Thanks to Stephanie at the HTTP gallery in London for alerting me to an imminent exhibition by a duo of artists known as Boredomresearch. The exhibition comprises of computational and physical computing artefacts exploring some of our favourite memes such as Cellular Automata to make art.

‘Boredomresearch are interested in building computational works, inspired by simple rules found in natural systems. They explore processes of computer modeling and the creative potential of genetic algorithms for the creation of nature-like phenomena.’

The exhibition runs from 1 September to October 23 2005

Stills from recent video experiments using scripted Flash animations. Found a use, finally, for those alpha exploit experiments I made. They seem to find a happy home in Resolume.

Howard R. Barnhart is been producing some exquisite geometric art that’s worth investigation. Using Colorist and Constructivist methods, he has produced a range of work in different mediums that have at times a computational aesthetic. In fact his journals (scroll to bottom of the page) seem to contain references to systems or ‘algorithms’ for the ordering of colors and shapes in his work.

This pulls us over to Sol Lewitt’s maxim ‘The idea becomes the machine that makes the art’. Lewitt worked using sets of instructions to produce geometrically precise paintings and in doing so set a precedent in the area of generative art. Interestingly Nu-school computation artisans have looked at Lewitt’s rule-set methodology as a way of questioning the relevancy of this type of conceptual art to current software-based art.

Thumbnails of video streams outputted from original DV material using Resolume. Attempt to recode reality into glitch bitstream and broken data stacks. Making visible psychogeographic hotspots and mapping their connecting narratives so that code is no longer behind-the-scenes logic flow or codec for representing video but part of sensual experience of it.

I’m producing new video material for a couple of gigs I have in September. One is on a boat on the Thames the other is at the End club, London. More details to follow soon.

Guerilla Innovation is collecting and collating a prime slice of the good stuff. Its intention it to examine technocultural trends and creative intervention. From it we learn that Peter Greenaway has been trying his hand at Vjing and that prankster John Hargrave has been having fun with credit card signatures.

Tony Beflix has been producing tangible reproductions of his glitch experiments. Fresh off of the Beflix laboratory printing press is a sequence of long-exposure photograms of output from his customized VJ software. Check out those moody glitch glyphs then enter the blurry linear metropolis of Corruptionville.

Those familiar with (s)Hoxton, London & who read this feed will probably know the Foundry. Tony will be doing some live visuals there this coming Saturday night.

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Once a fair moon the crystal punk algorithm infects the data stream at Nature Towers with a power spike. Lucky we have a power surge transphormer to deal with these tidal transmissions.

‘Now that we have found data, what are we going to do with it….’

Binding metaphor, miracle and golden codework, crystal punk invites ruminations on fuzzy architecture and soft-core isolationist art-space-trance fixation. Diffusion Limited Aggregation of the senses.

‘ Psychogeodynamic objects are defined as those blurry-edged entities from which strong psychogeographic ‘rays’ emanate. The history of landscape representation is one overflowing with anecdotes about the psychogeodynamic demanding its reproduction by the overwhelmed artist or snapshoteer’

Joris Karl Huysmans arrives with his eye-n-eye pod - scratching Alan Turins binaries. Basho is in the blue corner, Rumi is in the red.

Head for the former utility area of a vacant 13 floor office in Utrecht in September to December 2005 for the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture.

‘Unlike the alphabet that always knows where it is going, this workshop does not.’

‘We do not care if participants don’t know anything useful, and likewise we will welcome you with as much enthusiasm if you do know something useful.’

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A collective unconscious for dynamical systems - Paul Prudence

Here are some stills from Talysis - a short film I made for the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture held in Utrecht, Holland in Autumn 2005. The film explored elements self-organisation and crystallisation - autocatalytic replication and recursive symmetry using digital video feedback.

Its navigates the possibility of a sentient geometry to produce a stream of geometric archetypes; a collective unconscious for emergent dynamical systems; a video feedback language system for pattern recognition.

Video Feedback is a great example of real-time evolving self-organising systems near the edge of chaos. With a relatively simple camera-monitor/TV set-up you can produce a vast spectrum of time-based fractal species, many of which bare great similarity to the complex dynamical systems found in nature.

