Hydrogeny – Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

Evelina Domnitch and Dmtry Gelfand’s recent work Hydrogeny consists of a tank of ultra-pure water scanned by a white laser sheet. Electrodes at the bottom of the tank liberate hydrogen and oxygen bubbles through the process of hydrolysis. Diaphanous bubble clouds and rise in bifurcating paths to the surface while a penetrating laser sheet reveals the intricate dynamics of the bubble flow matrix. The water is further transduced by sound which generates complex spatial configurations and vortexes within the bubble clouds. The streams appear iridescent as each of the bubble acts as a lens to reflect and refract laser light.

Continent, an new online journey, that attempts successfully to ‘map a topology of unstable confluences and traverse the interstices of alternative culture, theory and art’ has an unmissable article exploring Hydrogeny in greater detail.

Samuel Thomas von Sömmering’s “Space Multiplexed” Electrochemical Telegraph (1808-10)

An Aside

Hydrolysis was proposed in 1808 by by the German physician, anatomist and inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmering as method to transfer messages over a distance of a few kilometers. The Electrochemical/Bubble Telegraph receiver’s wires were immersed in a glass tube of water. An electric current was applied in a sequence by the sender through the various wires, each of which represented a digit of a message. At the receivers end the electrolysed water released streams of hydrogen bubbles next to each associated letter or numeral. The telegraph receiver’s operator would watch the bubbles to decode the transmitted message.

Also see:
10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid
Camera Lucida
Optofonica - Anharmonics, Synthaesthesia & Sound Spatialization

Music Animation Machine - Stephen Malinowski

The Music Animation Machine is a tool that allows the visualisation of musical compositions (in MIDI form) as an animated time-line of graphical and geometric elements. Rather than presenting music in its traditional format of the score with a standard 5-line staff notation of symbols and note placements, Stephen Malinowski’s software displays notes, voices and tonality in a scroll. Coloured bars and circles are employed using the visual music of Oskar Fischinger as a model. The history of the MAM began in 1974, and having gone through many iterations, Stephen has grappled with the intrinsic problems of representing musical elements such as consonance/dissonance, the history of recently heard notes, the interactions of overtones, and triadic relationships.

Using different graphical metaphors the MAM visualisations reveal the unique spatio-temporal fingerprints of musical compositions – re-configuring time into space through the transcription of notes into visual form..

Debussy’s Arabesque #1 is presented as a flowing node network each note increasing velocity as it reaches its moment while Clair de Lune is presented as a modernest block design. Its interesting to note how the generated graphical configuration feedbacks onto the auditory perception of the music to create new melodic insights.

You can watch more visualisations from Stephen Malinowski’s MAM here.

Rynth[n4] - Paul Prudence & Natures - Quayola & Mira Calix

Dataisnature is honoured to have its title used for night of audio visual performances at the Pavilion Dome Theatre, Brighton, for the closing of the Brighton Digital Festival on Friday 30th September. I will be performing two visual music pieces along with a performance by Quayola & Mira Calix. Data is Nature is curated by Lighthouse/Honor Harger.

Here’s a passage from the PR, the full text of which can be found here:

‘Data is Nature features the Brighton première of Natures by renowned musician Mira Calix and visual artist Quayola. In this performance, the organic behaviours of plants become part of an audio-visual world where the natural and the artificial coexist harmoniously.

Data is Nature also includes Paul Prudence, a London-based musician and visual artist, known for his stunning audio-visual performances, which use data visualisation and generative techniques to give us striking new views of nature.’

Related:
Quayola – Architectural Augmentation & Digital Constructivism

The Wave (detail) - Weshargrove & HeatherandChris

The Wave is a prominent geological feature located on the Colorado Plateau near to the Utah and Arizona border. Composed of striated waves of cross-bedded sandstone, the landscape appears to have the quality of a frozen liquid, its appearance not unlike cooled molten lava fields. The layers of ribboned red coloured rock are in fact generated by what could be described as one of Earth’s many endlessly long doWhile loops - millions of years of precipitation of water and deposition of oxidization minerals. These geological linear patterns of self-organisation generated by this repeating process are know as Liesegang rings and are commonly found in other sedimentary oscillation ‘computations’ – a good example being Banded Agates (There is also a cross-referencing here with the spatio-temporal output of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction).

Linear Landscape (detail) - Leonardo Solaas & Happy Place (detail) Jared Tarbell

Both Leonardo Solaas’s ‘Linear Landscape’ set and Jared Tarbell’s ‘Happy Place’ applet have used algorithms to generate artefacts with notable similarities to the geological patterns found at The Wave. The former uses a particle system to create an illusion of three-dimensional organic surfaces, the latter a node system to give rise to broken sedimentary textures.

Further Viewing & Reading
360 degree Panaroma of The Wave
The slot valleys of Antelope Canyon as a hydro-dynamic computation
The Melodies and Megaliths of Pseudocrystalline Terrains

Mechanical Calculator – Kevin Twomey & Une Mission Ephémère - Piotr Kamler

Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream: @MrPrudence

Ludwig Zeller’s Introspectre, Dromolux & Optocoupler speculate the future of different kinds of information exchange.

The Do-Nothing Machine - Charles Eames’s Kinetic solar toy [Video]. More info can be found at the Airform Archives.

AH // Dissections – Realitat. Illustratively styled computational work using Voronoi and Catmull Clark algorithms.

Structure Series - Marcos Montane. Circular and spirographic Delaunay triangulations.

Any Colour You Like (Pyramid IV) - Dev Harlan. Optical pattern projection-mapping.

Piotr Kamler - Une Mission Ephémère A cryptic, geometric mind-food breakfast.

The Square - Stanley Tigerman and G.L. Crabtree [1975] Kaleidoscopic combinatoric projection drawings at Rndrd.

