Dan Lycett of the always interesting Breakingthings is organising ‘Glitch:Aesthetics’ an event dedicated to Glitch Art , the Visual manifestations of computer malfunction and Data Corruption. Glitch has played a big part in the granular synthesis scene in recent years, most notably in the esoteric alchemical drones of Coil and the crunching post-industrial dance of Autechre. Now it seems the visual glitch is finally getting the attention it deserves!

Heavyweight glitch commando BEFLIX will presenting some of his new work and discussing the methodologies behind it.

Iman Morandi will be presenting his research findings on Glitch Visuals, which with BEFLIX will find its way along with a global collection of Glitch Art into a forthcoming book, ‘Glitch Art & Design Aesthetics’.

This Free Event is being held on Saturday 7th May at Dean Clough in Halifax beginning at 10am.

Bitmirror is an interesting installation that reconfigures the participating viewers image into an ASCII representation. This real-time system also uses granular synthesis for audio transmutation.

‘Movement, noises and voice release a simulated swarm behaviour in this graphical and acoustic particle system.’

Check out the applet simulation and click repeatedly to see some ASCII spatial Convolutions.

Ben Dalton is exploring 6-fold symmetry in Proce55ing to exact kaleidoscopic snowflake simulations. Dataisnature previously explored digital snowflakes in this post.

Waveform has some digital re/de/constructions of classic synths (windows only) including a remake of the legendary Granulab - a program that uses granular synthesis. Granular synthesis is the generation of thousands of short sonic grains which are combined linearly to form large-scale audio events.

“All sound is an integration of grains, of elementary sonic particles, of sonic quanta.” -Xenakis (1971).

Waveform also has beep-based theremin called beepbox.

Worldprocessor abstracts and visualises imagined and real global data to attempt to do justice to the term ‘political’ and ‘geo-political’ globe.

23-23.org has a wonderful 3 dimensional reactive-configurable
op-art(icle)

The Journal of Architecture and Computation publishes articles addressing all aspects of the impact of information and computation on architecture. Equally absorbing is the excellent Computing for Emergent Architecture blog, recently redesigned, looking smooth and always full of great content.

Lastly, related to the previous ‘Journal of Patterns Recognised’ entry, I chanced upon this del.icio.us list! From knitting patterns to programming patterns!

Listening to the new Autechre extended playa and I’m thinking its almost as if they have circumnavigated an 11 year psychomusographical drift arriving back to a tonal and melodic space after that granular centrifugal force that span them into an unstructured glitch-space oblivion they seemed they might never escape from.

Easy to forget they started that whole granular musical obsession and seeded the glitch core!

‘Untitled’ returns the form! A certain kind of form at least.

For the poly-atonal akashic record, ‘Incunabula’ will always be my favourite AE long playa, and the ‘Garbage’ ep my favourite of all their output.

Liquidjourney has some unique examples of computer organisms made in Flash. Highly optimised (open source) code gives silky results that you would only normally expect to find in the Director, Proce55ing or Java environments.

The FITC Presentation begins with great annotations on the basic methods for producing creature-like behaviour and is a must for anyone wanting to learn how to spawn digital organisms in the binary eco system. Later the presentation deals with the more complex fundamentals of 3d movement using polygons.

Quasimondo supplies subtle and complex permutations of organic geometry with his Ornamism applet made with Proce55ing. Multi faceted-mirrored symmetries produce radiolarian like creatures that spin and reconfigure themselves beautifully and hypnotically

‘Ornamism is a fusion of ornament and organism’

Mario Klingemann, creator of a Ornamism says :

‘Many of the grown forms remind me of Ernst Haeckel drawings from Art Forms in Nature which is no surprise as the construction rules are similar to those that can be found in nature’

The Journal for Patterns Recognised is a new PDF journal project dedicated to the study of distorted pattern recognition – it looks to be yet another fine project sprouting from the Socialfiction fraternity.

‘the long history of research into speculative modes of knowledge practised by writers, artists and revolutionaries of all sorts, methods for experimental pattern recognition have always been important (i.e. cut-ups, scrying, generative walks, hallucinatory substances). The Journal for Patterns Recognised seeks to widen the understanding of these methodologies.’

Dataisnature is forever interested in patterns of all kinds from the obvious optical art of Vasarely to the random chaotic rhythms concocted by a slighty out of kilter electric Indian cooling fan! Patterns are everywhere, but not always obvious. Often occluded, they are perceptible to a trained eye/ear from a certain discipline. The probable reason I hear the rhythmic patterns in the chaotic cooling fan is because of my adoration for trance dervish drumming music! Most common of all, are patterns found in nature – from spiral galaxies in logarithmic formation to shells covered in Cellular Automata!

