Magnetic Resonance Imaging of fruits and vegetables

InsideInsides offers a collection of animations made from sequences of Magnetic Resonance Imaging of fruits and vegetables. Taking a slice at a time in topological order, and then animating the slices in sequence generates intriguing results. The vegetal forms are translated into quasi-morphological figures and biological entities. These classic archetypes, encoded spatio-temporally into the layers of the foods, act as natural visualisations of morphological development and growth.

Sections of a cucumber appear as microscopic bacterial entities with short-lifespans - fading in and out of existence, using a filtering mechanism, as if it were processing food.

The symmetry breaking movements of the watermelon animation, on the other hand, yield the kinds of geometric transformations we might find in an analogue video feedback experiment.

Psychogeophysical scrying Plot – Martin Howse & Persinger Helmet – Jonathon Kemp & Martin Howse

The London Psychogeophysics Summit has been and gone - the dust has settled. If this dust were measurable the Psychogeophysicists would surely have recorded and annotated its behaviour with a DIY contraption of their own making. Titled ‘Sites of Execution and Memory’ the week long summit consisted of daily workshops to create experimental devices for the forensic study of geophysical phenomena surrounding noted past execution sites and related locales.

Psychogeophysics enhances the classic notion of the Dérive with earth science measurements, sonology and geophysical archaeology. Add to this a geohistorical context and a species of atemporal psychogeography comes in to being. Taking the science of imaginary solutions into the physical domain, and making verifiable readings of the environment in relation to these conjectures, adds a welcome Pataphysical ingredient into the mix.

Psychogeophysics.org documented the week’s proceedings in detail:

Socialfiction facillitated one of his algorithmic dot walks in Greenwich Park, which utilised the minimalist Brainfuck programming language as a generative navigation system. Using ‘The Physics of the Outdoors’ by Marcel Minnaert as a starting point urban adventurer Petr Kazil exposed an array of deep observation techniques to enhance any kind urban interfacing. Other activities included geographical emotion mapping, Psychogeophysical scrying, remote viewing sessions, Thoughtography [Projected Thermography ] and the construction of a Persinger Helmet. The latter was put to use at the Crossbones Cemetery in Southwark, an unconsecrated graveyard dating back to the middle ages.

Flickr documentation of the summit can be found here

Paris Mapcut - Studio Kmo & The Geotaggers’ World Atlas #3: Paris - Eric Fischer

Eric Fischer’s Geotaggers’ World Atlas set contains a serious of maps derived from photographers timestamps and geotags found on Flickr. The data has been used to calculate the speed at which the photographers were travelling and plotted on OpenStreetMap. In all there are 50 cities covered, each with density paths indicating the most navigated and photographed areas. Can the Geotaggers’ World Atlas be interpreted as map of tourism and sightseeing? The Locals and Tourist set goes some way to answering this question.

Studio Kmo has a group of sets dealing with cut-out and drawn maps, predominantly cities, which exude a staggering amount of graphic detail. The cites of New York, Paris and Singapore are covered in stencilled form, among others. There are also sets documenting the development of the paper cut pieces themselves.

The Linear Landscapes set by Leonardo Solaas contains a series of algorithmic topologies generated by sampling images, and transforming their colours into striated configurations of lines. We are reminded of landscape contours as viewed from a distance as well as geomorphological features at closer inspection.

Looped & Into My Crawl Space (detail) - Lauren Seiden

Lauren Seiden uses found images obtained from the web, which she manipulates, to use as a base to map out complex gestural compositions that allude to natural forms, intricate webs, venation patterns and other botanical conglomerations. Her meticulously precise technique allows for the creation of patterns systems that bare notable similarity to those created using computational techniques such as pseudo-random noise generation (Perlin Roots and Perlin Sketch, by Stinging Eyes on Flickr, are good examples of this comparison)

Many of the drawings contain overlayed translucent cellular colonies inter-connected by tendrils which resemble the networks generated by surface colonising symbionts such as the Lichens. In others works, such as Looped, there is a strong insinuation of movement - as if small filaments or hairs are responding to tiny turbulent air currents. In many of the drawings we are left guessing as to to the nature of the original blueprint images used, and possible transmutation from the mundane to the miraculous.

Luma - XXXY

XXXY, formed of the Rome based duo of Sladzana Bogeska & Giuseppe Pradella, are currently creating live cinematic performances that eschew typically fast moving graphics or explicit sound reactivity. Luma, their most recent piece, is an extremely slow transforming abstraction that alludes to landscape topologies and psycophysiographical terrains. The shifting movements of the contoured surfaces, in Luma, takes place at a very slow pace rendering the transformations almost imperceptible, creating a kind of chimerical and paradoxical effect - as seen in the video documentation. Sound forms an important expressive aspect to XXXY’s live cinematic performances, augmenting the alluvial transfigurations, with passages of slowly shifting noise envelopes and drones. XXXY most recent performance of Luma was on a 3 screen span at that the Cronosfera Festival in Turin in May.