Tube - Ara Peterson & The Do-Nothing Machine - Charles Eames

Vasarely - P. Kassovitz [1960]. Exhibition documentary with music ‘NEG-ALE’ by Xenakis.

Ara Peterson’s laser-cut wood assembled sculptures with time-based properties are featured at DesignBloom.

Felix Turner has created a WebGL emulation of the Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer [scan-line displacement video effects].

Virus Models [1965] - Ted Klotz including the lamp-like Adenovirus with its 240 nut-shaped units in 20 equilateral triangles.

Emoc’s Paysages -textural compositions from photos by translating pixel colours to deterministic shapes.

Digital Archeology: Excavating the 6502 Chip. Its schematic - one of the last to be hand drawn.

Visual6502 has some very high resolution images [Die Shots] of early pioneering CPU chips including a Motorola 6800 [75MB!].

The Sun Cutter Project - Markus Kayser. Extreme Solar powered laser cutting.

Digiman discusses the objectivity of his own existence and generative modular synthesis from binary signals.

Flottille - Etienne Cliquet. Micro-origamis unfold via capillary action of water.

The Proof - David Colosi. An interior of a math equation & the laboratory used for its generation as art piece.

Rutt-Etra-Izer - Felix Turner & Adenovirus Model - Ted Klotz

Automatypewriter ’self-reflexive’ & self-typing interface for interactive fiction games.

Piet - A programming language in which programs look like the grid abstractions of Piet Mondrian.

Very Slow Scan Television - Gebhard Sengmüller. TV images encoded into bubble wrap at 1 frame/day.

Microvenus - Joe Davis. ‘feminine’ code inserted into a bacterium and sent into space.

Processing patterns for flyer/poster design including Puddle - Andreas Gysin.

60’s electromechanical calculating machines and rotary calculators http://bit.ly/iNzcPR photographs - Mark Glusker.

Mechanical Calculators - Kevin Twomley. Intricate/complex/alien gear systems of early calculating machines.

Fans of Zimoun will also enjoy Pe Lang. Multi-form mechanised kinetic-sound sculptures.

Large collection of old Electronic Music Resources at UBU including periodicals and books.

Last & First Men – Olaf Stapledon.

George Dyson’s ‘Darwin Among The Machines’ published in 1997, is an excellent account of the history of computers and global intelligence through the evolution of machines. As so often with book reading a chain reaction takes place, references in one book lead you to reading other books and so on. And so this was the case with Chapter 11 of Dyson’s book titled ‘Last and First Men’.

Much of the chapter is given up to Olaf Stapledon, who’s novel ‘Last and First Men’ chronicles the future history of the human race for the next thousand million years. In the story humans evolve through 18 different species (as well many more subspecies). Thriving in Utopias and then decimating each other in wars, nearly wiping themselves out and then re-adapting. Eventually they explore and colonise the Solar System - mutating along the way. Being well versed in the science of the time Stapledon outlines different evolutionary necessities that each species develops in order to circumnavigate impending catastrophes.

The novel anticipates genetic engineering and proposes a prototype of group-mind - a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals. Eventually humans are able to genetically engineer each subsequent species in order to survive and proliferate in inhospitable environments.

Illustrations of a Cellular-Numerical Model of Weather imagined by Lewis Fry Richardson (Sources unknown)

Dyson’s chapter on Stapleton details an encounter with a young professor, Lewis Fry Richardson. Both worked in the Friends Ambulance Unit in France acting as conscientious objectors during the First World War. Richardson, a Meteorologist, was interested, at that time, in mathematical models of weather prediction. Using his own ‘intentionally guided dreaming’ strategy he drafted a cellular-numerical model of weather – ideas of which were published in ‘Weather Prediction by Numerical Process’ after the war. His theory proposed a congregation of 64,000 human computers collectively processing numerical data, each human computing a weather cell of discrete location and calculating interactions with its nearest cellular neighbour. Local interactions would generate large dynamical systems of global weather patterns. It appears as if Richardson was laying the path to what was later to become Cellular Automata, although little credit has been given by later proponents of Cellular Automata systems.

Switch-engine breeder - David Bell & Turmite (an extension of Langton’s Ant) – Ferkel

In ‘Darwin Among The Machines’ Dyson ponders as to how much of Richardson’s cellular weather system theory was imparted to Stapledon during the quieter moments of ambulance duty. The answer to this question might lay in the Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’. For from an immense distance of time and space, Stapledon’s story of our species appears as an massive organic tessellation automata. An endless ebb and flow of cells, that interact in complex birth-death oscillations reforming and reconfiguring breeder seed patterns. Dense layers of complex ant-like interactions -human space-filler patterns folding and unfolding.

After the war Richardson dedicated his time to the statistical analysis of conflict. While studying the causes of war between two countries relating to border length part of his research was in the measurement of borders and coastlines. At the time this research was ignored by the scientific community. Today, it is seen as one element in the birth of the science of fractals and was cited by Benoît Mandelbrot in his famous paper ‘How Long Is the Coast of Britain’. It seems as if Richardson’s ‘intentionally guided dreaming’ gave birth to a great many prescient ideas of which have now become some of the most interesting and far reaching areas of modern mathematics. Many of these ideas, embryonic in form, found their way into Stapledon’s books, at times encoded, but never the less highly suffused.

1923 aka Heaven - Max Hattler & ‘A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ (detail) - Augustin Lesage

The connections between so called outsider art and certain forms of generative/computational art can be intrinsic and implicit. The self-referential motifs and mytho-mathematic patterns that so commonly appear in the work of outsider artists, generated by ‘non-standard’ brain functioning (or whatever the currently accepted catchphrase is), mimic the output of recursive functions, and various iteration species of the mindless algorithm. You’ll will have to wait for a more detailed post on this confluence of seemingly different paradigms – but expect one soon.

In the mean time attention will drawn to the work of Max Hattler, specifically his work ‘1923 aka Heaven’ which was ‘inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. ‘1923′ is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from the same year.

