Making the machines that make Art!

A mail pinged through datasphere to alert me to the Robotarium, a new environment by Leonel Moura whose artistic robots I’ve always had a soft silicon spot for. The robots work tirelessly producing rectilinear action paintings; Obsessive maps of deep-space robot lay-line connections.

“A set of autonomous robots, each supporting two colour marker pens, invest a white canvas. At the beginning they move in a straight and indifferent manner imprinting here and there small ink dots. As these casual strokes meet to form small patches, the robots become more active. When colour is recognized, they choose the pen corresponding to the same shade and reinforce it. The excitement grows and soon amazing forms emerge filling the canvas. At a given moment, determined by his sense of rightness, the human partner decides to put an end to robots’ activity. The artwork is ready.�

I also recommend Hectors stunning graffiti work. Hector, whose body parts consist of some electric motors, belts, cables, a laptop, a battery and a spray can holder, is controlled from Adobe Illustrator via a scripting environment for AI called Scriptographer.

From a more political angle The Institute of Applied Autonomy offer us GraffitiWriter – “a tele-operated field programmable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometres per hour�

GraffitiWriter was developed in response to the advent of next generation military/police technologies for urban surveillance.

I suppose to many of us a robot is seen as mechanical/computational device with a morphology that resembles a human being or animal. Plotters are really robots too, its just their hands are made of fine points and arm movements are confined to simple range.

Aside from the exquisite circuitry plots by Mark Wilson mentioned earlier in this post, check out these algorithmic and epigenetic plots by Roman Verostko.

Tonite at ill be heaving my Projector, Lacie and Vaio over to Hoxton for a low temperature spin-cycle mix of ontological psychogeographic erotic visuals Yeah!

Come say hello if you find yourself there!

JQLN’s Alife Ai Aculture steps in all the right puddles! It’s a zig-zag wandering of spectral A-life ruminations and Physical Computing musings. Great subjects woven from wonderful writing. Also check out Enlightenedmeow.

Angermann2 gets nicely wrapped up in all sorts of lovely nu-erotic manouvers…. Cartography, informational design and supershine yelow background hyper-hyper-text links!

It seems that these days if I’m not writing, making short films, experimenting in Flash or locked inside browserSpace I must be sleeping. The intensive use of computers is testing the bandwidth of the sensory input capabilities of our brains. We need Cerebral Raid Arrays and higher Cortex Data Transfers. Memory, however, seems not to be problem.

Recently I’ve been keeping a list of ideas in a text file. The rhyzomatic and fractal nature of thought however ensures that each idea often recursively generates a set of new ideas ad infinitum. I suppose an L-system schematic visually approximates this idea generating sequence. The psychogeography of thought could be represented using L-systems and then perhaps modelled using a Rapid Prototyping System to make a physical sculpture. I’ll add this to the list.

Neural.it is the online version of the paper magazine, covering all the interesting ground; hacktivism, computational art, and e-music.

Breaking Things is a great little blog of compu-mechanical inventions, smart design and the things we love. There are lots of interesting topics and computational artifacts - a quick skim found an interactive version of ‘100 billion poems’ by Raymond Queneau. Another version of ‘100 billion poems’ made with Flash was mentioned in this post.

Computing for Emergent Architecture is an experimental weblog run by some of the staff and students of the MSc VE at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies at University College London. Outside of emmergent architecture there are posts on city and spatial Modelling aswell as other engageing topics

Recently, particularly when working, I’ve been listening to the Mileece cd ‘Formations’. Seems Mileece is inspired by nature’s data to shape her music, and what beautiful music it is too. I’m listening to it as I write this, it sounds like what used to be known as ‘systems music’. The album, written using Supercollider, is an audio schematic of slowly unfolding growth, the sound of the Fibonacci sequence spitting out slow spirals.

