and DeCamp were involved in another project called Document Icons, a software sketch designed to allow the user to search through the contents of millions of text documents using histograms. The technique looks like it could also work well for tag heavy sites. Infosthetics blogged it here.
(via del.icio.us/tomc and infosthetics).
09:29
Soundtoys.net | Stanza:amorphoscapes | Hoyle/Baker: Soundtoys.net navigator
Soundtoys.net, the brain-child of UK artist Stanza and veteran survivor of online interactive art, has relaunched in new glory. Retooled by Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi) in a new “web2.006 framework” called @emitter, Soundtoys has made the jump overnight from old-school semi-static site to being all-dynamic, tagged and blogged.
Soundtoys contains a wealth of old and not-so-old works, including more than a few gems from the productive period of Shockwave experimentation in the mid-to-late 90s. To get a good idea of the scope of the project, have a look at the artists page. It reads almost like a who’s who of a cross-section of new media art and experimental design.
Adam Hoyle and Julian Baker have contributed a soundtoys.net content navigator, which allows interactive navigation of the project database using the tags. Users can combine individual tags to combine them as a search, get a short description of the piece and launch it directly from the navigator. Although some of the pieces may make your browser complain about Shockwave’s brutish ways (or even crash outright), persisent browsers can expect (re-)discovery of particular gems.
Many props to Stanza for starting this community and keeping it alive, and to Karsten for his good-looking but über-functional publishing platform.
Update: Karsten just blogged a detailed description of the magic behind the scenes of the new Soundtoys.net. Read it over on toxi.in.process.
Some highlights:
- Soundtoys by Boredom Research
- John Weir: Sound of traffic
- Elout de Kok: Version v.005
- Gameboyzz Orchestra Project
08:08
Leonardo Solaas: Dreamlines
Leonardo Solaas: Dreamlines
Argentinian generative artist Leonardo Solaas has created a dreamy, painterly work in his Dreamlines. The user inputs one or more keywords as input, which set the piece off on a a Google image search. The resulting sequence of images are then used as the basis for an animated drawing, morphing and changing over time.
The drawing process itself is done by a swarm of particles, who navigate the image as though it were a virtual terrain. Formulas translate pixel values into instructions for particle movement, making them relatives of finite state machines. The results are surprisingly subtle, the quality of the stroke ranging from hairy to spiky, curvy etc.
The interim state when one image is replaced by another is the most interesting, as one image is erased and one can clearly see the lines drawn by the particles. Obviously, depending on the search the resulting drawing can be recognizable as a filtered image or not at all. One tip is to input your own name or a well-known brand name. The right-hand image shown above is a re-drawing of an image used for an interview on Artificial.dk. Since the original contains limited colors and sharply defined shapes, much of the form and color is retained.
Quote from the artist:
…
Thus, the work is at the same time a study on population dynamics, or on the emergent behavior of a multitude of very simple autonomous agents.
Who is dreaming? The user, or the Internet itself? In a certain way, both. The program generates a personal moving picture, unique, unpredictable, and forever gone when it is finished, just like dreams. But that dream is made out of pieces taken form the subconscious of the whole net, gathered by some words of the user and the obscure logic of searching algorithms.
Dreamlines was shown at Transmediale.06 and recently won the IBM New Media Art award at the 19th Stuttgarter Filmwinter.
10:04
With its rich content and well-implemented tagging system, del.icio.us provides a tantalizing data set for would-be information visualizers. Fortunately, the open del.icio.us API allows developers full access to the functionality of the system.
To support the recently launched Processing hacks site I have written up a quick tutorial on how to access del.icio.us with Processing. The hack uses David Czarnecki’s delicious-java library. I also added a simple hack for outputting PostScript vector files.
12:36
This site went live while Generator.x was having a holiday, but it deserves a repost even though it’s a few weeks old:
The ever-productive gentlemen Tom Carden and Karsten Schmidt (Toxi) have launched Processinghacks, a user-contributed Wiki intended to provide the Processing community with documentation of advanced techniques.
Processinghacks nicely fills the gap left by the lack of tutorials on the Processing site, combined with the beginner focus of the built-in examples. While a lot of answers are available on the forums, they are sometimes out of date or hard to find. Processinghacks provides details on specialized techniques that are beyond the scope of the core Processing project, such as integrating Processing with Java or hacking the source code itself.
A big plus is that this effort is completely independent of Ben and Casey, which means that they can focus their energies on the core project of bringing Processing to version 1.0. For those who remember the debate brought up by Karsten a little while ago, this should set an example. Instead of just complaining about the state of things, people like Tom and Karsten are actively providing a service to the community.