In this film loop the viewer is taken on a trajectory through a seemingly infinite architecture of moving pillars, sliding steps and shifting façades, each adorned with glowing primitive shapes - circles and squares. The experience seems to be a well worked out exercise in the geometric resonance of nested complexity, the end result is a building that is a machine – a chapter of Tron occurring in Ancient Egypt. The bilateral symmetry, often also favoured by outsider artists, is employed to yield illusions of totemic forms in a way that those who have a fondness for Rorschach ink blots will appreciate.

Sync - Max Hattler

Be sure to check out Max’s related video ‘1925 aka Hell’ for a darker journey into a dystopian mechanized landscape. Also not to missed is ‘Sync’ featured at Instantcinema. Sync is another exercise in periodic movement and relationships between circulating abstract geometric forms.

‘There is an underlying unchanging sync at the centre of everything. All constituent parts are locked into it as the gigantic zoetrope disc’s constant rotation creates all movement’

Untitled 15 & Beneath North (detail) - Michael Kukla

Michael Kukla’s monochromatic drawings on paper are built up with successive layers of ink to creating cellular fields that have the illusion of depth. Vortices of negative space imply complex nebulous forms fragile to touch, movements of bubbles across a foam surface, and flat surfaces with outbreaks of sponge-like areas. The procedural cellular approach approximates the geometry of packed soap bubbles, when applied to sculpture the memories of these bubbles appear as fossilized remnant textures.

Particle Physics Wind Chime at Particle Decelerator & The Genesis of Complex Geometry at Emergent Urbanism

PARTICLE DECELERATOR

Synthesizing news and information from the new frontiers of art-science, with a particular emphasis on the quantum and cosmological, is Honor Hager’s Particle Decelerator blog. Picking up on the latest findings in particles physics, radio astronomy and dark matter, to name a few, Particle Decelerator unravels philosophical, metaphysical and political connotations connected to these subjects. Not to be missed is Honor’s TED talk ‘Listening to the Sounds of Space’, a wonderfully paced, concise exposé on the history of the Universe in sound.

BINARY HEAP

Binary Heap contains a wide bandwidth of posts linking to electronic music theory, electro-acoustics, modular synthesis, visual music, and programmable music systems. It also contains links to historical documents. Aleatorical musicians, and those interested in use of random processes in art, may well find ‘An Anthology of Chance Operations’ a must read. Another aspect of Binary Heap is that it collects examples of music software, including plug-ins and add-ons for DAW based software, as well as small idiosyncratic algorithmic generators.

EMERGENT URBANISM

Emergent Urbanism is a blog that was maintained by Mathieu Helie and has been non-functional since October 2010. A comprehensive list of the larger, more detailed, posts have been archived on a page of their own and cover subjects such as complexity and self-similarity applied to city growth, the geometry of town planning vs urban sprawl and the emergent morphology of settlement.

Universal Periodic Chart (detail) & The Formula of the Locked Potentials in Universal Ratio’s (detail) - Walter Russell

Outsider scientific-mystic Walter Russell developed a lifelong philosophy based on the unifying principles of forces within the cosmos - what seems like a kind of pseudo-scientifically framed offshoot of non-dualism. The most interesting elements his work are the diagrams and charts illustrating his books. They document an idiosyncratic understanding of natural phenomena such as light, magnetism, thermodynamics, waves and vibration.

Esa Ruoho has collected together many illustrations from Russell’s key works in Flickr sets – images from the books The Secret of Light, The Universal One and Atomic Suicide. The ‘In the Wave’ set contains charts with painted colour spectra and elliptical prismatic shapes denoting light waves, electrical vibrations and magnetism.

A strong theme running through Russell’s schematics, especially evident in his ‘Home Study Course’ is the correspondences of geometric equivalences and orders. The charts resemble sets of musical scales, denoting frameworks of periodicity and harmony within particular natural systems. Many of the diagrams, at first glance, might easily be be misinterpreted as modern musical notation. ‘Stages of Growth in the Nine pairs of Radar Mirrors’ is a prime example. The top half insinuates a time-line while the bottom half connotes a wiring schematic for a multi-channel electro-acoustic performance!

The 10 Octaves of Integrating Light (detail) & The 10 Octaves of Integrating and Disintegrating Light (detail) - Walter Russell

The pseudo-science and religious ideas served up by Russell, and his wife Lao, at the University of Science and Philosophy paint a patchwork pattern of fuzzy utopianism, idealism and at times naivety. As Art-Brut is to Art, so characters like Russell and Lao are to traditional mainstream science and so they are essential. It might just be the case that Walter Russell’s genius, and his diagrams, can only be decoded at a later moment in time. His friend Nikola Tesla had advised him to lock away his work in a safe for 1000 years - because humankind was not yet mature enough for it.

‘The glory of becoming a transcendent being is the only reason for living’ - Lao Russell

‘Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed’ - Walter Russell

g01i02a30 - Benjamin Dillenburger & justinlivi.Geode() - Justin Livi

Benjamin Dillenburger’s Structures and Digital Catenary sets collect images generated using shape grammars in Processing adapted to create crystalline wire-frames that are both architectural and biomorphic. The Structure set documents the evolution of dense symmetrical canopy’s - its not hard to imagine these structures as a proposal for a futurist glass house in a Gothic style.

Justin Livi’s justinlivi.Geode() set contains outputs from a Processing sketch that accurately resemble banded Agates - a micro-crystalline silicate with arrangements of concentric deposition rings. Some of the Geode patterns have the quality of water colour work, mimicking the way suspended inks create diffusion filaments as they disperse through water on paper.

Leonardo Solaas Affine Swarms are created by generating autonomous agents that leave trails of their movement under the effect of Affine Transformations. As the agents move from random to more constrained behaviour the outputs develop from noisy textures to rhythmically modulated geometric lattices.

