Here’s a selection of feeds that have found their way into my feeds_favourites_folder or that are in an embryonic stage but seem as if they will be worth regular repeated visits.

Smashing signification is Semioclast, bravely configuring a library of articles on semiotics, sci-fi, edge tech-theory and cyber culture.

Repeatwhiletrue is both a notebook of ‘personal code tinkering’ ideas and a repository of collected links across the computational spectrum and beyond.

Flight404, chef of fine proce55ing cuisine is now informin’ here. Again it’s a mix of personal projects and inspiring things that people are doing with computers and circuit boards.

The FAQ for Lorbus reveals that it is maintained by a 29-year-old industrial designer from Caracas, Venezuela. Naturally then, we find links to great examples of design and creative programming.

The WoosterCollective is a site celebrating street art. Art belongs to the street, art deserves the street. Once upon a time it was all about tagging and wild style, things have moved on just a bit.

And while I ruminate over the subject of graffiti - now’s the time to mention Ni9e’s blog. A particular subset to this feeds’ main interest in urban art/writing is the graffiti analysis project(ions).

We all love beautiful fonts, especially free ones, Fontleech is an excellent portal to some of the best free fonts (and ones you can swap cash for) available anywhere.

Radio-astronomy streams live celestial activity for your deep-brain late-night stimulation… ideal for a meditation upon George Batailles lovely quote, ‘We are but fleas in the blowtorch of history’.

‘Radio Astronomy could be seen to be a rehabilitation of the poetic resonance behind Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler’s ‘music of the spheres’. Throughout Kepler’s career, he focussed on reconciling Pythagorean mysticism and the Ptolemaic system creating precise measurements of planetary orbits. His third law of planetary motion, outlined in his celebrated treatise, Harmonices Mundi (1619), related planetary movements to musical scales and intervals.’

I can’t really endorse Gleetchplug cus I’m PC orientated, but this freeware drone and frequency generator certainly looks worth the download for MAC glitch experimentalists - A PC version is due next autumn…

The Originality Engine somehow grades your writing through a kind of ‘originality mapping’ algorithm… well… I typed in…’I Love you’ (blush) and it scored a wacking 129! A much better score compared to some of my more oblique and unoriginal meanderings on vectorial point reconciliation in low flying object orientated graphic API’s ;)

I keep getting sucked back over to Iotaceter.org. Iota is a great resource for animation and film experimentation - everything from Belson to Brackhage…

Lastly, the Touchgraph Google Browser needs a mention as it’s a fine Java example of a ‘tree-node’ visualisation for interconnected hubs, type in a URL and watch it graph interconnections to other sites, drag and pull the nodes for some organic elastic info-aesthetics.

From ‘How it works…The Computer’ is this page and highly suitable graphics.

‘As many as thirty components can now be fitted into a capsule approximately one-third of a cubic centimetre in volume’ (1971)

So… Here are some of my favourite ‘mistakeful’ Computers:

Hal9000 – 2001 A Space Odyssey. “I know that you were planning to disconnect me, and that’s something that I cannot allow to happen.” Also check out kubrick2001

Proteus - Demon Seed. Seen here are Proteus IV’s “modules,” located at the “ICON Institute for Data Analysis.”

The talking nuclear bomb (HAL parody) - Dark Star.Lt. Doolittle revives Commander Powell who advises them to teach “Phenomenology” to the Bomb

Colossus - The Forbin Project. Colossus’ interior is vast and underground, similar in appearance to the Krell’s supercomputer.

Oh and misbehaving droids are another post altogether, lets start with Westworld.

addendum : on further perusal of one of the above links is appears as if someone has allready been there.

The PKD android project has been set up by a team of artists, engineers and literary scholars to create, perhaps, Philip K Dick’s worse nightmare or greatest fantasy, an android portrait of himself. This blog tracks the development of the PKD android as it/he comes into ‘being’. Theres a kind of recursive humour here as the man himself spent a lot of time ruminating over ideas of sentience within machines and felt he was in contact with an alien machine intelligence much like John C Lilly’s own SSI (Solid State Intelligence).

also check the main PKD android site

via blOgOblOg

After my previous posts on expressive typography (here & here) I was happy to find these fine examples of kinetic/interactive typography programmed in java by Paul Scmidinger. ‘Waves’ is particularly interesting the way the obvious water-like collective undulations of the letters have a phase effect and gradually end up appearing as chaotic particles via a number of kinetic transformations. ‘Torus’ is a fantastic example of three dimensionality in moving type.

Paul also has a group of nicely done mouse trailers - originally spotted at Futurefeeder

Philipp Seifried has a good collection of code experiments done in Proce55ing, Flash, Shockwave and Java with a strong focus on aesthetics and play.

Flora is a generative music algorithm; it takes a base sequence of numbers and converts them via bespoke algorithms, which are used to dictate notes as well as rhythmic pauses. The generative pieces have a ‘systems-music’ feel about them, perhaps, reminding us of the works of the so-called minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

‘What is interesting about the Flora algorithm is that its music, while not exactly pop, is surprisingly harmonious and occasionally has almost emotional qualities’

Other works of interest include Cellshades - a family of Cellular Automata like visualisations, Warping Mandlebrot – an application for deforming Mandlebrot Fractals and the sythaesthetic Lorenz Music, where the math of the Lorenz attractor is used to generate notes and so give a musical reading of the this well known mathematical glyph.

So you spend all your spare time making Newton’s laws come to life on the computer screen, but your girlfriend is tired of you playing endlessly with gravity, elasticity and inverse kinematics and decides to give you the push. What better way to relieve the stress of loneliness than this sweet looking Flash artefact?