Another Soundscape - Chung-Kun Wang & Fabricmachine - Kathrin Stumreich

Microblogged: Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Very occasionally a post may have additional descriptive text, overriding its original 140 character version.

Black Rain by Semiconductor utilises Heliospheric imaging of solar winds and coronal mass ejections.

1-Bit Symphony by Tristan Perich is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip.

Organizing Critters, by Seung Joon Choi, where Critter bots double as frenetic action painters.

ButDoesItfloat collates drawings by Robert Horvitz, who’s Quantum Symmetries were mentioned previously at DataisNature. http://tinyurl.com/33vholl

Variable4 uses meteorological sensors & algorithmic scores to translate weather conditions into music.

Tele-present wind, by David Bowen, where Installation dynamics are derived from outside wind measurements.

Magic Mountains & Impossible Clouds - Alex Yudzon’s pattern-map scenographies.

The Pyramid by Subblue. Hazy pyramidal recursive structures that transform into mountains over time.

Impossible Cloud 9 - Alex Yudzon & The Pyramid - Sublue

Defetto’s Moiré consists of 3-Dimensional trapezoid transformations set to Jan Jelinek’s music.

The kinetic sonic sculptures of Chung-kun including Kong, a light sensitive percussive contraption.

Fabric Machine - Katrin Stumreich. Light sensors measure moving fabric opacities and use the data to generate sound .

UVA’s Speed of Light. A fibre optic installation that generates intersecting light beams.

Alex Mclean & Geraint Wiggins have uploaded their paper on ‘Bricolage Programming in the creative arts.’

Sphere & Torus Autologlyphs [ via Selective-Laser-Sintering] by Henry Segerman for Bridges 2010.

Vesicle (detail) & Cross Section of a Pre-Fab Pollen Grain - Clint Fulkerson

Clint Fulkerson is one of a growing number artists dedicated to hand generating computer-like patterns, geometries and complex mathematical forms. The procedural aspect of mark-making Clint uses is derived from an auto-catalytic self-organising principle, a self-reflexive recipe that has as much in common with morphological systems as it does drawing.

‘I create my artwork through the slow application of decisive marks. As I draw, I follow a loose formula based on what I’ve already drawn, filling areas of the picture plane gradually, without making initial layout sketches. This makes the final product somewhat unexpected and emergent.’

In this sense the drawing could be seen to be a system in action whereby local agents (drawing marks) define successive marks to create global structures of complexity that are often unaware of their ongoing mutating configurations.

This emergent behaviour has been noted in morphological systems and biological colonies, at length. No surprise, then, that many of Clint’s drawings have titles alluding to the development of organisms such as meiosis and mitosis. In some some of the drawings Voronoi-like meshes appear to generate tensile forces of subdivisioning cellular activity.

Related:
Emma McNally - Emergent Cartographies
Bruce Pollock - A Scroll Through the Alluvial Cellular Terrain
Robert Horvitz – Quantum Symmetries
Matt Shlian - Everything, Everything
Erwin Keustermans - Patterns by Partition
Human Robots & Space-Filling Emotions

Materia Obscura - Jürgen Rebel

Jürgen Reble’s Materia Obscura and Instabile Materie films utilized the process of chemical degradation of celluloid to create rich textural morphologies that act as visual insights into the films own materiality. Instabile Materie was created by exposing 16 mm film strips to crystallizing salts and other corrosive materials, the resulting lattices and patchwork aggregations appear to record, as if using a scanning electron microscope, the chemical and molecular structure of the salts themselves. The ‘chemograms’ stills created from Instabile Materie were later digitized and used to create the more recent high definition Materia Obscura. The speed of the frame sequences were further slowed down enabling the analysis of new kinds of transitions and transformations, pertaining to the geological as well as the alchemical. Materia Obscura was shown accompanied by a multi-channel soundtrack by Thomas Köner at this years Sonic Acts Festival. Footage can be found here

Jürgen is no stranger to the techniques of the manual processing of film footage using mechanical, chemical and even biological influences. From 1979-1989 he was a member of the artist collective Schmelzdahin (with Jochen Lempert and Jochen Müller) who together carried out extensive experimentation with the materiality of film. Stadt in Flammen, produced by the group in 1984, used found footage which was buried in the garden, deliberately exposed to bacteria and microbes, and copied when the emulsion began to liquefy.

Hylozoic Soil - Philip Beesley

Philip Beesley’s sculpture and installation works utilise automated geotextiles, lattices of acrylic tiles, and reflexive materials to create artificial plants, reefs and cybernetic forests. Incorporating an array of sensors (whiskers) and actuators, these ecosystems interact with the environments and anyone wishing to wander through its digital/mechanised undergrowth.

Hylozoic Soil, an immense chandelier of intricate forest-like material contains branches holding feathers and fur, which reach out to stroke or be stroked.

‘The sculpture responds to human ‘occupation’ with air movement, produced by peristatic waves of motion within distributed fields of lightweight-pores. Arrays of capacitance-sensing whiskers and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to pull air and organic matter through the occupied space.’

