Jantar Mantar - Jaipur, India

I’d be surprised if Giorgio de Chirico , and the other Metaphysical landscapers had not seen or been influenced by the huge celestial instruments of the surreal Jantar Mantar. This stone observatory was built by the astronomer-king, Jai Singh II at his then new capital of Jaipur, in Rajastan between 1727 & 1733. The collection of monolithic instruments sets up a tantalising metaphysical landscape as If you were to walk straight into one of De Chirco‘s mytho-mathamatical dreamscapes. Arcs of stone, twisting facades and giant gnomons create light-play and shadow formations - asking the observer to find interesting perspectives of geometric absolutism.

Of course each ‘sculpture’ has a specific purpose aside from the muse of abstracted geometry, each Yantra (Instrument) is devised to provide specific celestial readings, from the calculation of Hindu lunar calendar to defining the positions of stars and even predicting the intensity of monsoons. A total of 18 instruments utilise the sun so that shadows are output as variables on curves and linear marked surfaces with measurement scales. The Sumrat Yantra is considered to be the largest sundial in the world with is 90ft high gnomon centrepiece. Jai Singh, who devised many of the objects himself, believed that the greater the size the more perfect the accuracy of these objects.

The enigma of a day, 1914 & Place Metaphysique Italienne, 1921 - Giorgio de Chirico

Jai Singh was a scholar with a life long interest in mathematics and astronomy and it appears he was conversant with contemporary European astronomy through his contacts with the Portuguese in Goa. Aside from Jaipur he built observatories in Delhi, Ujjain, Mathura and Benares.

This Maharaja appears to be one of the more interesting and stranger ruler figures in history; his helio-centric observatory is a palace to the sun and way of proving his devotions and connection to the heavens, and ultimately his power. In many respects there seems to be certain similarities to another Sun worshipping ruler, the heretical Egyptian pharaoh, Ahkenaten.

While in Jaipur I met up with Jantar Mantar obsessive, algorithmic psychogeographer and Vedic Crystalpunk, Rohit Gupta, who showed me the wonderful Cosmic Architecture of India by Andreas Vowahsen. It turns out that Ro wears many hats - check out his psychogegraphic Cellphabet project, as well as the wonderfully sequential and schematic ‘Doppler Effect’ comic he produced with Gabriel Greenberg.

The Doppler Effect - Rohit Gupta & Gabriel Greenberg

Algomantra, as a trigger phrase, makes me think of the Indian grammarian, Pingala, who discovered the sequence attributed to Fibonacci in the grammar of ancient Sanskrit mantras. Pingala called the sequence Matrameru, which translates poetically into The Mountain of Cadence. Its not so surprising that this recursive sequence of numbers provides the pattern of petal arrangement in plants known as phyllotaxis aside from the patterns of syntax in mantras - nature is data after all!

Ro nicely pointed out, ‘data’ also means God in certain Indian dialects.

There have been quite a few papers written about the Jantar Mantar worth checking out, heres links to a couple:

Jantar Mantar: Architecture, Astronomy, and Solar Kingship in Princely India - MacDougall, Bonnie 1996

Architecture in the Service of Science – Barry Perlus

Barry Perlus’s site also contains some VR Models of the observatory.

Tina Tonagel’s ‘Maschine zur Projektion eines Blumenmusters’ is a mechanical looping creator-destroyer machine system. Utilising modified overhead projectors, emergent floral patterns are printed onto a transparent screen, which then journey to their own annihilation. Just moments after their arrival they are erased at a second mechanical junction by a drop of water combined with a sweep of a brush. The textural aesthetic reminds of us the hand-painted animations by Norman Mclaren. The difference here being that ‘Maschine zur Projektion eines Blumenmusters’ creates an infinite cinematic projection dialogue, which could go on looping forever.

Left: Blobs (detail) - Deaxismundi & Right: Composition in G (detail) – Crashingslowly

Here follows some Flickr sets that exploit the aesthetic of liquid immiscibility both real and virtual:

Crashingslowly insinuates the musicality of immiscibility with his Jazz series, ‘Composition in G’ utilises time-based exposures to offer up a range of liquid galaxy formations.

