Martin Ignacio Bereciartua: Letter-pair analysis

Argentinian designer Martin Ignacio Bereciartua has created an interesting visualization showing letter-pair combinations in a given text. Created in Processing, the application reads in a text in any language and keeps track of the number of occurences of letter pairs. These are then shown as bubbles with sizes determined by frequency of appearance in the text, self-organizing so that they fill the space optimally.

The result is an elegant and good-looking visualization of common letter-pairs in a given language. Examples for several languages are shown. For a treatment that looks at letter-quadruples (also known as four-letter words), see Toxi’s classic Base26.

Via infosthetics.

Joshua Davis: Once-upon-a-forest

Joshua Davis has announced a new series of workshops somewhat cheerfully called Get Creative. The subtitle packs more of a punch: “Using dynamic abstraction within Macromedia Flash MX to build art making machines .” Only London remains on his tour, the dates are 4-5 November and the gig is organized by FITC.

Apparently, Davis will walk participants through the process he follows when creating works like those seen on Once-upon-a-forest. He will even provide them with code: “Attendee’s of this lecture will leave with a renewed creative outlook…and an enormous collection of reusable art making machines (Flash Components) written by Joshua Davis which he uses on most of his client projects.” Not bad for £400, cheap by design industry standards.

I’ve always found Davis’ generative illustrations (like those seen at Accident Happy) more fascinating than his design work. I think he has a much more unique “voice” as an artist than as a designer. His art works have a great deal of detail and texture to them that is often lost in his clean-line Modernist design projects. Granted, the recent Stardust.tv web site maxes out on kitschy charm and technical wizardry, but I still find much more personality in the print works. So a workshop exploring his techniques for generative composition doesn’t sound half bad…

Christian Giordano: Tagged colors

It seems that AIGA’s Digital Information Design Camp proved productive. The online exhibition doesn’t go live until August 1st, but Christian Giordano has posted some results on his blog, including this very nice visualization of relationships between words and colors in the Flickr group Color Fields.

The DID camp used Processing throughout and had some impressive tutors, from the host John Maeda to the actual instructors: Ellen Lupton, Peter Cho, Lisa Strausfeld, Ben Fry, Golan Levin and Martin Wattenberg. It reads like a Master Class of computational design. Of course, it comes at a cost – $2450 for non-members, $2,175 for members. It’s an advantage the design field has over art: 1. You can put a price tag on creativity. 2. Someone will be able to pay that price.

Original link via Processing blogs.

Boris Müller: Poetry on the Road

Boris Müller is a computational designer and educator based in Berlin. His work combines an analytical approach with a personal signature. This strategy is used to great success in his series of posters for the poetry festival Poetry on the Road. To create the graphics, Boris writes software that interprets texts and turns them into visual representations.

The 2003 version is particularly beautiful, with each letter of the alphabet being interpreted as a command to draw lines or change the quality of the line being drawn. The result is a complex tangle of shapes, expressive and poetic in their own right but also containing the code of the original poetry that was used as input. There is a simplified interactive version online to illustrate how it works.

Boris recently became professor for Interaction Design at Fachhochschule Potsdam, where he teaches students using Processing and Flash. Expect interesting work from Potsdam in the future…

C.E.B. Reas: Process 6

C.E.B. Reas: SeoulB

C.E.B. Reas is an alumnus of the MIT Aesthetics & Computation Group and is well-known for his work with generative strategies, both as an artist, educator and co-creator of the Processing software. His artistic method is purely generative, exploring abstract surfaces through the simulation of kinetic systems.

Inspired by conceptual and minimalist artists such as Sol LeWitt , Reas’ work is stringently defined yet wonderfully organic. He is a formalist, working with 2-dimensional surfaces in an almost painterly fashion, using color in a way that is simulatneously playful and restrained. Reas can easily be described as one of the foremost aestheticians of the generative art field.

As an educator, Reas has worked to further the understanding of computational approaches to art and design through his work with Processing, as well as through numerous workshops worldwide. He worked as professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea 2001-2003, and is currently professor at UCLA Design | Media Arts. He has exhibited extensively all over the world, and is widely published.

Recent projects include the Process/Drawing show at the Bitforms gallery in New York, Software Structures for Whitney Artport and SeoulB for W Hotel, Seoul.

C.E.B. Reas will give a presentation at the Generator.x conference. He will also be presenting a new piece for the Generator.x exhibition.

Links:

Computational design consists of applying computational approaches to design problems. Typical examples might be a dynamic user interface to the stock market, an interactive visualization of DNA sequences or the use of genetic algorithms to analyze stress loads in a bridge. It can also mean giving new qualities to existing media, such as adding simulations of friction and gravity to a Flash interface. Or it can simply mean using generative strategies for the creation of visuals.

The essence of computational design is to understand digital media as a collection of processes working on each other, as opposed to static media objects. Unlike other media, digital media have no inherent qualities given by a physical material. Instead, they are limited by qualities simulated by software, such as the 2.5-dimensional interface of window-based interfaces. By creating new software or extending existing ones, a computational designer can redefine the medium her work exists in.

Instead of creating a static animation, a computational designer creates a dynamic system with algorithmic rules dictating its behavior. Such a system can be self-adaptive, interactive, animated and produce a multitude of results not directly anticipated by its designer.

References

A good reference for computational design is John Maeda’s Aesthetics + Computation Group (ACG) at MIT Media Lab. The ACG was arguably the first group to seriously explore this approach to design, and has produced many important contributors to the field.

Other reference include:
- Ben Fry's information visualizations
- Daniel Shiffman course syllabus for his Introduction to computational media at ITP.
- The excellent Dataisnature blog