I was thinking this morning about what music to incorporate with my visuals, in preparation for the ‘IZ’ event at the 491gallery in Leytonstone on Saturday (details to follow). After scanning the hard drive I decide to listen to the Equinox and Solstice series by Coil. The drone currents of Magnetic North are polarising me and John’s alchemical incantations are reverberating…

Heaviness, heaviness
Blue sapphire six-pointed star
Blue sapphire six-pointed star
Deep ruby-red inverted pyramid
Deep ruby-red inverted pyramid
And red rose?
Red rose filling the skull
Red rose filling the skull
Yellow cube in the lower pelvis
Yellow cube, yellow cube
Silver moon crescent below the navel
Red ruby inverted pyramid.
White-winged globe defines the forehead
White-winged globe defines the forehead
Between the eyes, between the eyes
Black oval egg occupying the throat
Black egg within the throat
And red rose filling the skull
Red rose filling the skull
Deep ruby red inverted pyramid
Red rose filling the skull
Yellow cube, so alone the crescent below
White winged globe defines the forehead

Between tracks I flick browser-space channels to the blog at the excellent socialfiction.org and find, coincidently whilst listening to the music, that John Balance of Coil died last Saturday.

A large part of Coils output dealt with the themes of death and dying. Their musical ideas were useful in forging some meaning out of existence for me at a formative time - fortifying, in the process, very strong idea(l)s about what death is or can be (and what it can be used for). They were also the soundtrack to my occult experiments and ongoing exploration into the metaphysics of numbers, patterns and geometry. They also lead me on to the occult work of AOS and to the ontological anarchism of Hakim Bey. In a different world this blog could have been dedicated to these ideas and themes entirely.

Saturday night will be tuned to resonance of Coil!

Sterile Variables is approaching the serenity of 4’33’ of silence in some oblique way.

A nice collection of Fractal video feedback screens can be seen at dmtr as well as Sereia Displacer, an interactive 3d visualisation of a scanned picture.

Further out Automata like glitches are breaking out all over Scant Fever at Invisible Chamber. Elsewhere the Randomized Views sequence is excellent collection of random compositions, my favourite being number8. Click to reconfigure.

The Time Machne is an interactive interference pulse installation! It might be the visual equivalent of Time machines, music to facilitate time travel, by Coil. A tone-time dilation capsule I can recommend!

On returning check out the organic cellular transformations of Computed Paintings.

‘a symmetry breaking operation between each of the pattern generating transformations reconstitutes the process and allows each pattern to build a unique form.’

The Web combined with environments like as Flash, Director and Proce55ing have brought typography to life.

Chronotext is a sketchbook of typographical structures made with proce55ing, many of the pieces utilise 3-dimensional space and some of them are interactive. Textworm and Textwire are kinetic sentences that can be pulled around the screen to be reconfigured at will. The Book of Sand is an interactive version of a short story by Borges, coincidently one of my favourite storytellers. The sentences of the book flow according to the contours of piles of sand, try affecting the flow of the sentences by forming mounds of sand.

Peter Cho’s letterscapes at Typeractive explores each letter of the alphabet, giving each glyph character through interaction and motion. It’s interesting how each letter’s shape has to some degree dictated the type of transformation, interaction and motion used. DataIsNature’s favourite right now is W!

Uncontrol’s ‘One hundred million poems’ is a modular combinatorial piece that explores ‘expressive typography’ – a phrase initially coined by Robert Massin. (Click the square on the second row, 4th from the right labelled ‘massin’)

In the past poets and writers have tried to free up their poetry and prose to avoid the static rows and columns of the standard printed page. In 1918 the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire published a book of poems that did not look like poems, he named the book ‘Calligrammes’.. The poems were essentially configurations of letters or words forming an image of the subject of the poem itself. In “Il Pleut” (1916), words appear to cascade down the page like raindrops on a windowpane itself.

Picture poems actually go back a lot further than Apollinaire. When travelling through Morocco with a friend a few years ago I managed to pick up some beautifully illustrated books containing typographical pictograms and intricate geometric patterns made from words in stylised geometric type – a tradition that has existed for centuries.

My own fascination with calligraphy and kaleidoscopes lead me to make a set of experiments that I called Calliscopes. Calli means ‘beauty’ and Scope means ‘to look at’. These are essentially circular formations of dynamic text fields with skew transformations and rotations set by the position of the mouse pointer.

Try changing the typographic formation by entering a new message in the dynamic text field at the top of the page, especially with unorthodox characters.

see also Expressive Typography #02

Thinking Machines displays the traceries of machine thought as a computer plays chess. The result is a signage of artificial thought, and a mutable gylph set of evolving computer strategy.

Chess House is an architectural isomorph of a game of chess. Habitable space is mapped from the motion of the individual chess pieces as they move about the board.