Infostuka preliminates a generative project with some liquid sketches containing interplay between water, oil, ink, soy sauce and detergent. Microscopic biological cellular forms arise out of these quarter-edible interactions.

Deaxismundi virtualises the process with his blobs set, using emitters in VVVV, to exact some luminescent mercurial molten metals - computational alchemy in action.

Alh84001’s images tagged with ‘diffusion’ are constructed using ‘two rhodamines (red + yellow), a coumarin derivative (blue), and good old green fluorescein’. The resulting bifurcations and flow schematics were produced by taking macros of these ‘fluorescent dyes diffusing into solvent under UV illumination.

Talea is a musical pattern generator utilising a radial graphical system whose process engine is a simple evolving Cellular Automaton. According to its author, Alessandro Capozzo, the title of the work concerns the isorythmic composition practice in renaissance music and so this points to a fascinating confluence of techne both very old and very new. ‘Isorhythm (from the Greek for “the same rhythm”) is a musical technique that arranges a fixed pattern of pitches with a repeating rhythmic pattern’

On listening to the audio extract of a real-time performance of Talea its possible to hear echoes of the Systems Music aesthetic, a minimalist ‘note to note’ procedural composition technique defined numerically and permutationally. Talea, however, seems to rely more specifically on an emergent growth structure, possibly due to its use of Cellular Automata governing rule sets rather than a fixed system.

Talea uses Tactu5, an alpha version processing library made for the purpose of creating algorithmic music. Rather than incorporating a synthesis system of its own, it is designed to be used with existing sound synthesis programs such as Csound, Puredata and SuperCollider via network communication. The download page contains examples and ‘work in progress’ tutorials and online references.

Much algorithmic music often forsakes aesthetics for process resulting in fairly unlistenable music. The success of algorithmic procedures really depends on the mapping system employed by the composer to translate the non-musical information into a musical syntax. From this point of view, Talea seems to be a successful step in the right direction for producing computationally driven compositions that have feeling and are ‘musical’.

The possibility of transducing sounds purely from visual interference configurations & Moiré patterns is something to get excited about. Mikomikona’s “Fourier-Tanzformation I+II” consists of two operated overhead projectors showing black and white optical interference effects and dot progressions similar to Op-Art works. These black and white projections are filmed in real-time with small video cameras and the subsequent video signal is transformed into sound via a bespoke hardware device. This ‘opto-electronic synthesizer’ provides a synaesthetic process confirming a novel approach to the ‘dynamic transformability of sound into image and image into sound.’

Check out the PDF booklet for an in depth description of the process and philosophy behind this piece.

“Fourier-Tanzformation I+II” was spotted at Golan Levin’s ‘Informal Catalogue of New-Media Performances Using Overhead Projectors’

The recently added Flickr video capability is throwing up many excellent examples of digital motion graphics, generative artworks and documentation of real-time performances.

Responding to a call for videos for a NIN competition, Eric Natzke has recently uploaded his own contributions, Ghosts II & III. The videos, like much of his recent work, appear as abstract paintings building up over time, where natural colours seem to bleed and blend into one another like real paint. The ribbon-like lines look like they have been derived from human-gestures resulting in quasi-computational brushstrokes. Segments of combinations occasionally slide in the XY plane simulating a 3 dimensional space and temporal building of abstract expressionist colour space.

Eric is, of course, a god in the world of Flash having made a name for himself many years ago with his online sketchbook of Actionscripted artworks and typographical experiments. His online presence has since metamorphosized into a work blog.

Left: Slit Scan Movie - Christian Hossner & Right: Watching the sky– Mitchell Whitelaw

While at Node08, Joreg, one of the brains behind VVVV, demonstrated a nice patch to simulate the photographic and filmmaking process of slit scanning. It was pleasing to see the holy grey V4 teapot become stretched and contorted through a synthetic space-time continuum. The patch he demonstrated (Timewarp) is available on his user page.