Related:
Banded Agates, Sonic Hydrodynamics & the BZ Reaction

Herbicide Gourd (detail) & Connector Plant (detail) from Growth Assembly - Sasha Pohflepp and Daisy Ginsberg.

Sasha Pohflepp and Daisy Ginsberg’s project ‘Growth Assembly’ is comprised of a set plant-machine illustrations together which form part of larger composite horticultural mechanism.

‘After the cost of energy had made global shipping of raw materials and packaged goods unimaginable, only the rich could afford traditional, mass-produced commodities.

Synthetic biology enabled us to harness our natural environment for the production of things. Coded into the DNA of a plant, product parts grow within the supporting system of the plant’s structure. When fully developed, they are stripped like a walnut from its shell or corn from its husk, ready for assembly.’

Growth Assembly, which was illustrated by Sion Ap Tomos is a pictorial investigation in synthetic biology and DNA manipulation. The illustrations have been created in a similar style to those found in traditional illustrated pharmacopoeia and botanical codices of the last few centuries. These botanical codices, particularly in the 19th century, were produced as an aid to cultivation and hybridization of plants. Creating plant hybrids can be considered an early form of non-invasive genetic engineering. In this sense Growth Assembly continues the lineage of study in plant manipulation and botanical engineering - albeit extending it into a domain of pataphysical science-fiction speculation.

groWorld-randomGarden-01 - Tale of Tales & Plant Eyes - Dave Griffiths

Foam’s groWorld initiative, begun in 2007 and still in operation, is a many headed hydra exploring vegetal syncretism with workshops, conference discussions and art exhibitions - details of which can be found here. One particular groWorld interest is in the patafusion of permaculural idioms to the world of gaming. Much has been written about the need for liberation in video games from the ubiquitous and inane shootem-up scenario.

Dave Griffiths has been documenting the development of a set of patabotanical gameworlds at his site related to the groWorld initiative. His Plant Eyes game, developed with his own open prototyping engine Fluxus, allows the player to take on the role of a plant and roam through an organic environment utilising nutrients to grow into new plant forms.

Mandragora, from Tacuinum Sanitatis (1474) & Pictorial History of Ancient Pharmacy (1902) - Peters, Hermann

Tale of Tales, a games development studio lab specialising in poetic gaming paradigms, have also contributed some patabotanical game prototypes. There are no ruined texture-mapped citadels pock-marked from the ricochets of bullets to found in this lush blue-tinged multi-player jungle.

Woman as a plant – plant as a man. Combining a bifurcating root formation that resembles the human form and containing a psychedelic concoction of tropane alkaloids, the Mandrake (’Djinn’s eggs’ in Arabic) is an emblem of vegetable-human synthesis. Mandrake ‘generates alpha brain-wave activity, similar to that found in REM sleep, generating hypnotic landscapes of the internal gameworld.

Related:
Aljazar - Live coded robot music (Also by Dave Griffiths)

Pataforest(detail) & Seed - Foam

Adapting the absurdist metaphysical conjectures of Pataphysics (Alfred Jarry’s Science of imaginary solutions) to Botany creates a fantastic ecology of verdant pataphors. Metaflora, Phycological futurology and hypnogogic phyllotaxis perhaps? Libarynth invents and documents this new branch of speculative science and its related offshoots by ‘patafying’ the study of plants.

Triffids take note! Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney’s Cursory Speculations on Human Plant Interaction ‘explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate reciprocal interaction between humans and plants’. Examined in the paper: the continued evolution of human-plant symbiotics - in their somatic and syntactic protocols. This includes shamanic enthogenic communication and Thalient strategies.

Visualists craving some pictorial cues will enjoy Foam’s Flickr stream of Patabotanical illustrations. Here you’ll find a collection of arbocultural surrealism - machine seeds and plant fusions. The Magnum Opus of this set is the extravagantly complex Pataforest, a kind of floating forest biohaven, apparently in complete self-contained harmony – a part-game design-plan for a topsoil Eden minutiae.

Pataplant Guild Sketch with detail– Foam

If patabotanical art has a precursor, maybe we need look no further than our friend Paul Klee – consider for example Botanical Theatre or Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of Plants. We should also not forget the arborescent algebraic notation of The Voynich Manuscript.

Note: ‘The Forest is a College, Each Tree a University’ is a line from the lyrics of Coil’s ‘Queens of the Circulating Library’

Related:
http://fo.am/

Karl Schwanzer. Domus 550 & The Square - Stanley Tigerman and G.L. Crabtree (Both at RNDRD)

RNDRD

RNDRD, ‘Rendering the 20th Century’, contains a compilation of scans taken from out-of-print architectural journals, otherwise impossible to get hold of, and defining key movements in the evolution of architectural practice. Rather than concentrate on finished projects, the specialisation here is in drawings, collages, and dioramas. The most spectacular images are those of the futuristic and experimental utopianism of the 60s and 70s.

‘RNDRD loves awkward models, the sketchiness of early computer graphics and even building types and strategies, now hackneyed, that once appeared as innovative solutions. Buildings are expensive, but paper is cheap. The most interesting project may not be the one that was built. RNDRD wants to give these unseen works and forgotten trends a presence on the internet’

RNDRD is complied by Josh Conrad and Lauren Hamer

CRYPTOFOREST

Wilfried Hou Je Bek has been entertaining us with a diverse landscape of wild-style essays for as long as blogs have existed. Socialfiction fans will have learned of bacteriopoetics, gargoyle automatons, algorithmic psychogeography and the philosophy of crystalpunk to name a few. Last year Socialfiction evaporated into the digital aether (Although you can still find some of it archived here). Good news however appearance of his more recent project(ion) and its accompanying blog – Cryptoforest. Cryptoforestry extends the vectors of psychogeography into the realms of of feral, in-limbo, incognito, precognitive and unappreciated forests in the urban environment.

