A very nice visualisation of GPS-Data.

Just attended the grand opening of the Jepson Center for the Arts, a truly magnificent new building designed by Moshe Safdie in Savannah, GA, the evidence of which is in these photos. (It would be even more evident if i wasn’t such a terrible photographer.)

A fellow Barbarian IMed me today. “Update your blog, blogger.” I think my response was something like, “Suck a bag, bagger.” I thought about it and decided it was probably time to be a proper blogger and update my blog, but I just don’t have much to say. Well, not true, I have plenty to say but nothing I think the dozen of you would care to read. I have no new eye-candy to feed you. I have no new applications for you to test. I have been doing other things.

First, let me just say the move went swimmingly. I love my new apartment. I have very little to complain about, which if you know me is no small feat. It has a great view of the city. It has not one, but TWO bay windows. The water takes but three seconds to heat and issues forth with a reasonable amount of pressure. There is even an entire room that I forget I have simply because its door stays shut. I don’t know what to do with it. Guest room, I suppose, but for now it is where my moving boxes sit to gather dust. Oh, and there seems to be less dust in San Francisco. Did I mention that?

Secondly, my new Intel powered Macbook Pro is here. But I rarely use it. In fact I type this blog entry on my ‘older’ laptop because the lack of Adobe Universal Binaries makes using it a drag. Come on Adobe, pick up the pace! No new UB releases until 2007? You have got to be kidding me! Way to go and piss off your customer base. Bottom line, Photoshop, Flash, and Flash player all run slower than they do on this slightly older laptop.

What of Processing you ask? Well, Ben is crankin on it. Processing is already a Universal Binary but some of the libraries need updating before I will be able to test the alleged 2x-3x speed bump, JOGL being the most important of these. None of my openGL applications will run just yet, so I am taking a bit of a processing breather seeing as how OFFF Mexico was cancelled which means I don’t need to start worrying about presentations until early April when I will start getting ready for FITC in Toronto.

What else, what else. Well, I ate some really good dungeness crab a couple days ago that is not agreeing with my innards. I have spent the last 2 days trying to figure out if I will ever risk eating really good dungeness crab again. But just thinking about it is bringing up burps with memories of garlic butter and I have to say, it might be a long while before I will be able to separate the good-time-tastery from the 48 hours of mild nausea.

Again, what else, what else… oh, well, I met someone. He is getting most of my free time. But since this isnt Live Journal and you all are probably here to read more about spectrum analysis and webcam tracking, I will spare you the details. But he makes a mean bloody mary and has an adorable psychotic cat. Oh, and in mid-April, we are going to the French Laundry which was named the Best Restaurant in the World two years in a row. Okay, so those years were 2003 and 2004, but really, how much could it have dropped in a year? Second place perhaps? Third? Who cares!! As long as it is in the top 10, I wont complain. Much.

Islands Of Consciousness is the latest addition to my portfolio of experiments, sketches and artistic works Incubator. It emerged from a collaboration with the Ukrainian musician and composer Oleg Marakov alias Corpuscul. When he showed me Islands his musical piece for 4 simultaneous MP3 players in shuffle mode I immediatly saw the great potential to combine it with my Flickeur project.

Islands Of Consciousness is an infinite movie with a randomly arranged soundtrack created in realtime with random images from Flickr. It is different to Flickeur in many aspects: I have extended the visual grammar and completely changed the algorithm which chooses the images from Flickr - now it is truly an associative stream, as each image is chosen based on the previous one’s tags.

The most important feature though is the soundtrack: not only is it randomly arranged using ca. 40 MB of sound samples, what’s more important is that it directly influences and controls the flow of the movie and the graphical effects that are applied to the images.

Due to those differences the narrative that evolves out of this arrangement is not so often the “this is the janitor that was the last person who saw the two girls before they met the evil clown in the woods” type of story that Flickeur very often creates, but rather a real stream of consciousness with many surprising or disturbing elements: Especially when a sound seems to fit perfectly to the content of an image or when the composition of layered and masked images looks just beautiful or strong. I recommend a minimum viewing time of 5 minutes in order to see the variety of the piece and don’t worry if the screen stays black in the first minute - it is not broken but caused by the random creation process.

Note: due to the law of probability the chances that you will encounter cats, dogs, marriages or babies in almost every movie are pretty good. Maybe a little bit too many cats for my taste.

sin otro orden que en el que me vienen a la mente.

John Cage, Erik Satie, Stereolab, Tom Coates, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Zappa, Robert Wyatt, Dan Shiffman, Karsten Nicolai, Dj Shadow, Tom Carden, Scott McCloud, Steve Reich.

Crecerá cuando me acuerde de más.

Usually I don’t like Siemens mobiles, because the usability sucks in my opinion. But: the Siemens CX75 has a blogging client on board, and of course a camera. I hadn’t hands on this phone yet, but maybe there’s some Mo(bile)Blogging ahead.

Usually I don’t like Siemens mobiles, because the usability sucks in my opinion. But: the Siemens CX75 has a blogging client on board, and of course a camera. I hadn’t hands on this phone yet, but maybe there’s some Mo(bile)Blogging ahead.

dreamlines

I sure most people have seen this already being that its quite popular, but I thought Id put it here for my own reference.

I like it… its creates quite beautiful images based on whatever you want.

I enjoy work like this because it raises questions about art/computers/generation/interaction and the like. Even more so than my work it makes people say things like - “its nice… its not art though is it.”
Who knows, Im certainly not into labeling anything, according to the text its a “generative drawing machine” so lets leave it at that.

I could probably (and so could everyone else) talk about what I would class as art untill the cows come home. But im not going to.
I like this work very much, and thats the end of it.

