Archive for the ‘Digital Media’ Category
Bald currency
May 21, 2009
Positions in flux
May 21, 2009
The symposium ‘Positions in flux: On the changing role of the artist and institution in the networked society’ will center on some of the major parameters for the current and future development of contemporary art. In particular it will reflect on the aspect of cultural sustainability of art projects, art and technology initiatives and art curating.
‘Positions in flux’ will give floor to international artists, theoreticians, critics, cultural producers and aims to initiate a truly critical debate. The symposium is designed for a broad audience working in the field of contemporary culture and art, with a desire to understand what comes ahead and how to respond to these changes on an artistic or institutional level. ‘Positions in flux’ will provide a platform and “thinkspace” for artists, cultural workers, theoreticians and a broader public to envision the future in our field and to provide us with the necessary information to make choices for a meaningful and sustainable development of society and culture.
The three panel discussions follow a clear thematic scheme and try to bring in as much expertise and viewpoints as possible. The panels are interlinked and designed to initiate an ongoing discussion among the participants. (Text by The Netherlands Media Art Institute)
Location: The Netherlands Media Art Institute
More info HERE
Horizonless Projections
May 7, 2009
Here & There is a project by S&W exploring speculative projections of dense cities. These maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th. They’re intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.
Jack Schulze explains…
“First we take an electronic Manhattan. It’s a patch-work of various commercial sources, where we’ve repaired walls that aren’t drawn right and roofs that don’t fit. About a tenth of the city is re-built by hand, then textured.
“The projection seen here is a combination of city manipulations in modelling software, and choosing the best lens for the simulated camera. The nearby buildings obstruct the view if you get that wrong, or the distant ones stop working as a conventional map. There’s fine tuning and instinct. Let’s not demo the power of 3D applications, but make a map which is both useful and optically awesome to look at.
“Annotations come after the render. You’ll see that roads have to contour around buildings that would otherwise hide them. The design key is what’s handiest for a person standing in this exact spot, looking at this exact poster.”
(The map deserves to be examined at full scale.) Text by http://schulzeandwebb.com/hat/
eyePLORER
April 17, 2009
eyePlorer is an interactive data visualization of various facts and the relationships between them based on data from the English and German Wikipedia. Keywords related to a user-chosen topic are placed in a circle, which once selected, reveals the nature of the relationship. The granularity of these keywords can be tweaked by a zoom slider at the bottom, and double-clicking a keyword reveals the relationships with its neighbors by connecting lines. Keywords can also be combined as multi-faceted queries by simple drag and drop actions, and knowledge stores by dragging keywords to the notebook on the right.
The colors within the circle denote different categories such as people, countries or organizations. Categories can be removed by dragging them outside of the screen, or further refined by clicking on an empty zone within them.
Monumental
March 28, 2009
The Monument View is an “ambient responsive outdoor installation” by Chris Meigh-Andrews, which shoots a continuous time lapse birds-eye view of the city. You can use the Explore button on the top right to search through a back-catalogue of the sequences.
DATAFLUX 0.1
March 23, 2009DATAFLUX 0.1 is an installation by Kit Webster, a sound and strobe light synchronization are mapped onto pillars.
Kaleidoscope Mandala
March 19, 2009Play first:
Not what he thought by Lieberhonig
then click below:
I recommend looking at Catherine Hubert’s kaleidoscope mandala flash animation with Bittor Ruiz de Azúa’s Test Tube release. Wonderful release by the way.
interim camp
March 19, 2009
“Interim Camp” is a 13 minute long animation by field. They say:
Poor visibility; weather again unsettled today. Surreal rocks and riven lowlands, valleys fog-shrouded. Frightening depths, and emptiness. Rarity of air is noticeable. What are you looking for in this hostile stretch?
The constant transformation of the landscape shapes and their surfaces is based on generated motion sequences of drifting and constantly transforming surface structures, which were created with a custom generative software tool.
Zoom it!
The Grimace Project
March 13, 2009The nature of emotions is an ongoing scholarly debate. Over the years, many different explanations have been put forward, resulting in various emotion models. Most models are based on one of two major approaches. In the dimensional approach, emotions are being described by a small number of independent dimensions – usually two or three. For instance, the circumplex model by James Russell describes emotion via the dimensions “pleasure” and “arousal”. The categorical approach, on the other hand, assumes a finite number of basic emotions, which describe innate emotional reactions.
Grimace was based on the emotion model described in chapter 2 of Making Comics by Scott McCloud, a manual for artists how to convincingly draw facial expressions in comics. It follows the categorical approach, postulating 6 basic emotions:
Bicycle Built for 2,000
March 13, 2009
Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 short voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service, assembled together to sing the song Daisy Bell. In 1962, the IBM 704 became the first computer to sing, singing the song Daisy Bell.