The Crystalpunk Manifesto for Psycholudology - Wilfried Hou Je Bek at Cryptoforestry & H-Ada-Mar(s)d [Hadamard code matrix which was embedded on the NASA Mariner 9 spacecraft ] at Chemoton

CHEMOTON

Chemoton is Vitorino Ramos research notebook containing thoughts about ‘artificial life, bio-inspired computation, complex sciences, their applications and technologies. This is one corner of browser-space where thoughts on the work of John Cage and Paul Klee collide with short essays on the social intelligence of bacteria and fluid dynamics of ant colonies.

Surface Detail - Tom Beddard

Tom Beddard [Sublue] has been featured on these pages before - in a post on Structure Synth, in a Selected Tweets, and at least two Flicker Fruits collections: #17 and #34. It’s time to devote a complete post to his work concentrating on recent projects.

Tom develops his own ‘home-brew’ raytracing shader software to generate highly complex fractal topologies, tessellated surfaces, and three-dimensional objects. Surface Detail is a good example of the capabilities of his software. Combined with a monochromatic palette it generates fractal aesthetics distinct from any you’ve seen before. A rotating planetoid structure, mutates through a steadily transitioning surface of subdivisioned self-similar cells. The effect is morphogenetic, biological and botanical - compare his work to this SEM picture of Gephyrocapsa oceanica for example. Flickr stills of Surface Detail can be found here. Geometric Organica, a precursor to Surface Detail, similarly deals with organic networks of fractal forms, which appear as machine-crafted seeds and fruits.

The most recent update to this sequence of works is the realisation of a WebGL application that can run in any current browser supporting Mozilla’s powerful WebGL library (Google Chrome & Firefox 4 Beta). The intense Sci-fi like scenographs generated by Fractal Lab hint at the kinds of landscapes perhaps envisioned by Terrence Mckenna and John C Lilly while musing on solid state intelligence and ultra complex machine planet ecologies.

Related:
aDiatomea – Sonically Superformed Micro-organisms
Year of the Radiolarian

Incredible Machine - AT&T Archives & Surface - Taizo Matsumura.

Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream: @MrPrudence

VagueTerrain #19 Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology.

Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity [PDF] - Joe Banks on Electronic Voice Phenomena & Psychoacoustics.

After the Screen: Array Aesthetics and Transmateriality – Mitchell Whitelaw [Teemingvoid].

Incredible Machine. Elucidating film on early computer graphics systems including BEFLIX that could have only been made in the 70s [AT&T Archives].

Starringthecomputer is dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Handily compiled in an A-Z of computers.

Unitxt/Univrs - Alva Noto, [visuals by Wuestenarchitekten] introduces a fresh take on ‘interface-sonification’.

Hoxtron – Daniel Brown. A work in progress 3d landscape sound analyser.

Kinetic artworks by Taizo Matsumura. High speed movement creates ‘persistance of vision’ surfaces.

Triangulations posts on the kinetic light sculptures of Julio Cesar Gonzalez.

Large scale spirographic shapes & symmetry drawings by Tony Orrico.

Ephemeral architectures/fragmented geometric installations - Clemens Behr.

Jean Tinguely’s Art Machines. Photos from his exhibit in Paris in 1959 by LIFE magazine photographer Loomis Dean.

Vector Figures - Mandelbrut .Vectrex scan-line oscilloscopia.

VagueTerrain #19 Schematic as Score: For Loud Speakers Schematic [detail] - Jason R. Butcher & The Fabelphonetikum Schematic [Detail] - Moritz Ellerich

Sewing Machines Orchestra - Martin Messier. Orchestra of acoustic noises produced by 1940’s sewing machines.

Large scale optical and perceptual projection installations by Peter Kogler.

Otomata, a generative sequencer using cellular automata logic which evolves sequences of music - Batuhan Bozkurt.

Circles Dancing in a Rhomb – Edmund Harriss. Discontinuity lines produced by rotations of a torus as a piecewise isometry.

A Sunday Afternoon Watching Symmetry Break [Pointillist thoughts at ‘Kali & the Kaleidoscope: An Artificial Cosmology’] – Rohit Gupta.

Marble Machines. Modular contraptions for steel bearing animatronics at The Tinkering Studio blog.

Chance and Order. Martin Isaac on on the aleatory process behind Kenneth Martins ‘random’ geometric paintings.

Pitch to Rhythm : Rhythm to Pitch - Andrew Lucia’s visualisations of the tones & rhythms of music by Stockhausen.

Composing Perceptual Geographies - Maryanne Amacher revealing thoughts on spatial sound composition.

520 Millions ago was a ‘a wild period’ with Lobopodians [Walking Cactuses], Opabinias & the dreamlike Hallucigenia.

Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior or, The Songs of Eden - Daniel Hillis [Of Connection Machine Fame].

The Poetics of Data - Jeff Thompson re-contextualizes data sets as poetry.

Hexagrama - Arístides García

Arístides García’s Hexagrama is a visual music study, made with VVVV, based on the interactions and movements of ‘clockwork’ geometric forms. Music sequencers usually rely on a standardised left to right reading of a timeline for the recording and triggering of audio. Hexagrama breaks the mould of this traditional linearity. Using a circular schematic of chronology allows the ‘hands’ to trigger percussive sounds while the subdivsioned shapes cue other synthesized waveforms in steadily increasing complexity. All sounds are triggered by information sent from VVVV to a VST instrument.

The Metatron Cube & Score for Metastasis - Xenakis

Not surprisingly Arístides has used non-standard music notation scores from the 50s and 60s as pointers to his process - citing the notations of Xenakis as a key reference. Other inspiration comes from sacred and esoteric geometry, notably the Metatron Cube, as well as Islamic tessellation patterns.

For more works by Arístides head over to his website, where you find documentation on VJ performance projects, Installation projections and other works made with the video synthesis tool-kit, VVVV.

