Generating a pattern for a fruit bowl.
http://www.leebyron.com/what/experimental/
Cast: Lee Byron
See other hypercubes (4d-7d):
4d-screen.de/related-space/intro.htm
Cast: Tobby Lang
Tetris instalation projected on a waterwall presented during the Laboratoire des fictions.
Project realized by Benoit Espinola ( http://beart.wordpress.com ) in Aix en provence school of art ( http://www.ecole-art-aix.fr )
The water was used as a screen, the door is used to control the game.
Built with Processing ( http://processing.org )
Author: 109278123
Keywords: tetris instalation installation projection processing mur eau water wall waterwall art
Added: May 28, 2008
Streetartist blublu.org made an amazing video, that will let you ask foremost one question: How many did the people spend to make this video? The video “Motu” basically shows an animation, that was entirely filmed outside or to be more precise: on building walls. With chalk they animate morphing figures all over walls in the city. Each frame leaves a white trail, that was the “animation frame” from the picture before, resulting in a very interesting visual effect.
The whole movie is somehow based upon surprise and there are scenes, that simply will make you wonder, because the play of light, animation, spacial situation and camera perspective is simply awesome! Thumbs up for the idea and the work invested. A unique piece of art.
Another piece called Livorno by blublu.
[ via Stylespion ]
Software from Nervous System (Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg) added to the exhibition.
Rather than continuing to blanket this blog with videos from my current project-in-progress, I’ve set up a Vimeo channel which those of you who are interested can subscribe to. I’ll be posting a lot of videos there as changes are made, to document the process and to gather feedback where I can.
Here’s the URL: http://www.vimeo.com/coloureconomy
There are a couple of new videos up there already - please drop by and have a look.
You are looking at the projection of a 4-dimensional Cube onto 3 dimensions. This object is rotating in the hyperspace.
See other hypercubes (4d-7d):
http://www.4d-screen.de/related-space/intro.htm
Cast: Tobby Lang
Want more evidence that tradition in user interfaces has blinded us to the possibilities for making graphics fluid and intuitive? Just look at the first known GUI, Dr. Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad. His 1962 PhD thesis at MIT, Sketchpad represents a whole bundle of firsts: the first object-oriented programming project, the first use of a toolbar, the first real-time graphics system, the first drawing program, the first GUI, the first use of instances, the first use of draggable vector graphics … and yet, that’s not what’s impressive about this. What’s really impressive is that the work of this one man still holds up in 2008, and not all of what he does here has been fully answered by modern UIs. (Sometimes the past turns out to be more futuristic than the present, perhaps because people doing modern development work don’t know enough of their history.)
The video here is introduced by Xerox PARC’s Dr. Alan Kay, who was later an Apple Fellow (among other things), and made his own contributions to UI history.
This is doubly interesting to me, because the simplicity of this kind of project makes it ideal for people writing their own interfaces into tools like Processing. And notice how nice it is having a persistent physical interface — something that might not be practical for Adobe, but could be perfectly practical for a DIY electronics builder and live visual performer. You can read his full thesis, and for more UI history with Alan Kay, there’s a full 1987 documentary that traces this and many other developments (including the mouse) on the Internet Archive.
Ivan Sutherland celebrated his 70th birthday last week, as described by Java creator James Gosling:
Happy Birthday, Ivan! [James Gosling: on the Java Road]
Gosling points out that even more interesting than this interface is what Ivan has to say about technology and courage. It’s well worth reading if you’re embarking on a research project of your own.
© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
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The VJ and live visualist of the future isn’t just about DJ metaphors and what happens in clubs. It’s about a convergence of new interface technologies for dealing with visual material in a more fluid, flexible way. It’ll change not only visual performance, but how we express ourselves in digital visuals, as well — something we’ve already seen happen with non-linear video editing and vector and bitmap graphics software, but taken further.
Vade points us to a couple of glimpses of technologies being researched now that will help enable these changes.
Takeo Igarashi, Tomer Moscovich, John F. Hughes, “As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation”.
The description from the creators:
We present an interactive system that lets a user move and deform a two-dimensional shape without manually establishing a skeleton or freeform deformation (FFD) domain beforehand. The shape is represented by a triangle mesh and the user moves several vertices of the mesh as constrained handles. The system then computes the positions of the remaining free vertices by minimizing the distortion of each triangle. While physically based simulation or iterative refinement can also be used for this purpose, they tend to be slow. We present a two-step closed-form algorithm that achieves real-time interaction. The first step finds an appropriate rotation for each triangle and the second step adjusts its scale. The key idea is to use quadratic error metrics so that each minimization problem becomes a system of linear equations. After solving the simultaneous equations at the beginning of interaction, we can quickly find the positions of free vertices during interactive manipulation. Our approach successfully conveys a sense of rigidity of the shape, which is difficult in space-warp approaches. With a multiple-point input device, even beginners can easily move, rotate, and deform shapes at will.