Some highlights from Processinghacks:
21:23
Grafitti Research Lab: LED Throwies
LED Throwies is a project from Grafitti Research Lab, a division of the EyeBeam OpenLab. It involves hooking LEDs up to a small battery and using a strong but miniature magnet to make it stick to metallic surfaces. As the name suggests, the typical mode of application is simply to throw them at the target.
“Throwie” is a reference to graffiti “throwups”, quick and dirty pieces usually done with a single layer of paint and an outline. The LED Throwies could point the way to a new form of urban street art, adding color and magic to the hood. Look at the video on the Grafitti Research Lab site for a nice preview of a Throwie “party”.
There are no detailed credits on the Grafitti Research Lab page, but there is reason to believe that Evan Roth aka fi5e (who created the Grafitti Analysis piece) is involved somehow. Since the OpenLab is dedicated to public domain R&D, there is a publicly available detailed recipe published on instructables.com.
More images on flickr/tags/ledthrowies.
20:37
Daniel Brown: Flower Series (Olympic)
Daniel Brown: Flower Series (Olympic)
Old but still good: Daniel Brown has a nice variation on his old Flower piece in the “40 artists, 40 days” project on Tate Online.
Famous for being an early Shockwave wizard and the original Mr. Noodlebox, Daniel was celebrated as Designer of the Year 2004 by the London Design Museum in recognition of his experimental work with new media. He also put together the Generative-X (no relation) show of generative art at Onedotzero9 in 2005.
40 artists, 40 days was a “special project in support of London’s Olympic and Paralympic Bid to bring the Games to Britain in 2012″. It marked the countdown until the 5 July deadline for the decision by the Olympic Committee, which did indeed end with London being awarded the Olympic Games for 2012. Rule Britannia.
For more Danny goodies, look at danielbrowns.com and Play-Create.
23:12
Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg: The Dumpster
This seems a fitting post with which to celebrate both Valentine’s Day and the end of a 3 week holiday-induced blog silence:
The Dumpster is a visualization of the romantic lives of American teenagers. Extracting breakup-related blog entries from millions of blogs, it charts them along a chronological axis with text excerpts and relevant data like age and sex of the poster. The blog entries themselves are visualized as a pleasantly pastel cluster of bubbles, falling from the top of the screen and percolating to the bottom.
The Dumpster bears some similarities with Golan’s earlier work Secret Lives of Numbers, which was shown in the Generator.x exhibition. It utilizes the same time axis and pixel grid navigation device for accessing the many nodes. The project description claims that the Dumpster reveals “underlying patterns of these failed relationships”, although this is hard to quantify. There is a “Match” data field shown for each entry, this could indicate a match against other entries. Another possibility is that it represents how well the text matches some text pattern used to identify blog entries dealing with romantic breakups.
But even if the numerical relevance of the visualization seems slightly impenetrable, the Dumpster charms the viewer with endless text excerpts demonstrating the banal beauty of love. Despite the large number of entries there seems to be practically no false positives, just endless teenage musings. And given the impeccable timing of releasing it on Valentine’s Day, you can’t fault it.
The Dumpster is a joint commission from Whitney Artport and Tate Online. Along with Turbulence these portals are becoming serious spaces for the creation and publication of more complex online works. Given the difficulty of exhibiting net-based art in a gallery context, even modestly paid commissions become a major incentive for the creation of new work. At the same time, it allows museums like the Tate and the Whitney to dabble in “experimental media” without committing to showing it in their physical spaces.
14:28
It’s holiday time here at Generator.x. I will be in Thailand for the next 3 weeks, missing out on Transmediale but back for Tangible Code in Oslo and AV06 in Newcastle. Hopefully I will have internet access so that I can delete the most annoying comment spam.
Have a nice time, I know I will.
16:28
Toxi aka Karsten Schmidt has been playing productive troublemaker the last few days, blogging some loose thoughts about what kind of tools and ideas are needed for a productive evolution of the computational design field. To roughly summarize: He is critical of the current state of the generative / computational scene, and the tools that are being hyped. Among his criticisms is that the work that is currently popular in the scene is often focused on immediate gratification, duplicating already existing work. It also often found lacking in niceties like software design, or even a more general understanding of good coding practices.
Karsten used Processing as the basis of his statements, pointing out that the procedural syntax of Processing could educate lazy coders and ultimately a dead-end for serious users of the tool. Not surprisingly, this has caused an explosive (but not incendiary) discussion over on the Processing forums. Ultimately, the discussion deals with the theoretical foundation for a tool like Processing, but also with possible future directions for the project. It’s on the techy side, but relevant for anyone who fancies her/himself a coder or who wants to understand what makes a programming language/tool capable of maximum freedom of expression.
Be sure to also read Karsten's followup where he clarifies his position after some misunderstandings.
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