Out of the fictional expanse come this baby! If only. Or what about this p(r)(h)oto-cosmetic ascii tribute to Mena? Just Intonation is a set of principles which can be used to create a virtually infinite variety of intervals, scales, and chords which are applicable to any style of tonal music. These Baroque ghosts are convoluted extrusions created with C4D’s COFFEE language. In a distant place people are crocheting hyperbolic equivalents.
There have been lots of analogies between writing code and writing poetry. At the very least there is similarity in the act of typing, a percussive spatial action that hammers out abstract rhythms on the keyboard. Check out Dakadaka from Group C for a visual representation.
Generative.net has an interesting paper that examines the relationship between poetry and code and idea of generative poetry. It correctly points out that the Dadaists and Surrealists were probably the first to use random numbers and chance systems to build complex automatic generative poetry. It further says:
‘All poetry might be seen to be generative in that it is always in the process of becoming. Even for the Surrealist Paul Valéry, a poem ‘entails a continuous linkage between the voice that is, the voice that impends, and the voice that is to come’. It is generative in the sense that it unfolds in real-time.’
Perl Poetry isn’t really generative as such but it’s really kinda cool.
‘Many Perl programmers are linguistically adept; the expressivity and flow of our language attracts people who enjoy the written word. Perl programmers also tend to have a lot of free time from getting their jobs done so quickly, and so it’s natural that they sometimes blend Perl and wordplay. One common manifestation of this whimsy is Perl poetry: a poem that also happens to be a functioning program.’
The Societyforpotentialliteratures is a collection of generative illustrations inspired by Oulipo – a form of generative poetry and literature. The illustrations combine both algorithmic reconstructions and manual deformations. Other works apply recursive algorithms to live video feeds.
Levitated has its 6bit Iching.poetry.generator – not to be missed.
‘The observer is allowed to make five state changes. State changes are made by selected active nodes in the circles. Active nodes are logically defined by changes in each of the hexagram’s six bits.
Energy particles stream from the position of the selecting mechanism.
English labels for each of the 64 states were written by hand, and are of great relevance to the meaning of the poem generated.
Words within the poem are generated behind the viewer. Slowly, each word comes into view as it travels a path through three dimensional space, in real time, as controlled by the observer. The words eventually destabilizes after travelling into the distance. Destabilized words behave erratically and fly off into oblivion.’
Pawfal are doing a lot of interesting things with sound using Linux. I confess to not having played with Linux for a few years now for various reasons but some of these meta-audio-gadgets certainly give me an excuse to fire up my Vaio with Dynebolic
‘Autumn is an application that creates, or rather grows, melodies by the interactive growing and selection of tree like lifeforms. The environment is a simple plane populated by a number of trees, forming a forest (current tests involve populations of a 20 to 50 trees). As trees grow, they give off fragments of song as a side effect to their growth.’
Ever wondered what L-systems might sound like? Pawful are already looking into genetic programming using L-systems to produce pattern music.
handhelden has a massive collection of electronic hand-held gamming consoles. It’s a pleasing sight to see so many species of console in this day where the market has become saturated by the dominance of but a few mega-corp brand models. The design of some of these consoles are fantastic, just what would disconnected future civilisations make of Lightfight, Reflex or Pairmatch?
At the end of 2003 I had the good fortune to visit Berlin for a few days for the first time. Once there it was hard to imagine why had hadn’t gone many years before as the many complex cultural and architectural layers of the city had excited me so much. An eager psychogeographer, I set out, as I do when I meet any city for the first time, with a camera in hand and endeavoured to reveal the secrets of Berlin, constructing a noir detective story without people using the cities’ personality as a guide! Immediately captivated by the street art slogans and designs, the film I made ended as a chronicle of chance encounters between a Londoner and the shadowy winter streets of Kreuzberg. The final edit ended up as part of ‘Zig-Zag Wanderer’ a 3min lament to Psychogeography which was commissioned by Texelseboys for the Dutch Natchpodium TV Show. Should have some screen grabs very shortly.
I was amazed by the sheer amount of sound collectors roaming the streets of Berlin while there, microphones pointing to the skies, and so was happy to chance upon Berlin.soundscape-fm, as much document to a ‘Berlin drift’ as anything I’ve come across.
Berlin is also home to DAM, the Digital Art Museum, whose aims are to be the worlds leading online resource for the history and practice of digital fine art. The online wing features works from all the pioneers of the early era(s) as well as a good selection of essays illuminating a wide bandwidth of genres, practices and theories in computational art. The DAM also exists as a physical space – Holger Lippmann’s work, due to be exhibited from 18th feb, takes accents from club culture to produce gardens of fractal plants and lysergic forests.