Pages from ‘A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates’ – RAND

‘The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance ‘ - Robert R. Coveyou.

Random number spotters will enjoy ‘A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates’, published by RAND in 1955. The book contains 600 pages of random digits neatly aligned in tables. The tables were designed to be used in mathematical and scientific experiments particularly in the area of cryptography. The book was reissued in 2001 and is available at Amazon, where it has generated some amusing readers reviews:

‘Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.’

‘If you like this book, I highly recommend that you read it in the original binary. As with most translations, conversion from binary to decimal frequently causes a loss of information’

More reviews of RAND’s encyclopedia of random digits can be viewed here.

In 2006 Nathan Kennedy wrote to RAND asking if he could freely distribute these million random digits believing that they contained no creative content and therefore should not be subject to copyright restrictions. RAND responded negatively, and perhaps preposterously affirmed that the million random digits were subject to copyright laws! Nathan’s answer was to publish his own ‘A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates’ online.

As all programmers will know, computer generated random numbers are at best pseudo-random as they are generated in a predictable (deterministic) fashion using a mathematical formula. Patterns will eventually show up in large sequences of random numbers.

Random.org offers true random numbers generated from data derived from sampling atmospheric noise. Random that is, if you don’t subscribe to the idea that the Universe is in itself one endless ongoing parallel computation and therefore deterministic in principle.

Christian Bok & Protein 13 - The sculptural embodiment of The Xenotext

Christian Böks’s Xenotext Experiment attempts to encode a short poem [constrained by biochemical necessity] into a sequence of DNA so that it can be implanted into a bacterium – the Deinococcus radiodurans. It’s a literal [no pun intended] attempt to bring prose to life, and to release it into a biological ecosystem. Furthermore Christian’s encoding process attempts to create a reaction from the bacteria - the manufacture of a benign protein. This, in essence, allows the bacterium to ‘write’ a new version of the poem in response to the implant. If this sounds like science-fiction, or more like something out of William S Burroughs stranger fictions, its by no means a coincidence. The Xenotext, as explained by Christian, is an attempt to bring to life Burroughs’ famous maxim that ‘language is a virus’.

Recent reports of the possible wireless communication between bacteria poses some intriguing futurist speculations. We can imagine a wireless network of ‘bacterial devices’ collaborating on encoded literature through dense nanoscopic parallel computations - the biological equivalent of a Connection Machine. The future of poetry? Envision a Petri-dish of ‘bacterial computers’ programming self-generating, and evolving, combinatorial Oulipo verse encoded via DNAML [DNA markup-language].

New Scientist recently interview Christian Bök on the Xenotext - it can be found here.

Network B, a.k.a. Process 4 (detail) & Process 6 (B) - Casey Reas

Casey Reas, one of the initiators of Processing (along with Ben Fry), and a key mover in the field of process art shouldn’t really need any introduction for anyone involved in the generative art scene. Recently he has updated his website with new project documentation - proving a perfect opportunity for Dataisnature to post on his work.

Casey’s speciality is in utilising algorithms to create naturalistic and organic forms that often mimic those found in the plant kingdom. Most recently he had been utilising network algorithms to cultivate growth systems. In works such as Network B, a.k.a. Process 4 and Network A, a.k.a. Process 4, we are invited to consider the growth process in itself as it slowly unfolds.

Other works include gestural figures and painterly marks that remind us of the ‘all-over’ paintings of abstract expressionism, think of the calligraphic works of Mark Tobey, for example.

In the ‘Process’ series of works the prescriptive directions for each piece is made transparent to the viewer of the work. The instructions are written as a kind of recipe in plain text to be included with each piece. Process 17 contains the following human readable instructions:

‘A rectangular surface filled with instances of Element 5, each with a different size and gray value. Draw a transparent circle at the midpoint of each Element. Increase a circle’s size and opacity while its Element is touching another Element and decrease while it is not.’

Such a simple and strict instruction when applied through the use of computer code to generate the forms yields surprising results that appear to exist in the blurry boundaries between determinism and randomness.

These instructional methods directly echo’s the work of an earlier generation of artists who have used similar paradigms to create artworks in a rule based manner. Sol Lewitt and Kenneth Martin are good examples, the latter made good use of aleatory strategies in his recipes for making art.

The IMB 7094 & Max Mathews circa 1972

Recently we hear of the death of Max Mathews, known to some as the father of computer music and forerunner of digital sound synthesis. It was in 1957 that he programmed an IMB 704, a room-sized machine, using his Music I program, to ‘perform’ music that in his own words had ‘timbres and notes were not inspiring’. It was not actually the first time digital music was generated by a computer, the Australian CSIRAC can lay claim to the piece of fame.

In 1961 Mathews arranged an accompaniment of the song Daisy at Bell Labs on a an IBM 7094. Arthur C Clark who caught wind of this suggested Stanley Kubrick use the song in 2001:A Space Odyssey and, as we know, its featured as a slowed down version suggesting the regression and faliure of the HAL 9000 computer.

The Altair 8800 & Steve Dompier’s instruction set for generating music on the Altair 8800 (detail)

In 1975 Steve Dompier, member of Homebrew Computer Club, made a very memorable hardware hack on his newly built Altair 8800 computer - a machine that came in kit form and had to be constructed by hand. While interrogating its 72 function set, he noticed interference frequencies coming from the radio he was listening to. He noticed that a process occurring at a particular memory address would generate a specific frequency – for example memory address 075 was equivalent to an F-sharp. After finding the other memory addresses corresponding to other notes, he had mapped the musical scale which lead him to writing a simple music generation program. At the next Homebrew Computer Club meeting he showed his discovery to other member of the club. Fittingly he choose to have his Altair perform a rendition of Daisy, as if in homage to Mathews piece on IBM 7094 and and Clarke’s HAL 9000. The same night Dompier instructed his Altair to generate ‘Fool on the Hill’ by the Beatles – you can view a video here.