The final 3d renders, with their strong sense of perspective, have a metaphysical quality about them (as in Giorgio de Chirico)

Each game of chess can generate a different building! So each room is a kind of subset of chess strategy

If you kept your eye on the weblog I had running at transphormetic.com, you will know that I have a particular interest in patterns found in plants and related concepts such as recursion, symmetry, self-similarity and phyllotaxis - all of which result in complex, geometrically exact, replicative forms.

The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer) is a classic in the field and is available in PDF format (scroll to the bottom of the page) at algorithmicbotany. The book is a great place of study for any code biologist looking to nurture nature with data!

A lot of art is also informed by these models. Botanical Scan is a 3 dimensional plant installation constructed from a sequence of transparent layers. The work is heavily informed by self-organisation in plants and trees.

“Here we can observe a natural intelligence that informs all matter, organic and inorganic, an intelligence that also structures the universe spatially.

Architects are also increasingly utilising these mathematical models to communicate ideas and ‘grow’ algorithmic and organic buildings.

Nthd.org is predominantly a repository for experimental plugins and software for 3D design, architecture and visualisation. Check out the projects page and you will find some interesting work involving L-systems and Biomorphs.

The Computer Arts Society, originally founded in 1968, seems to have reignited activity. PAGE 58 (0.5mb PDF), one of its bulletins, has a nice article on the history of lightshows of the West Coast in the late 60’s by Robin Oppenheimer. This lead me to think about other pioneers in the area not covered in the article like Brion Gysin and his work with the Dream Machine.

“With the current vogue for high-technology brain-machines at an unparalleled height, the original concept as developed by Brion Gysin and his collaborator Ian Sommerville is a welcome reminder that whilst technology advances space, the conceptual base for interior research is as ancient as the sun and the trees. Its beauty is in its simplicity, and in its ecologically sound construction which requires no more than a sheet of card and the recycling of a redundant record player.�

Of course no late 60’s lightshow would be complete without the projection of a moiré pattern. A moiré pattern occurs when two or more different geometrically regular patterns are superimposed and visual interference occurs. Qpqpqp has an interactive optical installation with Moiré patterns made with Director; its liquidity gives the impression of light refracting through water. iMoire is a piece of software written in OpenGL used to build and explore bespoke Moire patterns.

Lightcycle is a long time favourite covering such topics as A-life, Emergent Behaviour, and Computational Art. While visiting check out the well-designed and conceptually tight proce55ing creations.

Absconditus predominantly covers ActionScript and associated XML technologies. A large part is also dedicated to the annotation of Thoth (an XML tag based language developed by the site’s author). I am particularly interested in the category ‘code poetry’ which is a nice term to describe code aided art and design

Giornale Nuovo publishes a diverse range of art and visual communication articles often with great images to back up the writing. The work selected is always interesting as are the words.

Beflix is one mans personal adventure into the gl!tchsphere! The site features three years worth of top-notch Glitch aesthetics, Digital corruption, Data visualization, Software error, and Glitch VJ, not to mention great stories.

More to come.

The Digital Art Museum is a treasure trove of art made with computers, here we can tap into a very rich history of computational and digital art. The DAM lead me to Mark Wilsons site, possibly the most exciting work I’ve seen in quite some time. His early acrylic paintings, dating back to 1973, refer to imagined modular circuitries and intricate dashboards, the recent works are also compelling. The hi-tech laser engravings, from 1998, swap plotter and paper for laser and acrylic sheets.

Just as endless combinations of DNA code go towards describing our natural world, the Flash Artist instantiates behaviour into his building blocks of life, the movieclip, by becoming a biologist of computer code. ActionScript is a kind of DNA mnemonic to the Flash eco system, to be arranged as a blueprint for growth, behaviour and organisation. Hybrid algorithms spliced together from clippings of code — hit F12 and watch your mutant code fill the browser with something quite unexpected and beautiful. ( from Computational art with ActionScript )

I’m covering the aesthetic end of ActionScript and exploring Artworks made with it in a series of articles over at actionscript.com. The articles are really a set of introductions to various areas of computational/algorithmic design and modelling. Our old friends, the L-systems, the Cellular Automata and the Biomorphs bribed me into writing about them again. Check out the articles :

Computational art with ActionScript
Fractal Botany and the Art of Recursion
Data visualization - Information as art and info-aesthetics
Interview with Jared Tarbell of Levitated.net
A-life – Automata, Ants, Biomorphs and Bacteria

The articles are packed with links to beautiful flash examples throughout.