In action, there appears to exist a tension between the apparent cyborgian, and arguably ominous triffid-like forms, and their soft benevolent actions and behaviour of calm curiosity.

Compositions with Structure Synth & Sunflow - Tohu777

The generative art application Structure Synth, developed by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen, was mentioned at Dataisanture back in 2008. Complex iterative structures can be generated using highly condensed code syntax. There’s been a ongoing trend, using the software, to export the structures and render them in Sunflow giving them architectural qualities.

Tohu777’s Flickr series explores Structure Synth’s recursive grammar syntax to create compositions that resemble building facades, complex interiors and welded superstructures. There are also renders of complete building complexes utilising random seeds to generate variations on a theme. Tohu777’s use of random variables within the program is particularly well executed. It allows the generation of complex life-like, and believable, structures that appear to have considered and well thought-out spatial relationships between the many component elements.

Detail from Ernst Heackles plate of Lichens from Artforms in Nature & Leconara pacifica/Amandinea punctata - Lynette Schimming

‘The cartographers guilds struck a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that vast map was useless…In the deserts of the west, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars, in all the land there is no other relic of the disciplines of geography’.

Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley)

Perhaps part of this map can still be found, or at least relics of it, in the territorial patchwork, created by the different colours and textures of neighbouring lichen colonies. Rhizocarpon Geographicum, or Map Lichen gives a classic appearance of a map or a patchwork field. The adjacent patches are separated and bordered by a black line of spores, and resemble parched desert lands, small groups of islands or even ancient cartography.

Graphis scripta, Scotland - Paul Diederich & Lichen Oracle - Lorena Babcock Moore

These ultra-survivalist symbionts (they can survive after being exposed to deep space) also tease our pattern recognition capabilities in other curious ways. The so called Graphis Scripta generates small curved lines and glyph-like marks that resembles Asemic Writing. Depending on the species, the lirellae (spore groups) may be linear, branched, star-shaped, or labyrinth-like. The resulting ’script’ might appear cypher text, and has been used as an aid to scrying. You can view a ‘lichen oracle table’ here, and as with all many kinds of divination techniques using cypher scripts, the bilateral symmetry on some of the glyphs insinuates the appearance of personages or animal figures.

Aside from Graphis Scripta and Rhizocarpon Geographicum there are many other interesting patterns and forms to found in other species of lichen. A small personally curated gallery can be found here and Ernst Haeckles plate of Lichens from Artforms in Nature can be found here.

Telcosystems – 12_Series

Telcosystems, formed of a trio of artists based in Holland, have built up a large body of work dealing with digital audiovisual investigations particularly programmatic imaging and spatial sound. Their latest work 12_Series consist of an horizon of flickering monitors, each containing grid-noise patterns with 12 speakers augmenting the changing screen configurations with spatial sound abstractions. Alluding to visualised Morse code, hermetic text and non standard music notation the screen content shifts from one state to another. The screens, appearing to be in mutual communication with one another, switch on and off, and the patterns constantly change their depth of field.

‘Telcosystems use evolutionary models in their algorithms for generating their audiovisual compositions. The complexity in their work emerges out of variation and mutation of rudimentary patterns. Telcosystems conducted research into the experience of spatiality, and place their works between installation, film and sound’

The net result of 12_Series, is a kind of visualised computer intelligence or ‘thinking’ process, and an aesthetics of emergent behaviour. But the intelligence is not complete, its somehow distracted, insinuated by the faltering mechanism of consciousness, the sudden ’shut-downs’ of individual screens, and then a reconfiguration of its collective memory upon awakening.

The group has published a companion book to the piece, including a DVD and some excellent articles by Arie Altena, Joost Rekveld and Murray Horne.

Imaginary Architectures, Hotel - El Ultimo Grito & Awakening – Douglas Capron

Microblogged: recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Some posts have additional descriptive text, overriding their original 140 character version.

Félix Luque Sánchez’s Dodecahedron Symbology depicts an invented mythology of an interactive polyhedral object.

Nils Seifert’s Vimeo video set contains work dealing with Voronoi, particles, surfaces and collision algorithms.

Reza Ali’s 3D Field Flow is generated using fluid flow computations and thermodynamic algorithms to create turbulent optical spaces.

Baltan Laboratory Case Study 8: A computer simulation of the classic Mondrian painting style, in three dimensions, with viewer generated/interactive depth lines.

Visionary drawings, collages, paintings from the heyday of the archetypal experimental architectural outfit, Archigram, have found their way online at the Archigram Archival Project.

Designers El Ultimo Grito have created some imaginary glass architectures with topologies reminiscent of nested Klein Bottles.

Shell - Bradford Hansen-Smith & Chromaesthesiae - Softlabs

The Crystal Zoetrope by The Design Media Laboratory at the Korean Institute of Science and Technology uses Sub-Surface Laser Engraving to create a 3-d animatronic table.