Online workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. Each person was paid $0.06 for their participation via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. The work is accompanied by a visual interface that allows the exploration of the large collection of voices.
Sensing city
March 7, 2009
Sensing city was a live concert by an eleven-piece-ensemble which was occasionally influenced by urban rhythms, here the movement of cars outside the concert venue. As the passing cars triggered the rhythms that were being played, the city became audible through the musicians, even when the urban dwellers not knowingly were part of the composition
Taken from their website:
“A city has its own rhythm that affects the life of its people and is at the same time created by them. Bus schedules, traffic lights and the turn signals of cars are familiar patterns to the citizen. This interplay between creation and inspiration is also at the heart of all music. Making music means translating impression into sound, listening to music means transforming sound into impression.
So what happens if we allow these urban rhythms to occasionally have a direct influence on the musical performance of an eleven-piece-ensemble?
As the movement of cars outside the concert venue triggers the rhythms that are being played, the urban dwellers not knowingly become part of the composition, the city becomes audible through the musicians. This process happens in real-time and is guided by the framework of a video-installation that surrounds the ensemble during the performance of sensing city.”
Images of the concert are available here.
Impress-Foam Touchscreen
February 25, 2009
DNA Molecular Visualization
February 9, 2009
A narrated animation of the processes involved in biological productive nanosystems, here visualizing the molecular biology’s most central “dogma”. The video is based on scientific data describing molecular structure and function, showing animations of DNA coiling, replication, transcription and translation. It was created by Drew Berry of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. It even shows molecular machines operating at real-time speeds.
According to metamodern.com: “What is striking about the videos how much Drew gets right, and how well he handles the necessary cheats forced on animators by the impossibility of showing the millions of random molecular motions that typically occur between the significant biomolecular events.”
CLICK HERE for original animations.
Wordle
January 30, 2009
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
These are different “clourds” made from the contents of Wanderlust.
Forever
January 18, 2009
The Victoria & Albert Museum presents Forever. Floating above the pond within the John Madejski Garden, a large video-wall installation of endless animations responding to an ever changing soundtrack. The bespoke generative design system at the heart of Forever will spawn unique audio-visual films everyday, forever.
Creative Direction – Matt Pyke / Karsten Schmidt / Simon Pyke
Project Management – Philip Ward / Universal Everything
An online installation, generating an endless series of video podcasts is available to coincide with the display.
“Our role as designers was to define the parameters in which the work evolved. In response to the pond, the sculpture continually grows upwards from the water, all movement stems from a central ’spine’ which reacts to the music, and it has evolutionary points set over time, causing the work to alter in appearance and Intensity over its 2 month lifespan. This evolution will occur naturally as the installation tours to other venues worldwide, the form of the digital installation will alter depending on the venue.”
Film directed by by Jack Laurance and Rex McWhirter More info at universaleverything.com/276
21 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
Visual Ambiance
January 16, 2009
play first:
Res by Aogu Yoshida
then click below:
I STRONGLY recommend looking at Rafaël Rozendaal’s project with Aogu Yoshida’s Test Tube release.
m/e/m/e 2.0
December 16, 2008
m/e/m/e 2.0 is a mechanical web-site that mimics and memes[*] consumer oriented and alienated web 2.0 web-sites. the machine is built using misc computer parts, mostly CDROM drives (28), and represents an ultimate recycling effort in contemporary hardware art. media industry gets to show us the guts of the technology it enslaves, be it physical or illusionist. m/e/m/e 2.0 mixes up the positions taken by the media devices – CDROMs become files, files turn into circuit boards – after the decade of web fetishism comes the age of post interactive materialism.
Traveling between venues and exhibitions m/e/m/e 2.0 changes its IP address and power source but the message it carries remains the same – let’s bring machines into the world of people instead of living second (hand) lives in the world of machines.
motorized lens from a DV camcorder is controlled using arduino board and brains
Piet Zwart Institute, Media Design Master of Arts, graduation 2008, class of Florian Cramer
The only remaining bits of reality, namely the [input type="button"], are collected all together and materialized (using etched PCB) in order to shift the paradigms of online living and question the necessity of pervasive digitalization. coming to us from the future (around 2070 AC) m/e/m/e 2.0 tells stories of few dozen popular websites, shadows of which are archived within the system. opposed to immaterial contents of its subjects, pages of m/e/m/e 2.0 are hard-copies made of circuit board material; they are mechanically shifted and exposed in front of the image sensor. surprisingly, the machine is connected to the internet and the contents of m/e/m/e 2.0 can be navigated via conventional interface of a web browser. More HERE
Images HERE