As I was about to post, webstats revealed a little inbound flight path from sojamo.de to transphormetic.com. Sojamo is Andreas Schlegel space of communication design, generative art and communication processes research, and he too seems to be based in Berlin. Check out his wide range of elegant computational artefacts. Yet more generative nature from data in the form of Vattenfall Media Façade!
Am enjoying the work at metaphorical, a repository of reactive and pattern orientated ‘computational enchantments’. The Form section contains some interesting interactive pattern/illusion works. Discs 1, 2 and 3 approximate the visual interference and disturbance patterns often encountered in traditional optical illusions through interactivity. Other colour/shape modulations such as Squares 1 and 2 and Wave remind us of the subtle geometries of Vasarely and Riley. Elsewhere in the Nature sections we find some consummate programmatic dealings with l-systems, some generative snowflakes and the Garden of Eichstätt, a meeting of a 17th century botanical book with some present-day computational botany. Explore the whole site!
How often do we express a synergy between the music we listen to and the art we are immersed in? The biggest common theme in computational art right now seems to be the synaesthetic transmutation of one kind of data such as numbers into another kind such as sound, or even colour - perhaps we are approaching a meltdown of data territory with new artistic synergetic software - just a micro note in my mind for now. Now here’s a note of the music that’s been bleeding through headphonics right now and keeping me going.
Volleyed Iron - Kettel
10th - Nobukazu Takemura
Cuddle & then Leave – Kettel
Socially Inept - Proem
Unrelated but connected in temporality are these sites that my browser has been pointing to today
Verysmallobjects - a classification system for very small objects. Very small objects have a special significance in the world which is related to how much noise they don’t make.
Christophe Lecraine - superspatial wildstyle tangles of automatism!
Lust.nl - processed based typographical experimentation
Topic7694 - interesting arguments regarding the pros and cons of Wolframs ‘A New Kind Of Science’
Springtails is a colony of e-insects which react when touched. They fly through the air and if caught in a spring, the spring chimes. The result, a random zazen of Japanese-like bells and chimes. Boredomresearch, the crew responsible for springtails, cite ‘the simple rules found in natural systems’ as being the main current behind their computational artefacts. You know you’re in the right place when you find a piece called ‘Theatre of restless automata’.
Socialfiction, our favourite repository for experimental and algorithmic psychogeography memes has posted some great new ideas. Check out THE CRYSTAL-PUNK MANIFESTO - ‘Inorganic Strategies/Crystalline Tactics’. It comes across like an algorithmic TAZ lattice - which is a great place to be! The Crowd Crystallization Application looks alluring – we can only hope that it’s a kind of cellular automatic path finding crystallographic orienteering tool and art device! Or perhaps the app doesn’t really ‘exist’ at all?
As I mentioned once before on dataisnature, the algorithmic code co-ordinates of cellular automata and L-systems are an obvious entrée into computation psychogeography and Socialfiction seems to be exploring this path with great fervour! Further Socialfiction is taking it upon itself to express the ‘mind-derive’ with the unfolding $tring theory of algorithmic dreaming! Nice.
Here’s a selection of browserspace that’s been leaking through the liquid crystals over the last few days.
AUSPIRAL v.001 is animating audio code, drawing frequency data as circles and squares.
Ertdfgcvb contains interactivities with a particular interest in 3-dimensional space, checkout f/a -18, Magneto and the lovely Ultramoiré. Dataisnature has a bit of a thing for Moirés - for more linear interference check out the last paragraph of this post
Newyorkcitywalk is a web document of a major psychogeographic achievement! – walking the complete Manhattan Island! I particularly like the marked map.
‘The map I walked with was an old version published by Hagstrom. Some people think its more “artistic” than the new computer-generated version. I marked off the streets with a black Sharpie marker as I went. As you can see below, by the end the street names were completely illegible, and I ended up carrying another map so I could figure out where the heck I was.’
While on maps,don’t go north of the river mate! Grab this PDF while you can as I read recently that TFL licensing doesn’t always take too kindly to modifications of their sacred schematic! DataisNature Mansions are located in deepest Sarf-East London so I found this particularly a top-notch ting, innit!
As readers of this blog will be aware, I’ve developed a fair craving for the history of computer art and all its related nodes. I’ve been intrigued by the quality of the early work, the beautiful and provocative artefacts that populate the early part of the timeline. In all movements, music or art, it often seems that it is the early years that are suffused with an abundance of optimism, they also benefit from being blind to any overall notion of genre history – and this is what give rise to artefacts that are so diverse, vibrant and interesting, there is an innocence in there that seems to be communicated.
Check out ‘Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art’ by Frank Dietrich. (3.2MB)
Long out of print, this little gem of information written in 1985, has been scanned and PDF’d by Frank for your online perusal.