Douglas Capron’s ‘Hydrology: Visions in Ice’ series of photographs explore long exposures of water crystallization patterns.

Bradford Hansen-Smith’s site collates and documents a wild variety of paper folded Polyhedra as well as spiral and organic paper fold constructions.

Pete McPartlan’s Long Drawings consist of continuous procedural facets, acting as references to Chinese scrolls paintings.

Mike Davey builds a Turing Machine, which up until now remained a theoretical proposition. The ‘intelligent’ device can simulate the workings of any computer algorithm.

Ralf Baecker’s ‘The Conversation’, a pataphysical processing environment, is constructed from an array of Solenoids. Inseparable elements try to adapt to the forces within the network.

Softlab’s Chromaesthesiae is a spatial and chromatic investigation of space. The fabricated installation uses photo ink jet paper, binder clips and laser cut acrylic to create chromatic funnel shaped sculptures.

Live Paintings - Perry Hall

Perry Hall’s paintings use a variety of process techniques from Decalcomania, a method originally favoured by the Surrealists to the sonification of oils or acrylics. In the former, patterns are generated by transferring a high viscosity paint from one surface to another, and then pulling the two surfaces apart. The resultant textural figures are not random but instead form a characteristic pattern of fine branching structures, filigree networks and dehiscent structures. In Perry’s ‘2008′ paintings the Decalcomanic procedure is created with a radial action to create structures similar to dendrochronological tree-ring patterns. At other times the textures, aligned in parallel, give the impression of a kind of asemic calligraphy.

Perry’s sound drawings, single frames taken from HD videos, bare all the hallmark patterns of sonically transduced liquids – with lattice arrangements and organic and periodic tessellated patterns.

The highlight of the portfolio, arguably though, is the ‘live paintings’ series which documents videos of the dynamics of paint, including fluid vortexes, convectional processes and turbulence. Abstracted from environment context these images might have been derived from space probe photography. The wave structures and vortexes are identical in form to those found moving across the surfaces of the great gaseous planets of the Solar system.

Optofonica Capsule & Counterclockwise - David Muth & Hiaz [Optofonica Capsule]

Optofonica is an ongoing project and experimentation lab founded by TeZ [Maurizio Martinucci], Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand, and including Martijn Van Boven as a fellow artist, devoted to the investigation of synaesthetic artworks and sound spatialization techniques.

The collective divide their time by working on their own personal projects, forming specific internal collaborations, as well as inviting established artists and musicians to get involved for special projects.

A good example of the latter is the Optofonica Capsule constructed by TeZ and Janis Pönisch. The capsule is a sensory chamber constructed for the solitary and immersive experience of audiovisual artworks. Resembling a giant flys head, the user enters the capsule and is allowed to define her/his own program of audiovisual works (a collection of pieces curated TeZ himself). The confinement cuts out any external sensory information and the sound surround technology provides a ‘tactile audio’ experience. The capsule has already travelled widely around the World, destinations have included Transmediale in Germany, Nemo in France, and Elektra in Canada.

Sonolevitation - Evelina Domonitch & Dmitri Gelfand [Optofonica DVD] & Anharmonium - Tez

A companion DVD compilation documenting the artworks viewable in the capsule has been released on the Line imprint [part of 12k]. Often transcending typical science-art barriers, the works explore such phenomena as magnetism, fluid dynamics, acoustic levitation and brain-wave interference.

TeZ’s most recent personal work, Anharmonium, concentrates on utilising cymatic processes to create sonic visual projections using high density light sources. Currently installed in the Melkweg media room, the piece explores ‘interference patterns within a sonically activated fluid illuminated by laser emissions to create an augmented meditative space - a psycho-physical observatory.’

Anharmonium - Tez

Whereas a lot of recent works exploring visual phenomena generated by sound remain strictly within the realm of computation, TeZ’s Anharmonium operates outside the digital box relying on the physical properties of sound on materials and the inherent emergent properties of light reflections interacting with sonified fluid dynamics. In this respect TeZ’s operations are more akin to pre-computational methods of generating synaesthetic experiences. It’s not so much of a surprise then that the analogue aesthetics generated by Anharmonium are more akin to the work of someone like Thomas Wilfred and other pioneer syntheasthetes. The Anharmonic aesthetics include the apparent illusion of extruded form-lattices transforming and merging in 3-dimensional space.

Related:
Camera Lucida - Sonochemical Presence
10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid

The Formula-(0.03.37.22) – Subblue & KBGC01C 0003 [lo] – Watz

Sublue’s Mandlebulb set explores various species of 3D Mandelbrot fractals in exquisite detail. Their forms exist between baroque planetoid objects with hyper-dimensional surface ornamentation and microscopic diatomic organisms.

Zeno’s Palindromus series uses the palindrome as a metaphor model for bilateral reflection of angular forms to generate symmetrical neon robot architectonics.

Marius Watz’s KBG set contains a group of sound visualisations executed in his trademark ‘more is more’ bold colour style. Sound files obtained from artists related to the Konsberg Jazz Festival were interpreted as explosive radial wave form patterns in concentric formations.