The technique, which has been widely used by artists, involves taking small photographic slices (slits) of an image and then stitching the strips together to provide a time based image – a record of whole series of events, rather than a single snapshot. It turns out that Golan Levin has provided us with excellent overview of the technique with a large list of artworks that have employed this process including ones utilising digital media techniques. He also provides us with Processing and Flash source files that utilise slit-scan simulations to process images via web cams.

Probably one of the most memorable moving image slit-scan moments is the Stargate sequence in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. The making of the sequence is often attributed to Douglas Trumball, although research seems to suggest that there was much larger team involved in reality (including Tom Howard, Con Pederson, and Wally Veevers). The plot thickens a little more as it appears from essays by William Moritz, a respected expert in the field of Visual Music, that it was none other that John Whitney (see previous post) who originally approached Kubrick with the idea of using slit-scan special effects in the movie. He was turned down. Whitney seems to have discovered a version of the slit-scan technique via the malfunctioning of one of his own custom built mechanical computers. He used the technique his film Catalogue, made in 1961.

Radial positioning of image slits into circular forms provides a nice way of presenting a days worth of event information in a way analogous to the circularity of clock or cycle of the sun relative to the earth. Mtchl’s ‘Watching the sky’ Flickr set contains images where ‘Segments of the datasets are visualised, compressing time and revealing spatial and temporal patterns in the environment’.

Oli Laurelles ‘Travelling Around’ project captures images during train journeys and then squeezes the pictures into a series of 1 pixel wide snapshots. When stitched together radially they represent abstract visualisations of passages through time. They further give a clear indication not only of location but also the speed of the train at any particular moment in the journey.

Permutations & Arabesque - John Whitney

No survey of visual music would be complete without a mention of John Whitney, inventor, animator and early computer art pioneer. His two most celebrated works are Permutations - 1966 and Arabesque - 1975, made after his stint as artist in residence at IBM. It was there that he used an IBM 360 mainframe system with Fortran to write his own animation programs. One of the key aspects of Whitney’s films is in the use of what he referred to as ‘Computational Periodics’. A means to achieving ‘harmonic events in audio-visual presentation’ where a simulation of musical progression could be achieved with rhythmic overlays of multiple objects to create symmetries and counterpoints analogous to notes and rhythms within music.

‘In PERMUTATIONS, each point moves at a different speed and moves in a direction independent according to natural laws’ quite as valid as those of Pythagoras, while moving in their circular field. Their action produces a phenomenon more or less equivalent to the musical harmonies. When the points reach certain relationships (harmonic) numerical to other parameters of the equation, they form elementary figures.”

In Arabesque, Whitney used a combination of computer and oscillograph to create a series of transforming sine waves and parabolic curves that compliment Manoochelher Sadeghi’s exotic Persian Santur soundtrack. It’s notable the Whitney was influenced by patterns in Islamic architecture, their symmetry and modulation being analogous to temporal patterns in complex musical motifs.

Whitney’s book, ‘Digital Harmony - On the complementarity of Music and Visual Art’ is an advanced treatise on the harmonic relationship between music and computer graphics. It’s a beautifully illustrated work containing explicit examples of computer code and connected philosophical ideas.

With lectures, workshops, patcher kutcha’s, exhibitions and installations concerning the visual programming video toolkit VVVV, NODE08 really was an inspirational event. The Lectures were dense and diverse, stepping aside too much emphasis on the software itself and opening up dialogues on a range of provocative subjects such biotech art, the archaeology of generative art and parametric architectural procedures.

I gave a survey of visual music, the sonification of form, recursive systems and software simulated video feedback as generative process.

The Patcher Kutcha presentations were amazing, with works that stretched the preconceived ideas of what VVVV can achieve with jaw dropping examples of artistic as well as commercial projects. The workshops, for beginners and experts alike, were highly subscribed too and buzzing. Topics such as typographic treatment, XML content generation, tracking solutions, shader programming, feedback patching, Arduino tinkering and so forth can give some idea of the bandwidth of topics covered. The event culminated in the Vvvvabulous Vvvvinissage where some top Vvvvisualists utilised a multi-screen projection to generate some beautiful high-end real-time graphical environments. Besides the fixed programme, there were projections and working spaces for all Node08 attendees and it was possible to spontaneously show patches, and create exhibits on the fly.