Ken Rinaldo’s well-designed Flash site, Emergent Systems, contains a collection of system based media art installations, many of which pay particular respect to ecological issues.

‘Integration of the organic and electro-mechanical elements asserts a confluence and co-evolution between living and evolving technological material. I am fascinated and encouraged with human kinds struggle to evolve technological systems that move toward intelligence and autonomy which are modelled from our current conceptions of the natural.’

After my recent post on fractools, I thought I’d wade through all of those 156,000 results via Google for Fractals (images). I’ve written a personal pattern recognition algorithm that incorporates and encodes my taste in fractals allowing it to filter out all those passé Julia sisters and mandlebrothers, anything with garish colour pallets and anything familiar.

It found these:

Amazing fractal cityscape circuit board elevations, some in 3d. Cities look like circuits of buildings, circuits have roads and data traffic systems. These make me think of Mark Wilson’s beautiful plotter drawings, some of my favourite all-time computational circuit-board schemas, mentioned during the dataisnature embryo stage.

Talking of Fractal cities, check out ‘Connecting the Fractal City’ – a very impressive article about the negative side effects of modern cities drifting away from a growing fractal distribution to an automobile-centric uniformity. This is one of the best articles I’ve found on the web for some time.

In my last fractal outburst I mentioned using L-systems as a psychogeographical tool (Socialfiction has done a lot of work with psychgeoAlogorithms) for navigating cities and even subway systems. Then I find this in my blog’s comments from blprnt, an L-system train network with nodes (stations) and automated trains!

The best fractals of all are the ones already occurring in nature. To get a taste for natural fractals try procuring a Romanesque cauliflower. All members of cauliflower family are fractal but the Romanesque is a particularly beautiful and clear example for those who haven’t met her before.

‘The key notion of a fractal is that it possesses structure on a hierarchy of scales. A structure defined at an overall size x implies something similar at a size rx, where r is a scaling factor like 1/3. For a structure to be fractal, there exist substructure at decreasing sizes r2x, r3x, r4x, etc. A true mathematical fractal has self-similar structures going all the way down to the infinitesimal scales. For a physical fractal, the smallest scales become too small to see, so this implies a range of scales from very large to the very small.

The number r is called the “scaling factor”, and can in theory be any fraction. In most common fractals it is usually some fixed number between 1/2 and 1/10. Naturally-occurring fractals, such as cauliflowers exhibit a nested structure with r not very different from 1/3 (Salingaros, 1995; Salingaros & West, 1999)’.

Textone.org has an application that builds clumps of broccoli (or forests) visualised from website content. The application takes the entire syntactic structure of a site, pages, content and links and makes trunks, branches and leaves. The installation version also processes the information into sound in realitme. So go grow a forest from your blog.

Finally, check out this rather ordinary Fractal, but notice the extremity at its epicentre, its an inverted buddhabrot! Which is as good in fractaland as an inverted pentagram to those that ‘know’ and who have powers……

London via infosthetics

Dataisnature transmits from London, as well as commuting regularly through it.

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Code is an online exhibit of open-source net-based code art. This exhibition addresses philosophical questions around the use of open-source models to build art and all works exhibited also include the source code as part of the exhibit.

‘The primary curatorial desire was to support a diversity of approaches, to give a little support to artists who are giving away their art.’

And diverse the works are too – ranging from Autoportrait, code that configures a text portrait made up of phrases and key words taken from search results on the particular person the portrait is of, through to Olly (Open Lingo Something Something) – A lingo application that transforms Director, a proprietary development environment, into an open source one.

If your interested to know more about open-source philosophy, free-culture and copy-left go no further that Rob Myer’s blog which collates findings and includes interesting ruminations by Rob himself.

Santiago Ortiz has built an interesting group of visual musical ‘instruments’ in Flash that explore notions of syneasthetics, combinatorial music and audio-visualisations of fractal landscapes. The pieces have a playful exploratory trajectory of interaction - processing abstract graphical systems into sound and music, and vice versa.

Jordan Belson made the incredible and strange computer sequences for the 1977 film Demon Seed. On further research I also discover he made many experimental art shorts and was originally an abstract expressionist painter - exhibiting large scale artworks at the Guggenheim Museum in the late 1940s.

The titles of Belson’s films are enough to give us an idea of the kind of work he has made: Samahadi, LSD, Cosmos, and Transformation. Often he employs complex geometrical shapes that converge and diverge producing layers of space and colour, pulses of dots circumnavigating an invisible sphere of influence - an attempt at visualising the non-objective through patterns arrived at via mystical study merged with scientific fascination.

“a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena—all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way” - Belson

The Unknown Art of Jordan Belson is an entrée into the graphic work of this non-objective film maker.

‘Like his films, Belson’s graphic art is constructed around mystical ideas. He seems to possess special sensibilities that allow him to see what others are not able to see and he is eager to share his vision through those mysterious images; through image abstraction he reveals his understanding of the universe.’

This particular research derive brought me to some other interesting places:

Galaxy: Avant-garde Film-Makers Look Across Space and Time
Visual music / lightshows
Visual music / Films

Outside of maintaining this blog, making art and writing, I keep alive by doing freelance interaction design, usually in Flash. The most enjoyable project I worked on recently (as an associate of Invioni.com) was the Smithsonian Winter Counts website. This Flash site is XML driven and incorporates the Zoomify Component for viewing high resolution images of glyphs and drawings of the North American Lakota Indians. I worked on the code for the interface widgets, visual effects and search functionality as well as some other big chunks of behind-the-scenes ActionScript. The site was recently nominated for a Webby.