William Ngan’s Mosumi set contains computational simulations of Chinese ink paintings. Combinations of sharp black lines with thicker lighter marks successfully provides the impression of ink washes, and the blurring effect of water on brush strokes.

Breed - Driessens & Verstappen

If the recent history of digital fabbing were overlayed onto the geological era of Earth, Erwin Driessens, and Maria Verstappen ’s Breed sculpture may have evolved somewhere in the Triassic Period. This piece, an elegant crystalline cubic sculpture, explored in a variety of materials, appears in its initial incarnation as early as 1995 in manually constructed plywood. It was subsequently produced in 2001, in nylon, using the Selected Laser Sintering technique.

Using evolutionary algorithms to simulate the process of cell division, Erwin and Maria’s program recursively removes material from an original block at progressively greater levels of detail. The process involved in determining which cells are left in the structure and which ones removed is not unlike the process of a simple Cellular Automata, albeit in three-dimensions:

‘One initial cell, a cube, engenders throughout successive stages of cell division a complex, multi-cellular “body”. Morphogenetic rules determine how the division of a cell occurs, dependent on its situation between the cells surrounding it. Every potential situation has a separate rule, so a cell surrounded on all sides by other cells may divide differently from a cell that only has a neighbour on the left and underneath, or a cell with nothing at all in the vicinity, etc’

An interesting post procedural aspect to the creation of the sculptural lattices is the ability to search for shape “coherence” in order to find “fitter” models, i.e. models that would not collapse under the effect of gravity in the real world:

‘The simplest method (two-membered evolution strategy) is already effective: take a randomly composed genotype as base, generate the phenotype and test it for fitness; mutate the base genotype, generate the phenotype and test it for fitness; compare both results with each other, and take the result with the highest fitness as the new base. Repeat the mutations until the result satisfies the stated requirements’

Breed 1.2 #e234 - Driessens & Verstappen & Bizmuth Crystal

The most recent versions of the piece, Breed 1.2, were produced in 2007 in printed metal. Looking at these cuboid multi-forms its not difficult to recognise the all to familiar frozen geometric patterns of Cellular Automata and the self-organising structures that emerge out of Activator-Inhibitor systems. One specific comparison that should not go unnoticed is the obvious similarity between these models and real world Hopper crystals such as those of Bismuth. Bismuth crystals grow in this shape because the edges of growing structure generate a higher electrical charge activating crystal growth to a higher degree than in the centre of the sides. The program behind Breed essentially works in a similar way reversed - activating removal of cells depending on their mutual arrangement and proximity within a system defined by simple rules.

aDiatomea Species - MRK

Dataisnature is always pleased to welcome new generative micro-organisms into the ever growing computational food chain. Many simulations of biological lifeforms indulge in artistic licence to create organisms that are inspired by but look quite different to the actual creatures. Aiming for a more accurate replication process, MRK’s aDiatomea Flickr set contains images that look remarkably like Diatoms – not surprising since a sequence of rendered Superformula shapes were cross checked against actual Diatom species.

Diatoms are a unicellular phytoplankton [literally ‘plant-wanderer’]. These minuscule hydropsychogeographers drift in eddies in the ocean created by the confluence of two or more oceanic currents, tracing out spirographic trajectories in space-time. There are over 100,000 species of these tiny symmetrical wonders and together they generates half of the Worlds entire output of oxygen.

MRK’s generative Diatoms utilise ambient occlusion techniques combined with fractal texturing procedures in order to simulate the delicate silicate geometric structures that provide protection to the real-life diatoms. Form generating sustainance is further added by the injection of sound.

Related:
Geo Mutant’s [Buckyball lifeforms]
Year of the Radiolarian

Saskatchewan Delta & Tanezrouft ‘Land of Terror’, Algeria II

Pathological Geomorphology is a new blog dedicated to images of ‘extreme, bizarre, incredible, shocking, or otherwise intriguing landscapes and landforms of the Earth’. Its creator Kyle House, a geologist specializing in Fluvial Geomorphology, Paleohydrology, and Quaternary Stratigraphy, created the blog after scouring Google Earth, and other similar online services for images of interesting land assemblages. As Kyle notes in his first blog post these landforms are to him pathological in the sense of ‘being developed or expressed in such a degree that they are extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal’.

This blog has been drawn to such formations, and more particularly the generative processes behind them as illustrated in recent blog posts such as The Uncritical Solitonic Undulations of Barchan Sand Dunes or The Slot Valleys of Antelope Canyon as a Hydro-Dynamic Computation.

While we very much welcome the term ‘Pathological’, alluding as it does to those corporeal textures of diseased tissue as found in Atlases of Pathology, Dataisnature prefers to refer to the computational rather than the medical in mentioning these formations. Being pattern enthusiasts and adhering to notions of Pancomputationlism our eyes focus on the emergent patterns, algorithmic distributions and generative processes behind such land form exotica.