Here is my growing Flickr set of the Node08 event.

Expect a more thorough survey of many of the projects/ideas presented at Node08 in the coming weeks/months.

Thanks to the organisers for inviting me to Frankfurt and a very special thanks to Patrick Raddatz for his great hospitality and help during my stay.

Lumen’s annual programme of film, sound, and visual art returns for a seventh year in May, across various venues in Leeds, UK. Evolution 2008 appears to be exceptionally diverse with lectures, installations, screening of short experimental films and live performances by the likes of Murcof/XX+XY & Loud Objects. The latter ensemble patch together a circuit bent collection of components in real-time to produce a low-resolution symphony of electronic noise - the operations can also be viewed on an overhead projector. Murcof/XX+XY is act definitely not to miss - XX+YY’s visual chasms and oscillographic landscapes provide the perfect live visual counterpart to Fernando Corona’s haunting spacious classico-electronica.

Left: Hello patterns 3 (riflessione) - Daniele De Nigris, Right: Scaffold (work in progress) - Tom Lauerman

Daniele de Nigris sets contain geometric works in the spirit of Op-art, radiant gradients in natural hues combine with aspects of symmetry, modulation and repetition to produce some succulent results.

For those with a penchant for scaffolding, and that’s me included, take a look at Tom Lauerman’s work in progress, Scaffold from 2004-2007 – a delicate multiform miniature exoskeleton complete with plank walkways. Be sure to peruse other varied works in the *publish* set, including the wonderful porcelain Cumulus Fractus clouds.

Selflesh’s works may well have been featured at dataisnature before, but we are going back. The Small Works set contains some new treats including the embroidered gouache paintings. ‘Seaside with green thread’ is a place where minimal aesthetics merge with a playful title that might have been dreamt up by Paul Klee. Also, if you haven’t met the Map Collages before, now is the time to say hello!

Inspired by the work of Witold Riedel (featured here before) and no less interesting are Jonathon A Mills works done in pen and ink. Decorative cloud-like patterns procedurally space fill the surface implying the kind of patterns found on a Ming vase.

From the 1930’s-1950’s the American Mary Ellen Bute made a sequence of visual music animations she called ‘Seeing Sound’ films. Most likely inspired by meetings with Oscar Fischinger, Thomas Wilfred (inventor of a colour organ known as the Clavilux) and even Leo Theremin. She used special formulae derived from music notation to meter the rhythmic motions of motifs to sound in her films. Not content with standard cel animation she also made use of cellophane, ping-pong balls, eggbeaters, bracelets and sparklers to create effects of refraction, reflection & shadow play. Tarantella, 1940, regarded by many as Mary Ellen’s best film, has syncopated jaggy lines that dance to a modern composition – pure lyrical abstraction. Later in the 50’s she would employ the use of an oscilloscope to ‘record sounds’ and then overlay this with a collage of her own animation. Two films incorporate this oscilloscopic technique, Abstronics, 1952 & Mood Contrasts, 1954.

‘Begone Dull Care’, by Normal Mclaren, is one of the quintessential Visual Music films, it also happened to have been one of his favourites along with the well-known ‘Neighbours’. Educated at the Glasgow School of Art, Mclaren experimented with animation and film making techniques without the use of a camera. He painted onto the blank film stock directly, added dyes, and then scratched away at the surface, etching in glyphs and abstract lines. This method was used to create ‘Begone Dull Care’, in 1949, to produce an explosion of colours, lines and shapes syncopated to a bopping jazz tune composed by Oscar Peterson. Certain shapes, textures and colours correspond to different instrumental sections, almost as if Mclaren was attempting the human equivalent of FFT (computational frequency analysis). The complexity of the visual motifs increases proportionally with the intensity of the music - culminating in riotous finale of colours, lattices, patterns and animated hieroglyphics in perfect synchronicity.