Works from Geometry & Persepctive - Lorenz Stoer (1537-1621)

50Watts Psychedelic ‘72 Textbook set contains images from the first edition of Biology Today published in 1972. The images are notable for their lavish and colourful interpretations of human biological functions and phenomena, and at times the artistic style verges on the surreal. The humanist approach, evident in Masami Teraoka’s illustration echoes the societal changes occurring at the same time, the style of imagery reminding us strongly of poster graphics for psychedelic rock concerts.

Aayacata7 collates a set of antique drawings of polyhedra, and other geometric exotica in his ‘Poliedros en el arte’ set. You will find drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci which were published in Luca Pacioli’s ‘In Divine Proportion’ in 1509. There is a selection of highly crafted regular and semi-regular solids by the German Jamnitzer Wenzel which were published in Perspectiva Corporum Regularium in 1568.

JFK to LAX - Sgoralnick & Human Sexual Behavior - Masami Teraoka (From Biology Today,1972)

The Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel contains work by an unknown artist which present geometric forms as still life compositions often with birds to create a sense of scale for each object. The balancing puzzle-like forms, pataphysically arranged, might be seen as precursor to the work of the metaphysical and mathematical works of Giorgio de Chirico.

Those who take time to scrutinise earth landforms from the window of a jet airliner in flight will enjoy Sgoralnick’s ‘in Flight’ set. A collection of pathological geomorphologies including alluvial fans, arable farming patchworks patterns, and branching drainage systems.

Seed Drawings - Clement Valla

Clement Valla’s Seed Drawings document the emergent process of a chain of individuals copying a small line drawing and then passing it onto the next to repeat the process a 1000 times. Each complete drawing is an aggregate of many smaller drawings grouped together. The works were made using the crowd-sourcing online tool Mechanical Turk, which ‘allows programmers (Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do’.

The drawings contain the characteristic patterns of emergent systems that have local interactions occurring between constituent parts without knowledge of the global configuration. Like a game of Telephone [Chinese whispers] the line changes over time with successive copies containing amplifications of ‘anomalies’ and ‘features’ over time. When reconfigured as a whole in a grid-like lattice we are made aware of the change in state of each line over time. There are areas of phase transition within the global structure, neighbourhoods of different kinds of lines, textures and colours evolving in characteristic from one location to another. The final outcome displays aspects of organic growth - mimicking natural emergent self-organising systems such as termite mounds, lichen growth or slime mould configurations. Whereas the former system relies on a chain of information being passed from each individual to the next (a one-to-one interaction) natural systems often rely on a more complex many-to-many network system to create the trademark aggregations.

Other works by Clement also harness the power of networked and collaborative programmable systems that question the hegemony of authorship. He goes on to note that ‘like an anamorphic projection, my programs produce distortions that reveal their own underlying logic, but also point to the system as it functions when we fail to notice it - when it works conventionally.’

Clements work was originally spotted at Infrabodies

X-Rac - Dr. Ray Pepinsky [photograph by Al Fenn] & Mesonic Fabrics – Biothing

Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream: @MrPrudence

Luminant Point Arrays - Stephan Tillmans. Tube TV screens photographed at the moment they are switched.

Variations on PI - Nils Voelker. Light-paintings based on combinatorial variations derived from Pi.

The Labyrinths of Moto Yamamoto. Large scale maze drawings arranged in salt.

Mesonic Fabrics – Biothing. Structural trajectories via simulated electromagnetic fields, emitters & Cellular Automata.

Light Montage / Soft Partition - Siwen Huang .Three dimensional optical surfaces.

Geometric tessellations and human-procedural works on paper by Devin Powers.

Aqua-velvet posts on the X-Rac and some other visualisation sculptures of Dr. Ray Pepinsky. Photographs by Al Fenn from 1954.

Darko Fritz on the Cybernetic/Kinetic façade artworks of Vladimir Bonacic from the late 60s.

Expanding Cosby Sweater - Ray Sweeten. A symmetrical oscilloscopic and sound-reactive work.

Stylophone + cross stitch == clothtylophone – Flickr set from Syano.

Eyafjallajökull - Joanie Lemercier/Simon Geilfus [AntiVJ] topological wireframe mapping projection.

Traumgedanken - Maria Fischer. Dream-logic hyperlinks made of real thread.

Hemesh [Processing lib] - Frederik Vanhoutte. Half-edge datastructure implementation to generate elaborate 3D shapes.

Traumgedanken - Maria Fischer & Pattern [detail] – Devin Powers

Generative photography - Ishac Bertan. Long exposures of projection asynchrony.

Beehives + Mainframes. Computer control room ladies from the late 60’s.

Roots - Roman Kirschner. Dynamic sculpture formed of growing crystals that generate sound.

Tessel - David Letellier. Mirror faceted kinetic installation [suspended topography of 40 4×2m triangular mirrors].

Watch the nodel note clusters of Debussy’s Arabesque #1 unfold. Performed by Stephen Malinowski.

The colours of noise and their affects on perception & consciousness as explored by Eva Schindling.

Quasicrystal Diffraction Pattern Simulations – Michaelerule. Multidimensional tessellations at Space Collective.

Chronoscapes & Aquascapes - PerryBurge. The aesthetics of liquid turbulence & ink flow.

Conway’s Life [Blog]. Geminoid replicators, Multi-Herschel Constructions & Pseudo-Heisenburp devices for everybody!

William S. Burroughs excremental DNA is soaked in gold dust & loaded into a gene-gun to create Bio-Art!

Left: Uprooted & Right: Uprooted - Hyungsub Shin

New York based artist Hyungsub Shin brings a new and fresh perspective to the realm of fractal artworks with site-specific sculptural cut-outs and complex rhizomatic symmetry-breaking drawings. An important aspect of Shin’s work, often realised in materials such as electrical wires, rope and plastic twines, is that of open growth and unlimited expansion - the artist notes that ‘the whole structure of the installation is not significantly affected by adding or subtracting its parts’.