The site acts as a wonderful catalogue of geo-vignettes with compelling annotations and leads to more treasure. Expect to find images of parabolic sand dunes advancing through a small rural community, a river delta in Spain taking the form of a cartoon-like bird, plus multiple folding of Palaeozoic sediments in Algeria to create radial concentric patterns.

Aside from ‘pathologies’ created by ‘natural causes’ you can expect to find the symptoms of diseases inflicted on earth resulting from environmental issues such as the persistent effect of treated waste water in the delta of the Las Vagas Wash.

Mass Black Implosion (Pas de cinq, Mauricio Kagel) & Mass Black Implosion (ST/48-1, 240162, Iannis Xenakis) - Marco Fusinato

Marco Fusinato’s sequence of drawings ‘Black Mass Implosions’ transform avant-garde musical notation into new graphical interpretations. The systematic connection of individual notes and musical processes to central points within the notation reconfigure the temporal and sequential reading of scores. The overlayed schematics propose a sonic implosion of all the notes simultaneously into a collapsed audio space. There is intimation of musical dark matter and compressed acoustic phenomena. Aside from the allusion to the physics of space, the title might also refer to the ceremonies of witchcraft, wherein the proposed transmutations of the original music might take the form of a ceremonial rite of annihilation.

Mass >> Serial Volume - Afsart & Polydesma 1800x - Studio Jonas Coersmeier

Elodole’s Concertina Paper Sculptures are a lesson in cut and fold grammar. Different combinations of linear cuts and traverse folding create a taxonomy of corrugated paper sculptures with distinctly Escher-esque geometries. Another of Elodoles sets, Paper Constellations, documents his experimentation with abstract modular paper formations, where often individual elements are composed in a circular configurations.

Studio Jonas Coersmeier collates a Flickr set devoted to the Nanotectonica Seminar at Pratt Institute in Fall 2009. The set comprises a collection of images generated with a TM-1000 scanning electron microscope. Expect to feast on micro organic and geometric messages from an unseen world.

Afsart’s set of Digital Slices documents the basic woodwork technique of lap joinery applied to the construction of slice-form sculptures. Slice-forms comprise several interlocking shaped sheets intersecting at right angles to create forms that suggest three dimensionality and volumetrics disproportionate to probable mass.

Holger Lipperman’s Sine/Cosine/Theta/Noise set explores trigonometric plotted objects, most often circles, combined with noise generated parameters to create dense fields, close-knit and massed textures. The thumbnails appear as bacterial growths or lichen colonies with their associated emergent radial patterns. On closer inspection arc and radial movements of particle physics and chaotic attractors are implied.

Pathnet & Trinity (details) - Bruce Pollock

Bruce Pollock’s drawings incorporate aspects of process and simulation of computation. A perusal of the drawn surface patterns reveal circle packing distributions, Voronoi subdivisions, irregular tessellations and a variety of other geometric multi-forms. In Pathnet we are reminded of the paradoxical honeycomb formation of truncated octahedron’s resulting from close order of packing soap bubbles. In Quake 2 a surface of subdivisioned blocks hint at a Treemap schematic (structured data as a set of nested rectangles). A linear recursive structure breaks through the dense blocks giving the impression of a plant/soil/root system diagram.

Many of the drawings can be read as patterns transformations as landscape topologies and this is most obvious in the long scroll piece. Here, geometric quasi-crystalline formations mutate into organic forms. Outbreaks of alluvial cellular activity occurs punctuated by the occasional formation of geodesic spheres.

Form Constants 8 & 16 - Wendy Collin Sorin

Wendy Collin Sorin’s series of drawings Form Constants are process generated geometric tessellations recalling the patterns of woven textiles. The disjuncts and fractures within the interlocking lattices serve to create the illusion of warp and weft; their respective uneven tensile forces extending an impression of an undulating fabric surface.

‘ Each drawing begins with a grid of interlocking pentagons and substructures of triangles, chevrons, squares, Xs and diagonals. Drawn in freehand, the forms accumulate intuitively in a way that responds to influences of process, time, and life’

Existing between rule-like periodicity and randomness these woven drawings also allude to the interlaced screen, to pixels, and recall the dysfunctional patterns of recent glitch art and imperfect design. The glitch analogy doesn’t end there, for Wendy’s drawings are informed by her migraine auras - those geometric optical disturbances cause by corruption of the neural-optic system. The phrase ‘Form Constants’ was originally coined by the German-American psychologist Heinrich Kluver. It describes geometric patterns which are recurringly observed during hallucinations and altered states of consciousness. These geometric archetypes and entopic figures are posited to be the result of symmetry breaking dynamical systems and mechanisms in the primary visual cortex. An interesting paper [PDF] on the subject, What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about the Visual Cortex, can be found here.

Bioform - Tomáš Medek & Lebbeus Wood’s Anti-gravity Tomb proposal

Microblogged: recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream.

Local Area Networks: Drawings of architectural deconstructions with Op-Art-esque façades - Viktor Timofeev.

Felice Varini creates geometric installation-paintings that question our perception of perspective.