Video Feedback patterns are produced by pointing the camera at a monitor or TV to create a visual feedback loop. Complex animated patterns are made of light which is trapped in a loop. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious practical application for video feedback but the forms generated are hypnotic and beautiful.

One of the great things about experimenting with VF is that you cannot often predict the form of the final recursive vortex.

VF species come in all shapes and sizes. Often they resemble common fractal forms like that of the Julia set or Sierpinski triangle. Elsewhere perfect labyrinths immerge out of the void, sometimes fine lineations form into fingerprints. Many of the shapes generated can be found in nature – Some VF forms look like micro-organisms or resemble artforms in nature - particularly radiolarians. Sometimes they take on the form of spiral galaxies and star clusters from deep space.

Left VF info

The best site dealing with VF on the web has to be Jesper Peterson’s Videofeedback.dk which has links to a great many pictures and galleries as well as essays and info on generating VF patterns. To start with check out his personal collection.

Feedback freaks have done their best to outline their set-ups for producing different kinds of VF shapes – a basic set-up with instructions for generating VF patterns can be found here.

In order to make fractal feedback the cameras image needs to be multiplied and recombined so that the images may overlap freely. Here are some instructions on exactly how to do this.

Finally it should be noted that these artefacts spark Dataisnatures’s attention over to Crowley’s Thoth Tarot Card the Six of Wands – Swiftness. Of Which the MegaTherion says in his Book of Thoth:

‘The card refers to Hod, splendour, in the suit of Fire, whence it refers to the phenomena of speech, light and electricity.

The pictorial representation of the card shows the Light-wands turned into electrical rays, sustaining or even constituting Matter by their vibrating energy. Above this restored universe shine rainbow; the division of pure light, which deals with maxima, into the seven colours of the spectrum, which exhibit interplay and correlation.

It will be noted that there are no flames; they have all been taken up into the wands to turn them into rays. On the other hand, the electric energy has created intelligible geometric form.’

Dataisnature is directly concerned with the apparent sentience behind these geometrical forms and their secret syntax.

If you are located nearby you might be interested in viewing ‘Mirror’ at the Kemistry Gallery in the London’s East End.

‘Mirror inhabits an area between portraiture, sculpture, and the motion studies of pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge. A stereo camera pair creates a moving three-dimensional image of the viewer, projected in real time into the space.

Snapshots of the space are combined to create a fluid history of all movement in the space. A viewer can therefore interact with their own history, creating new spatial forms as if painting with their body.’

UVA (United Visual Artists) were recently profiled at the excellent Generator.x site, so go there for a concise overview of their creative output.

Myopicsociety has produced a functional aesthetic in Flash for visualising the history of art from classical to modern times. A novel scrolling timeline reveals important works through the ages within chronologically overlapping movements, an animated map further identifies the locations of each pieces’ conception. The piece is XML driven. While your there also check out the interactive Lower Manhatten Maps, a commercial project providing information on transportation and local amenities.

Using the Treemap algorithm for visualizing data, Martin Wattenberg’s Colorcount assigns colours to words by finding the average colour of images returned from a search engine based on a search for that word. The resulting tapestry is a computational synaesthetic land map of the English lexicon.

Another excellent Treemap visualization is Marcos Weskamp’s Newsmap. Newsmap sucks in data from the Google news aggregator and converts it into a Mondrian-esque grid of headlines. Headlines are collected into categories represented by colour. The frequency of reportage for each story is further reflected in the amount of space each story takes up as a block on the screen.

Not guns and ‘hos but Java and secure encryption codes

Corrupt your stack pointer makin’ all your data suffer.
I’ve got saturated edges but your flow is sparser,

While you smoke your crack pipe I’m gonna pipe you to /dev/null.
I may not have a label but I **** like a star;
I’m an unsigned long int and you’re an 8-bit char.

Check out the Article

via Social Fiction

As with all forms of music - lets expect a fragmentation as nerdcore evolves, lets see some C++ step, script hop and drum n database….mmm yeah.

Manifest is a neat little proce55ing project from Michael Chang that allows the user to draw sea-type creatures into existence of varying size, shape and behavior. These submerged organisms then take on a life of there own via kinematic movement according to a set of AI rules. If you run the screen-mouse articulated version you will not notice that:

‘The project interprets strokes made from a tablet pen. When a stroke is completed (or closed into a loop) it manifests an organism based on stroke length, speed, and pressure.’