Pretty cool stuff. There are already a limited number of VJs who work live with Flash animations and such, directly manipulating vectors, though they’re a minority and the results tend to be fairly restricted. But imagine if you could mess with vector shapes as easily as you can video. “Illustration” could become a live performance medium, and not just something people do over long hours in Illustrator and print on paper.
No offense to Adobe, but I think part of what has stunted this evolution is the reliance on big, traditional tools. The established conventions for how you work with elements like curves (including the wildly counterintuitive bezier curve) remain in place because artists are so universally reliant on a single tool from a single vendor. It’s so complicated to learn, in fact, that you spend all your time learning what’s there rather than building workflows around what you actually need to do. Start working with vectors in a tool like Processing, in which artists (not necessarily people who would call themselves “programmers”) have to build their own tools, and all of those conventions are up for grabs.
But change is likely to hit video, as well, not just vectors.
Better-known research houses like Microsoft’s may be grabbing the headlines, but this Tokyo-based group is doing sophisticated research in all kinds of graphics manipulations. The key is integrating computer vision — the ability of the computer to “see” and analysis imagery and motion more in the way we’d expect — with other techniques. We take video with a simple timeline below for scrubbing for granted. But this metaphor is itself an invention — in fact, Joy Mountford, with whom I presented at South by Southwest in the spring, was on the team at Apple that refined a lot of these concepts.
The problem is, a timeline is pretty far abstracted from the way we see motion. Human perception can separate moving elements from a background, and sees the motion of objects, not just linear motion of a frame over time. The ingenious leap taken by the “direct manipulation” approach is to use computer vision techniques to allow us to “directly” move the objects within the frame, instead of just the whole frame via an independent metaphor. The impact on editing and viewing is already nice — but performance and VJing gets even more interesting.
Great ideas can come from fantasy — for an imaginary version of this, see a couple of old posts from Create Digital Music in which we saw giant DJs empowered with God-like control over the universe:
Giant DJs Continue to Play God with Universe; Scratching Reality Itself
Spin: Short Movie Makes a Turntablist God
What do you fantasize about as far as the future of visualism? Seen other technological research — or done some of your own — that could bring us into that future? Let us know in comments.
© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
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This is a quick export from the Colour Economy interface as it sits right now. This demonstrates the Flickr import - right now the images are coming from the group ‘catchy colors’ (http://www.flickr.com/groups/catchy/).
You’ll notice, compared to the other videos, that there are now more traders involved (900 in this render - though I’ve tested renders with up to 10,000)
ABOUT THE COLOUR ECONOMY:
What if pixels were free? What if they could trade their computer-given red, green, and blue values in pursuit of a profit?
The Colour Economy imagines an artificial economy of pixels, in which individual ‘traders’ exchange colour.
The Colour Economy is a project by Jer Thorp (http://www.blprnt.com) and was built with Processing v. 0135.
Cast: blprnt
after experimenting with slit-scanning and time distortion in videos for the past week, ive applied these techniques to create an audio reactive piece.
the main effect here is the data from the audio spectrum displacing slices of the video in time. the waves of audio data emanate from the center out symmetrically. id like to interpolate the peaks and troughs to form a nice wave like motion but i think the jittery effect works well with this track ( autechre - zeiss contarex ).
http://www.julapy.com/blog/2008/05/22/slit-scanning/
Cast: julaps
What would the Internet look like without hackers ? What would computing look like without free and open source software ? What would the culture look like with DRM and closed media channels everywhere ? Where do art and technology merge ?
Many questions will be debated during the first Hacker Space Fest from the 16th to the 22nd June 2008 near Paris, in the industrial outskirts of Vitry-sur-Seine (/tmp/lab).
I’m really happy to be in this festival about hacking & art in France. I’ll present many things there :
Hacker
Realtime interactive psychedelic fluid simulation with processing for an upcoming installation.
Inspired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Pong (absolutely brilliant game).
see http://www.memo.tv/psychedelic_fluids_and_particles_with_processing for more info
Cast: Memo Akten