‘A focus that will not stay in focus’. Documentary on the Op-Art exhibition, The Responsive Eye, New York, 1965.

Bioform sculptures - Tomáš Medek. Seed/Pollen/bulb-shaped wireframe, triangulation & sliceform constructions.

The mutable illusory sculptures of Hiroyuki Hamada. Including storage device-like objects.

The Light sensitive ‘intelligence’ of Braitenberg’s Vehicles have been Elegantly adapted by Casey Reas.

As One - Makoto Yakabi. Meditative geometric abstractions of multiplicity [CGI].

Brownian gargoyles: A Crystalpunk Automaton for the Chain-Reaction Glitterati – SocialFiction.

Knitting and computation. Cellular Automata Rule 110 as knitting instruction.

Visual music: Clavilux 2000 - Jonas Friedmann Heuer. Midi output to a VVVV patch generates lasting musical visualisation.

450 prepared pendulum motors on wall - Pe Lang + Zimoun & 192.128.9.1 [LOGICWILBRKYOURHART] - Viktor Timofeev

Geometric Calligraphy. The DAMs page of computer plotter drawings from the 1960s.

Abstract geometric ink plotter drawings made using a Commodore Amiga - Bill Hinz.

Margaret Noble is collecting sound art recordings [Anechoic pulses, glass Kalimbas & Saturn’s radio Emissions].

Sonic peripheries at Silent Listening: Dispersion of Soundwaves in Ice Sheets.

Living science-art interfaces. A compendium of bacterio-aesthetics and microbial-art.

The Bacterial Orchestra, by Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke.is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism.

Kinetic sonic multiplicities, the work of Zimoun.

Serial Consign’s ‘Four or Five Chess Machines’ examines chess as a translating system and encoding mechanism in art.

‘Means of Production’ – Serial Consign delivers a another quality indepth post on Fabbing and Digital Art.

Riding electromagnetic currents into the void. Butdoesitfloat collates pictures of Lebbeus Wood’s Anti-gravity Tomb proposal.

Trust-fun explores head scarf couture ready for the apocalypse adored with garish fractals and strange attractors.

Barchan Sand Dunes, Empty Quarter - National Geographic & Martian Sand Dunes - Nasa

Among the more interesting landforms generated by Aeolian processes on earth (as well as other planets) are those known as Barchan (literally crescent or arc shaped) sand dunes. Generated with constant wind direction and relatively low sand availability, a Barchan dune can stretch between a few meters up to spans of more than a 100 meters. At a distance these geometric mounds appear as sculptural forms herding en mass across the surface of the desert. An interesting spatio-temporal property of the collective is the behaviour of small fast moving sand dunes passing through larger slower dunes unscathed. This kind movement is similar to the way standing waves (Solitons) pass through each other in sound and light.

Dune formation has been extensively modelled using discreet cellular-based agents. A time-lapsed video of Barchan dune movement would most likely appear as a liquid Cellular Automata-like animation. General sand dune formation relies on the notion of self-organised criticality. Grains of sand pile up on a dune until the dune reaches a critical point and then an avalanche occurs often creating a chain reaction of complex dune formation. Barchan dunes seem to exist on the edge of self-criticality, just about avoiding the inevitable collapse to maintain their form as they march across the desert.

Elsewhere in our Solar System extreme winds on Mars (gusts up to 600 km/hr) also generate fields of Barchan dunes, particularly at its poles where the dunes become frozen.

Calculating Space - Ralf Baecker

Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space), a mechanical sculpture by Ralf Baecker, is constructed from sticks, strings, lead plumbs and little servo motors. Its miniature mechanised movements function collectively as a simple neural network by implementing core Boolean functions such as NOT/AND/OR. Using over 200 separate Boolean units the sculpture is able to simulate the workings of a Cellular Automata. Statistics and technical specifications do not do the sculpture justice alone. In reality the delicate movements of the parts and the sounds of the motors create a subtle architectonic music, while inside an elastic wire-frame mesh is pulled and pushed into its calculated space-shape.

‘The machine carries out its computations only for itself. Without depending on interaction or requesting it, it goes through its own states endlessly. The results of the computations are sent inwards - into its own center - they are not intended for the viewer. So an interesting paradox appears: while the machine opens up everything it closes it at the same time, as if it has a secret.’

Calculating Space was the name of a book by Konrad Zuse, an early computer pioneer and inventer of some of the first programming languages. Published in the late 60’s the book proposed the theory of Digital Physics, a subset of Pancomputational philosophy. Digital Physics posits the idea that the universe is a kind of huge parallel computation or gigantic cellular automaton. Interestingly, Zuse created a number of paintings themed around his work on Calculating Space, one can be viewed here.