Made partly in a Generator.x 2.0 workshop, Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s ‘A week in the life’ is a three dimensional visualisation of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin. Using bespoke software written for his mobile phone, Andreas was able to record the longitude and latitude of his position in the city. The data was then passed to a Processing sketch, which resulted in the 3D representation. WMMNA extracted the following info regarding the journey from Processing to final data sculpture:

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work’

The density of the cell sites reflect the speed and frequency of movement within the city. The more often Andreas visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map. Aside from the aesthetics, the work was aimed at making people aware of the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) which requires the telecommunications providers to collect the connection data of all customers. This is a good example of the confluence of two growing areas of interests within the computational art scene, abstract data visualisation and digital fabrication.

Datalooknize (Barcelona) - Oli Laruelle & drop-4586 – David Lu

YesYesNoNo’s Invisible Journey’s (Datalooknise) project aims at mapping fields of Wi-Fi node signals during bike and car trips. Using various kinds of representation systems to visualise different properties of the nodes (such as encryption settings) these abstractions act as timelines of the journey and, at times, give the impression of some kind experimental music notation. Detailed information on the methods used to collect and apply the data is annotated with each image in the development sequence.

David Lu continues his experiments with computational abstraction (using Processing & Openframeworks) with a new set documenting work done in 2008. Light translucent organisms drift over a grey planes and sharper lines create op-art-esque compositions in compelling natural colour palettes. Aspects of movement, rotation and propulsion are implicated the more recent monochromatic outputs.

Dave Bollinger’s Density set, which keeps getting bigger, uses ‘random placement, deterministic placement and optimal packing placement’ of simples units to provide a complexity that is ‘spatially ambiguous, akin to op-art, and conveying various perceptual oddities’. At times the results are organically decorative, elsewhere we find the patterns and aggregations of crystalline growth.

Note: All three artists have been featured in previous posts at NatureIsData!

Yesyesnono – Oli Laruelle
Computational Drawings – David Lu
Labyrinthine multiforms – Dave Bollinger

Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) – Marcel Duchamp 1920 & Filmstudie (stills) – Hans Richer 1925

Looking at two different generations of artists, in the 1920’s and the 1970’s, Geometry of Motion opening in March at the MOMA, sets out to survey artists who used unconventional optical techniques, made light-machines and explored geometric abstraction in film. Featured in the show are ‘fourteen historic works that trace the transformation of the art object from static image to fluid light projection’ Works by László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Hans Richer can be viewed along side later works by Robert Irwin and Gordon Matta Clark.

Dataisnature has been particularly interested in the aesthetics of the first group of artists, relying on the chimerical properties of light projection and kinetics while employing distinctly graphical styles. These early works are firm contenders to be placed a precursors to current contemporary practices with real-time light installation and club projection.

Onwards:
Boston Gems #1 - László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator
Kinetic Art & Architecture # 1

Calligraphy and Automatic Writing maybe distant relatives to computational processes, repetitive squiggles that are created by seismographic looping arcs of the human hand while the mind is else-if-then. Richard Lazzara has a splendid collection of calligraphic meta-doodles that have a touch of Pollock about them albeit monochrome with the sheen of a metallic background gradient. As If continuing the journey originally embarked upon by Bryon Gysin, his works rely on the illusion of secret alphabets, space-filling patterns and formation of random figures into recognisable forms a la Rorschach blots.

Originally spotted at Socialfiction

Related: adventures in nonism: asemic art

Applying the emergent properties of complex systems such as the self-organising behaviour found in biological patterns and social interactions, Kokkugia uses generative methologies to produce experimental architectural conjecture.

‘Agent-based simulation techniques are used to generate programmatic relationships. Architectural elements such as a façade, plaza, or construction grid are assigned rules or behaviours, which govern the way in which they interact with this field in the form making process. This develops an emergent relationship between program and peculiarities of architectural form, enabling the design process, and resultant architecture to exhibit particular behavioural qualities.

The use of negative space in complex multiform arrangements seems to be a prominent interest. Organic habitable parametric spaces and complex materials are constructed through the layering of geometric lattices. Aesthetically the structures are rich and seductive.