Doing a recreational web derive via the pattern recognition conduit I found out how to grow patterns in a laboratory! Using an electrolytic cell – experiment 13 explains how to grow your own fractal copper electrode position diffusion aggregate! This experiment reminds me of another art experiment called The Electrochemical Glass at mimetics.com

‘the tutorials draw from examples of current research in biology, chemistry, earth science and physics. For each experimental system presented, students study scientific models of microscopic processes that bring about the formation of the macroscopic pattern observed. These models share a common theme: random behaviour at a microscopic scale can lead to the formation of patterns at the macroscopic scale. These models are introduced using simple hands-on demonstrations–sometimes using props such as a checkerboard set and coins to flip–and are then explored further using computer simulation. Every simulation provides opportunities to explore the macroscopic consequences of changes in the system’s behaviour at the microscopic level.’

And surely Deleuze & Guattari would have enjoyed experiment 20 - Building a Rhizotron and Germinating Seeds. ‘A rhizotron is a clear-walled chamber through which one can observe roots as they grow ‘. There are also a set of java applets and downloadables to go with the experiements

’SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.’

Interestingly a paper generated by SCIgen, ‘Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy’ has been accepted at WMSCI 2005! Through donations the makers of SCIgen have paid for a conference fee registration and with further donations are hoping to travel to the conference to give a randomly generated talk!

I’m enjoying Fleen a generative java art project by John Greene. Complex Geometric patterns are created from component primitives using our friends the Cellular Automata as a basis.

The robot gallery contains three species of Fleen to give your browser a nice workout! The companion blog contains interesting annotations and clues as to how Fleen might possibly evolve.

John says:

‘Shapes are differentiated (given children) with gestures. A gesture is a specific geometry-differentiation operator designed for some kind of beauty or usefulness.

So we’ve got shapes developed with gestures, all in a tree rich with all kinds of relationships and descriptions. We throw gestures at shapes. We use rules and filters to select gestures and shapes or we pick them manually. We make these big complex well-organized things.

Call it gardening. A gardener concerns himself with the relatively simple work of planting seeds and sprinkling water rather than assembling trillions of molecules with a pair of tweezers. Fleen does the same thing with 2d geometry. It’s shape gardening.’

The code of life, DNA, has often been used extensively as data structure for making art, often in the form of re-mapping the stream of code into something audio or visual. Stanza, creator of a series of playful genetic art-objects and virtual musical instruments says that Genomixer is:

‘A series of online artworks inspired by the human genome sequence and developed from DNA profile which are sequenced from my blood. The online artworks are investigations into genetic codes mapped and re assembled online. The series enables a cross reference all the code on the genome sequence allowing you to intermix or breed your own variable; you can look at the new mix of chromosomes in real time; on line. You can also keep and print this pattern from the website.

Highlights include the chromosonic Generative DNA audio system, Mutator and DNA Space - A 3 d generative space playing through variations of dna in a morphing 3 d architecture.

Pixelsumo, maintained by Chris 0’Shea, is an interesting blog negotiating areas of digital art and interactive installation paying particular attention to open source software.

Most of you will already know of Neural, but for those that don’t it’s a great source of information on immerging digital art projects and interesting things people are doing with technology.

The heavy weight of computational aesthetics, John Meada, is hatching thoughts through his Simplicity blog. I like the way Meada takes the ‘everyday’ into account when feeding thoughts into his thinking on digital art – the post on clementine sculptures is great.

Once again I must mention Chris Ashleys ‘Html Table’ painting blog. Since I last visited his produced some large scale ‘off-screen’ works. Html colour filled boogie-woogie!

Finally, the Networked Performance blog at turbulance.org delves deep into the growing area of computer networked based art and performance

I found some beautiful shells in India; shells are wonderful examples of data in nature. One shell that I found had a kind of L-system emblem on it, 3 or 4 branches tattooed onto its Archimedean spiral form. It reminded me of another shell, the Oliva Porphyria, that is well known for having very complex Cellular Automata like patterns adorning it. My brother brought one of these back from a diving trip a few years ago and it quickly found its way into my pocket!

Some links:

CA Shells at fractalus.com
History of shell patterns and some pictures of CA shell patterns from Wolframs ‘A new Kind of Science’

I’m back in London now. Just before I left for India I quit the darkstar – too much bluetooth blues crumbling under the weight of the mega corporate business model!

More time to think. More time for Art!

Dataisnature resuming normal transmissions. Lots of Indian beat adventures to tell and lots of great computational goodness to come.