Extras:
PDF version of Calculating Space - Konrad Zuse [UK]
PDF version of Calculating Space - Konrad Zuse [DE]

Amateur - Actop

Actop is a creative cell based in Barcelona consisting of Alvaro P. Posadas and César Pésquera. A browse through their recent Flickr sets reveals a range of subtly coloured abstract landscapes. Much of the work is generated using the Trapcode special effects plugins for After Effects. A recently completed work, Amateur, almost completely absolves the use of colour in favour of blue tinged organic forms creating delicately formed landscapes. Filament and tubule structures conspire to create panoramas reminiscent of the hypnogogic paintings of the Surrealist Yves Tanguy. We could also be convinced of a perspective arrived at from the lens of a scanning electron microscope, looking down at miniature organisms and plants. You can view the video of Amateur, as well as other works, at Actop’s Vimeo page.

Dataisnature is soon off to the Netherlands to participate in Sonic Acts XIII – The Poetics of Space, which is spread out over a number of venues in Amsterdam, and runs from 25-28th February.

‘Sonic Acts The Poetics of Space is entirely dedicated to the exploration of space in performative and audiovisual art, film, music and architecture. It examines the importance of physical space in times of far-reaching technological developments, and the physical and psychological impact of spatial designs.

The programme comprises four densely filled days and nights and will provide an extensive overview of recent works and experiments – spatial audio compositions, audiovisual installations and performances – and includes relevant historical examples and utopian ideals and dreams from the twentieth century. ‘

The full program for Sonic Acts XIII can be found here in PDF format.

On Sunday 28th I will give a lecture at the festival conference as part of the Gardeners of the Future Session. In the lecture I will explore many of the computational analogies and algorithmic models of Earth processes. In Generative Spaces: The Spatiotemporal Subroutines of Runtime Planet, you can expect to hear about the hydrodynamic computations, metamorphic algorithms, aeolian protocols and sonic mechanism that define the generative spaces around us. Later in the day I will give a performance of my updated RyNTH piece, at the Beyond Space event located at the Planetarium Artis, Amsterdam.

‘The title of the thirteenth Sonic Acts Festival, The Poetics of Space, is derived from the English translation of the book La Poétique de l’Espace (1958) by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In this work Bachelard meticulously describes the influence of space and architecture on humans and implicitly argues for a new type of architecture based on experience and imagination, an approach that is not only rooted in science or functionality.’

Drop me a line if you are in town.

Pamukkale 258/365 – Chris5aw & Travertines,
Pamukkale – Dachalan

The Cotton Castle of Pamukkale, situated in South-Western Turkey, comprises of a range of terraces known as travertines. Hydrodynamic distribution of trace carbonate minerals combined with deposition processes generate a 160m high cascade of steps. On closer inspection undulating ridges and rhythmic patterns can be seen on the surfaces of the steps. These ‘fossilized’ cellular patterns are engraved through the deposition of minerals while the geothermal water flows chaotically over the surface. As such, these patterns are space-time visualisations of the ensuing fluid turbulence as it makes its path via tiny eddies and whorls to its final destination. This process is much the same as the generative build up of sinter terraces at Roto-Màhàna, noted in a previous post.

Constructivist Study - Steve Mason & Portrait - Chris Scarborough

Microblogged: recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Note: Some tweets have additional descriptions, overriding their original 140 character limit.

Lightning Fields - The dendritic aesthetics of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates - Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Atlaseobscura reports on the Morning Glory Pool, a natural wonder at the point of environmental disaster. The bright concentric colour bands are generated by Thermophilic Bacteria.

Christian Bok’s ‘The Xenotext’ Experiment is a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics to create a poem, doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S Burroughs, who declared “the word is now a virus.”

16-bit Intel 8088 chip, a poem by Charles Bukowski, laments the incompatibility between certain types of, now obsolete, data storage formats.

Sonumbra, by Loop, is a sonic parasol utilising electroluminescent fibres.

Julie Karabenick creates geometric pixillated abstractions, their pulsing circuits contain the ghost of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie.

Mitchell Whitelaw creates transduced weather jewelry in the form of a 3D printed bracelet, the form is derived from 365 days of local weather data.

Lightning Fields - Hiroshi Sugimoto & Weather Bracelet - Mitchell Whitelaw

Constructivist Study by Steve Mason. A generative set of cubes expand and sprawl into a randomised anti-gravitorial composition.

Digital Acoustic Cartography, by Daniel Rothaug, is an interactive experiment in mapping sonic events into a concrete visual language.

Andre Michelle has implemented an audio reactive version the Superformula in Actionscript 3.

Subblue creates a 4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer that generates extra dimensional curvaceous forms of self-similarity.

In conjunction with The Wire magazine, some music of constraint. 22 musical compositions by artists from around the world, where each piece was created with just 140 characters of code in SuperCollider.

Melvin Galapon’s prints explore computer monitor pixel geometry and strobing effect of TV static in a minimal graphic fashion.

Ant Scott’s Repetitive Beats series of prints are created using his flat panel luminograph technique. The results have the trademark broken glitch aesthetic. Listening closely we hear the scattered techno of neo-Op-Art .

Chris Scarborough’s drawing evokes a kind of deconstructed, Arcimboldo-esque transformer portrait.