Kokkugia was founded in 2004 by Jonathan Podborsek, Roland Snooks and Rob Stuart-smith and operates in New York and London. The agency was recently involved in the ‘Scripted by Purpose’ exhibition of ‘Explicit and encoded processes’ curated by the Theverymany.

Related:
Living Architecture and Parametric Abstraction

Filter feedback 2005 & Calltrace

While the idea of Firefox taking two hours to boot up on a Linux system wouldn’t be the epitome of fun, this is exactly what happens in Calltrace, a runtime visualisation of a computer program’s every function call. Utilising Valgrind, an analysis tool for memory management, debugging, and program profiling, Calltrace uses function call data to drive a custom OpenGL visualisation. The resulting animation, psuedo timelined with glitchy animated blocks, is a fascinating way of experiencing the rhythms, syncopations and cycles of runtime functions operating as they happen. Strangely, it brings back warm memories of watching Defrag running in DOS for the first time, as the operating system visualised the fixing of truncated files. Blocks of colour representing different cases/states of files would be seen to move into their correct defragmented allocations.

Elsewhere at YRY you’ll find examples of filtered video feedback loops and other custom midi-controlled OpenGL software, Monolight for instance, as the basis for VJ systems.

EEG_Brainwaves_Mapping_6 & FutureLandscape4

Enzo Varriale’s work in VVVV is marked by muted, metallic colour palettes and a strong graphic style; the gradient accent on the backgrounds helps to counterpart the three-dimensionality of the forms. Particularly of interest are his Brainwave Visualisations where EEG information is gathered over a short period of time and used to inform the outcome of the complex shapes and structures, meshes and synaptic tangles. Elsewhere, in his Abstract Surfaces set, you find crisply rendered outputs of mathematical functions, superfomulae and particle systems, most of which have used spreads (VVVV’s node for array positioning of multiple objects in space) to create a considered complexity.

right: Seelenlose Automaten - Patric Schmidt and Benedikt Groß.

Node08 (part of the Luminale light art festival), held in Frankfurt in April 2008, will be dedicated to range of digital art works built using the video synthesis toolkit VVVV. Expect to experience all kinds of digital exotica - from controlled lighting systems to data visualisations, 3d video projections to interactive synaesthetic artworks and lush VJ systems. There will be many workshops ranging from beginner entrées to advanced classes on shader programming and typographic control. There will also be talks and presentations from the main development crew of the software as well as other media artists and academics giving overviews of their related work – For a full program of events click on this link. I will give a presentation of my audio responsive video feedback work – it should be an exciting opportunity to meet up with the 4V community - this being the first event of its kind to celebrate works done with this software which has recently seen a rapidly expanding user base.

If you work with VVVV you might be interested in this call for artworks to be shown in the main NODE08 exhibition Hall, the Diakoniekirche during the festival. An informal jury will select the pieces for the screening.

Using a semi-autonomous generative drawing system and her trademark interface, Lia’s Isaidif turns browserspace into a real-time abstract artwork where trajectories connect nodes & layers of pixel thick lines to build up densities of textures with a graduated minimalist colour palette. The hermetic robotic clicks, clatters and mechanised audio counterpart increases the feeling of that some kind of apparatus is being constructed, or in operation, with wheels and crane-like structures. Fitting then that Isaidif was produced for last years Kunstmaschinen Maschinenkunst (Art Machines Machine Art) at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and crated by Katharina Dohm Dr. des. Heinz Stahlhut. The exhibition surveyed the role of the machine in making art beginning with Jean Tinguely’s drawing mechanisms of the 50’s and running through to present day artists such as Lia.

Related drawing machines:

Drawings of Harmonic Motion - Bálint Bolygó
Hektor – Jürg Lehni and Uli Franke
Drawbot - Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Drawing Machine 3.1415926 v.2 – Fernando Orellana
Rapid Action Painters & Artbots – Leonel Moura
Meta-matics – Jean Tinguely
Harmonographs & Spirographs

Employing a spectrographic range of colour, self-similar shapes and contours in her pieces, Jen Stark’s works might at first appear as if they were computer rendered. Instead she cuts through sheets of layered paper, revealing the colours below and shaping the cut paper into complex sculptures with mathematical precision.