The works on paper are as equally decorative as they are diagrammatic – data visualisations of social interactions are implied, as are biological systems such neuronal networks. In some cases the drawings attempt to formally capture standard fractal configurations – but Hyungsub’s human touch creates unconventional convolutions in the self-similar topologies – a welcome opposition to more rigid and fixed computationally derived counterparts. The complex works created with electrical twist-wires mimic capillary systems and brachial forms and are consolidated by the 3-dimensionality and resultant shadow play of the materials. The site specific sculptures, often juxtaposed within urban environments present structures as organic living forms infecting and encroaching upon brickwork. In other situations organic figures cut-out of anodised aluminium form bold silhouettes against the skyline to create a idolatry totem fractals

Related Posts:
Results 1 - 20 of about 156,000 for Fractal
The MandelBulb – Daniel White
Julya Sets & Fractal Cities

Paintings - Jerry Judah

Jerry Judah’s sculptural relief paintings depict haphazard structures, shanti-town sprawls, decaying settlements and the temple complex ruins. Taking inspiration from the landscapes of India, his monochromatic dioramas are generated from recollections of the ornate temple architecture he encountered there growing up as a child.

Many of the works appear to have been generated by a kind of emergent accretion, perhaps mimicking the organic growth of unplanned towns and urban self-organisation. The ’settlements’ are surfaced by a multiplicity of recognisable elements - aerial masts, satellite dishes and phone lines.

Judah’s imaginary landscapes (ften dystopian) are evocative of the rhizomatic architectural propositions of Lebbeus Woods. The structures are also reminiscent of algorithmically generated constructions and landscapes panoramas that have been defined by procedural techniques.

Originally spotted at Algorithmic Worlds
Related: Darlene Charneco - Dioramic imaginings

Clathrus Morning (detail) & Whisper Vapour (detail) - Bette Burgoyne

Bette Burgoyne’s pencil drawings are phantasmagorical reinterpretations of observed and recollected natural phenomena – clouds formations, lichen colonies, mycological growths, and the reflections of light on liquids. Working with a while pencil on black paper, the dense accretions of nebulous lines create a luminous layered effect. Components of dynamic growth, transfiguration, and supernatural movement are implicated.

A post on Burgoyne’s work at A Journey Round My Skull reveals the creative process involved:

‘Similar to jazz improvisation, I begin with a thematic structure while encouraging form and movement to emerge by rubbing and scratching with my pencil. For example, I conceive a drawing with a flexible construct in mind of “smoke” or “waves” or “reflection” and elaborate from there. Impressions from my subconscious collection of trees, water, minerals, and clouds are defined by applying veils and layers of visual information’

A Journey Round My Skull goes on to note similarities between Burgoyne’s drawings and certain works from the surrealists period - The photograms of Max Ernst and the drawings of Hans Bellmer, for example. We are also reminded of certain algorithmic topologies with web-like surfaces appearing to conceal recursive motifs - directing us to three-dimensional fractal forms such as Daniel White’s Mandlebulb.

Ad Astra (photo: Kim Baker) &Fire birds (photo: Patti Sundstrom) - Richard Lippold

Dataisnature encountered the work of the American artist, Richard Lippold, while on a visit to the MOMA in NYC last year. Works such as 5 Variations Within a Sphere and Variation Number 7 Full Moon, created in the late 40’s and early 50’s are intricate abstract geometric sculptures using wire as the main medium. Both pieces are modest in scale compared to the larger works he created for public spaces, the lobbies of international institutions and performance spaces. The most well-know large scale construction, The Sun, commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, used nearly two miles of wire filled with 22-carat gold and was held together by 14,000 hand-welded joints.

An important aspect of Lippold’s work is the interplay of light on reflective metals and wires to create complex spatial illusions within precisely defined utopian constructivist forms.

Considering the recent importance being given to Lippolds work, it’s unfortunate to find very little information about this artist available on the web. The Richard Lippold Foundation website seems to be permanently unreachable. Fortunately Flickr throws up some great images of his work – particularly Ad Astra, a 115ft high double spire bearing wires in star-like configurations, created in 1976 for the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Further reading:
Wired: Preserving the Installations of Richard Lippold

Shipibo ceramics and textiles

The intricate linear geometric and symmetrical artworks of the Shepibo Indians, a large tribe of the Peruvian Amazon, act as visual music maps – scores notating the chants and songs (Icaros) associated with Ayahasca healing ceremonies.

The textiles and embroidery, all crafted by women, contain recursive and self-reflective motifs, including geometric configurations common to those generated computationally by iterative functions. A characteristic recurring visual system found in the textiles are bilaterally generated cellular patterns containing space-filling curves.

The mathematical self-similar nature of indigenous artworks has been noted extensively before - Ron Eglash’s book African Fractals, being a good example of research in this area. The vibrational pattern networks of the Shepibo are specifically connected to the visionary experience during the Ayahasca ceremonies and to this end we are directed to a note in James Crutchfield’s paper, Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. In it he posits the idea that visionary artefacts may well be generated by a kind of biological feedback mechanism in the visual cortex due to the action of psychedelic agents. The linear tessellations of the Shipibo embroiderery have a strong visual resemblance to the patterns generated by video feedback especially those systems containing symmetry breaking transformations.

Shipibo embroidery & a space-filling curve

According to Howard G. Charing, in his article on the visual music of the tribe, ‘the Shipibo can listen to a song or chant by looking at the designs – and inversely, paint a pattern by listening to a song or music’. He goes on to mention how the designs are mapped using specific songs during the creation of the artefacts – in this sense the periodicity and repetitions in the songs appear to act as a generative grammar system – perhaps the song or musical equivalent of an L-system.