• Workshop: Image
• Organisation: Douglas Edric Stanley, Pavel Smetana, Ricardo Garcia
• Invited artist: Robert Praxmarer
• 3d specialist: Romain Raffin
• Participants: Yannick Aïvayan, Fabien Artal, Sylvain Boutroue, Raphaël de Stael, Nicolas Moncasi, Marie Noël, Julien Pauthier, Bastien Vacherand
• Location: L’école supérieur d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Date: 27 February - 3 March 2006
• Website: Atelier Hypermedia, Atelier 3d

We have just completed a week-long workshop working with Processing and 3d image creation. It was an attempt bring together the 3d and Hypermédia ateliers at the Aix-en-Provence Art School, and as far as I could tell, was pretty successful.

The original idea was that image programming is no longer easily separated into neat fields such as 2d and 3d, raster and vector, etc. While these separations are still at work, and their logics fundamental to computer generated imagery, the tools, environements, and practices tend to mix it all up in the end. As well, many signs coming from the 3d world point to an image convergence, or should I say a hybrid image — in which 2d logics are at play within the 3d image, and generate its volumes, textures, contours. Ever since we dived head first into Processing a few months back, what was previously just an hypothesis has become a subsequent realty — at least to our standards — hence the need for a workshop to explore where we can go with it.

As it turns out, we didn’t fully explore the hybrid nature of generating 3d images using vector/raster styles/logics, but we did discover a lot about 3d, and it is now more or less an acquired tool in the atelier. None of the images were fantastically pretty either, but we did avoid the typical Tron aesthetic that still seems to reign in the 3d world. Video games are slowly moving away from that aesthetic, but there is still a lot of weening needed to rip us out of Brunelleschi perspective, and I think we all need to do a lot more work to force 3d modelling into the sophistication of say, any typical hip Illustrator or Flash design. Death to realism! Long live the new flesh!

After a brief intro (yes, I read through the OpenGL Super Bible, yes I attempted a short resumé), we began with the Pushpop Code examples I posted here a few weeks back, and started tweaking it to turn it into messy 3d soup.

My collegue from the Atelier 3d, Pavel Smetana, also brought in Robert Praxmarer, a Future Lab researcher and Processing-proficient lecturer in the Linz University of Art Interface Culture program. He is also currently in residence at Pavel’s CIANT lab in Prague. Once he had settled in, he proposed this 3d Grid Processing Sketch, using the traditional image of Lena as a starting point. Most of the participants used this source code as a starting point for their code experiments.

Wednesday, Romain Raffin joined us with a series of demonstrations and simple code snippets of his own.

Romain is a real-time rendering specialist working outside of the art world, in fact he generally renders for the French Army and Aeronautics industry. I’m usually skeptical of engineers meddling with art coding experiments — I’ve seen the “art meets science” slogan meet reality, it’s usually a funding-inspired hoax — but Romain was totally cool and guided us with a light touch. He also went back over the theory behind matrix transformations, something I hadn’t really explored enough with the students during the first semester. Those that didn’t get it, get it now. He also has a helpful PDF document on building your own Bezier Trajectories and other interpolation code. It think the basic interpolation formula — I = A(1-t) + B(t) — is permanently burned into my brain.

You can download several of his demo Processing sketches over at our Happy Code Farm.

The workshop was also a good excuse to introduce the students to the Procedural vs. Object-Oriented debate sparked by Toxi’s </Procrastination> post. We started with a pretty butterfly example, and built all sorts of object-oriented programs from there.

For example, Fabien Artal plugged in the Sonia Audio Library and made this field of reactive objects:

Considering that the students are often building complex models, each with its own transforms and heirarchies, and often building hundreds of them — it seemed time to better enforce Object-Oriented philosophy in our code. It took a while, and I still haven’t found the time to build a decent course on Object-Oriented programming (let alone a course on arrays!), but everyone took to objects pretty well. Next year I’ll have to be more serious about this subject.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in old skool BASIC-style procedural fiddling around, but indeed you really need Object logic when you’re building complex projects. Although, I do have to say that with Director we never really had that problem because some basic Object-Oriented principles are built into the interface itself, and allow you to program like a sloppy pig (even by hand), all the while building kick-ass monster projects. You just can’t do that in Processing. It’s difficult to scale. So I’m starting to see something of Toxi’s argument : there might indeed be something missing in the Processing environment, at least in this arena.

One of the nice suprises was having an outside student, Julien Pauthier, join us from Mulhouse where he studies with Jeff Guess. Jeff has been teaching code for a while and we met up recently to discuss expanding the code|art network, building collective workshops, sharing teachers+students, and exchanging code online. I have always made it a point of inviting students from other schools to participate in my workshops, whether in Aix-en-Provence or elsewhere. I also try to bring a few Aix students with me to each workshop I teach elsewhere. This works very well and has built a nice network of people working in France. Perhaps it would be interesting to enlarge that network, and connect it up to other networks working throughout Europe. There would probably even be funding for such an initiative. Perhaps some people on Processing Blogs could chime in on this idea?

Cada vez que leo en algún texto algo parecido a “… en esta sociedad […] en la que vivimos”, me acuerdo de cuando tenía que presentar redacciones con un mínimo de líneas y añadía cualquier cosa para llegar al cupo.

I don’t play video games. Since I was a kid, I’ve had such a complete ineptitude at anything game-realated that I’ve resigned myself to a world without PlayStations, X-Boxes or anything remotely related.

One notable exception was Will Wright’s SimCity. Now that was a game that I could get into. It didn’t depend on anything remotely approaching coordination, which means that instead of being dismal at it, I could at last be average.

Will Wright’s next game is Spore - and it’s all about evolution. With seamless gameplay through an exceedingly detailed history, you get to start with a single-celled organism and proceed all the way through to space travel and planetary simulation.