Papermation, an animation completed last year, appears to be a stop-frame animation of paper cuts and compositions. The pulsing movement and sequence of configurations may hold some hints to the secrets of Jen’s construction process. This kind of low-tech approach to animation further reminds me of work by early abstract animators such as Oscar Fischinger and Norman Mclaren

‘ram2/6′ Plotted Drawing 1969 - Edward Zajec & P-021/A, ’scratch code’ 1969 – Manfed Mohr

January sees the opening of an important exhibition, at the Block Museum, Chicago, surveying the use of computers in printing making and drawing covering a span of around 60 years. The show focuses in on pioneering artist-programmers such as Manfred Mohr and Edward Zajec, artists who set an early trajectory for working with code to produce rule based artworks – often highly graphic in style and marked by geometric spatial composition. It also features works by artists who used other electronic means and devices such as Ben Laposky & Herbert Franke – both photographing the output of modified oscilloscopes. It also features some Dataisnature favourites such as Mark Wilson and Roman Verostko as well as completing the timeline survey with works by Joshua Davis and CEB Reas.

Related:
Oscillons & the art of Oscillography.

left: thePhysicalVertexBuffer by Leander Herzog, right: work by Nicholas Bruscia

Marius Watz’s ambitions project Generator X containing exhibitions, workshops and presentations regarding computational art and generative design hits version 2.0 and goes ‘beyond the screen’ in Berlin. Generator X 2.0 is a production in collaboration with Club Transmediale and DAM, both organisations with strong allegiances to electronic and computational art. After the Success of 1.0 this new exhibition will concentrate on the process of Digital Fabrication, allowing for computational artists to produce tangible visualisations of their work.

‘Digital fabrication (also known as “fabbing”) represents the next step in the digital revolution. After years of virtualisation, with machines and atoms being replaced by bits and software, we are coming full circle. For artists and designers working with generative systems, digital fabrication opens the door to a range of new expressions beyond the limits of virtual space.’

The opening night happened on Thursday, but there is a feast of great work, presentations and performances in the coming days by well-know artists in the field, many of which have been featured on these pages before.

Curios spotted at Oobject.com

Up for a geeky twist in the world of gadget spotting? Waste some time perusing the fantastic collection of historical curios, objects and environments at OObject.com and know the truth that nerdiness is next to godliness. Dataisnature loves the Abandoned Technology pictures (whist still being aware of their terrible toxic consequences, perhaps this even goes to increasing their power). Being a massive fan of retro electronic watches, particularly those Casio calculator watches from the 70s, you might want to buy me this beauty for all the hard work I’ve put into dataisnature over the years ;) Elsewhere you’ll find incredible listening devices, top supercomputers and amazing planetarium projectors.

Noisey_68 – Desaxismundi & Lune Potential Field - Dave Bollinger

Using VVVV, Desaxismundi transforms noise values into op-art waveform landscapes. Sometime these ribbon-like filaments appear contextualized in grids as if to imply readings on an oscilloscope.

Using Indian & Chinese ink on Moleskin, Lemez covers his pages with graphic decorative swirls, as if trying to find the perfect space-filling swirl algorithm.

Using ‘partially directed non-optimizing fitting strategy’ in Processing, Dave Bollinger’s Density set has an aesthetic that evokes work from the Op-Art movement, where individual elements, as he puts it, ‘fall somewhere in the nether regions between random placement, deterministic placement and optimal packing placement.

LennyJpg’s Soundtovertex set contains shapes that look like calligraphic glyphs - ribbon shapes spell out transcoded interpretations of an audio stream, they also bear an uncanny resemblance to GPS drawings.

Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn is a nicely crafted java application that allows a playful examination of structures in non-Euclidian space, more specifically Coxeter polytopes in stereographic projection. These complex geometric structures are the 4-dimensional Sisters to the polyhedra and have, what seems like, recursive interiors and packing formations that resemble bubbles in foam.

The applet allows you to fly through these structures and orient the camera view according to your whims; other controls include toggles for the kind of rendering display settings. Perhaps I shouldn’t report it, but there are also some nice rendering glitches on some of the selected models on certain views.

The word ‘polytope’ was introduced by Alicia Boole Stott, the daughter of logician George Boole. So the story goes, she had a remarkable understanding of 4- dimensional geometry (X,Y,X,Time) from an early age. By the age of 18 she worked out by herself the six regular polytopes and built cardboard models of their sections. Later on she would meet and work with Harold Coxeter whose algorithms were employed in Jenn.

You might experience a feeling of non-Euclidean déjà vous while roaming around Jenns polytope space, the experience of space is a lot like being in one of Escher’s drawings. And neatly enough, ‘Coxeter met M. C. Escher in 1954 at a mathematics conference in Amsterdam. Escher had heard about Coxeter’s work on shapes in
Multidimensional space and sought him out. After the conference, Coxeter sent Escher a copy of his paper ‘Crystal Symmetry and Its Generalizations’ which was illustrated with complex geometric figures, including a circle containing a pattern of objects that grew smaller and smaller as they neared the edge.’

Inspired, Escher used this figure as a source for his series of ‘Circle Limit’ etchings. Coxeter and Escher remained friends until the artist’s death in 1972. It also worth noting that Coxeter was in good contact with another Dataisnature fave, Bucky Fuller, Fuller dedicated his book, Synergetics to geometrician.

After you’ve finished with Jenn, why not try your skill at Jenngo, a version of every combinatorialist’s favorite board game, Go, where the board is embedded in projective 3d-space! (download it on the same page). Afterwoods, treat yourself to a collection of Psycholudological snacks at Socialfiction, specifically those posts marked with the tag ‘Go’ and find out what its ALL about.

Connecting onward flights:
Exotic Geometries: Paper Tessellations and Spidrons.
Spacelike tessellations of tetrahedrons
Exotic mathematical surfaces.

In the past year we’ve seen fashion prints hit the catwalks with generative designs adorning them, newsfeed knitwear, and an ever increasing growth of crocheted coral forms incorporating nature’s penchant for the hyperbolic plane. Time then to turn to jewelry, and considering the recent interest in Rapid Prototyping, it was only a matter of time. Applying algorithms that describe nature such as DFL (Diffusion Limited Aggregation), Nervous System allows users to design personalized artifacts, resembling dendrite structures using an online applet.

Related:
Human Robots & Space-Filling Emotions ( Art made with DFL)
Generator.X 2.0 Beyond The Screen, Call
Exotic mathematical surfaces (Rapid Prototyping)

Mescaline Drawings - Henri Michaux

Joseph Nechval hits the nail firmly on the head in describing Henri Michaux’s Mescaline drawings as a space where ‘we see the mind/hand become cyborg, taking on the systematic (but out-of-control vibrational qualities) of the robo-seismograph.’

Entheogens are the software, a program to be run in the brain hardware, sending encoded information to its peripherals, layering discreet but coded information. Michaux’s Mescaline drawings offer the sort of topologies often discovered under a microscope, or seen in a Jitter patch (I’m thinking Xx+xy’s visuals to Murcof’s music last Sunday at the Corsica Studios, London). Crawling non organic crystal matter coagulates into landscapes as the drug software distributes points and data in XYZ space, then connects the points through intelligent networks revealing intuitively the chemistry of the brain and the thought process itself.

Michaux’s drawings, done in the 50’s, offer maps of vastly complex energy fields, the kind of which he described as ‘thousands and thousands of effulgent microscopic points, dazzling diamonds, flashes of microbes’ This is algorithmic psychedelia at full power and the finest breakfast for lovers of pattern-recognition systems.

Myopicetude (detail) & horrorvacui (detail) – Danny Glix

A more recent artist who has meticulously, and beautifully, documented their inward bound journeys is Danny Glix, whos flickr set ‘Trippy sketches’ contains an array of obsessive compulsive phatasmagoria. A wildstyle rockface is extruded into form and a matrix of order is defined by sandblasted linearity – a bit reminiscent of Jean Debuffet’s textures, another favourite of Dataisnature.