ElectroPlastique1 grows organic undulations of nodes to produce a kind of watery landscape. Once manifested the landscape reduces itself to a sentient skeleton mesh finally to break into shards of colour - splinter vectors.

The inspiration comes from the extraordinary work of the Op-Artist Victor Vasarely and the piece itself, a 4 screen installation made with Proce55ing, was produced for the Territoires Electroniques festival at Le Fondation Vasarely.

‘A regular grid is deformed and then used as the basis of a series of organic abstract systems that evolve over time (5 minutes). Due to the panoramic format of the 4-screen projection, the impression is much like a landscape. In the end the grid is exploded and disappears, hinting at a non-Cartesian vector’

I’ve been a big fan of Marius Watz’s work for quite some time, his wonderful output of computational art can be found at Unlekker and Evolutionzone

Incidentally there was a wonderful new book out on Vasarely published early this year

8ball, the new version of the Flash player/plugin has been available for a few weeks now, but I’ve only just got around to looking at some of the hacks and undocumented features that will be a standard when its new parent-authoring environment is released. The aim of this public beta is to allow developers to test out existing swf files on the new player for compatibility.

Crafty tinkers, however, have already been digging deep and discovered an interesting collection of new methods and properties. From blends and filters to pixel level control and bitmap caching for a much improved performance right through to advanced video control including embedded alpha channels! Looks like the fun days are back with Flash.

Most likely for a while we will see a lot of homogenous artefacts, Photoshop style effects done dynamically, motion blurs and even demo scene style overloads. I hear the quality of video is much better with smaller file size but more importantly you will also have the ability to imbed markers into the video to trigger events!

Demos and more info:

Flashguru’s Flash 8 Experiments

OsFlash’s Undocumented Flash 8

Lesser known features of Flash 8

Large list of examples from Franto

To view this new stuff you will need to download 8ball, which you can find here.

Here you can find a Lisp routine for generating Ascii Mandelbrot. The code is as beautiful as the artefact it generates. I was interested to find out that many of the taken-for-granted constructs of programming languages, such as conditionals and recursion, actually were arrived at during the invention of Lisp in the 50’s. Later on, in the 70’s it found favour with artificial intelligence researchers. Aficionados claim Lisp to be one of the most elegant and robust syntactical programming structures around, it is characterised by extreme minimalism and lots of parentheses particularly in the Scheme dialect. Lisp is also the focus of worship for a shadowy group of hackers known as Grand Recursive Order of the Knights of the Lambda Calculus, things get really hot when you start mixing computer languages with esoteric teachings as far as Dataisnature knows.

RapidSlow is abstract animation exploring shapes and creatures generated by movement programmed using the L-system syntax. The organic movement of participating creatures in this movie is a record of an attempt to imagine how movement evolved from ‘plantly’ to ‘creaturely’. Do view the movie, strange creatures glide and flutter their way across the surface of my eyes (the computer screen).

So.. got the excellent ResolumeV2.3 to output preview to the beamer using the new laptop. And.. discovered to my amazement that swfs maintain their mouse reactiveness. Resolume is the most intuitive and creative video installation and vjing tool around and the latest versions make possible Interactive Vector Vjing. As well as the usual spectrum of video formats, with Resolume you can also import Flash swf’s. Earlier versions of Resolume dealt poorly with scripted Flash movies, version2.3 goes much further, allow!ng for mouse interaction opening up all sorts of interactive Vj!ng possibilites.

The word “Chaoscope” was invented by Ralph Abraham, long time chaos theorist, to describe computer tools used to help comprehend dynamic systems, a superset of the strange attractors.

Chaoscope is an image rendering program running on Windows for producing 3 dimensional strange attractors, this ongoing project is released as freeware! Judging by the gallery it looks good for generating rare species of exotic and unique form.

Related articles:

Julya Sets & Fractal Cities
Results 1 - 20 of about 156,000 for fractal

Japanesefreeware contains an assortment of audio-visual Flash and Director Experiments. Having a penchant for reactive-visual music, I have to highlight the simple but highly effective Sticks, where the proximity of animated interactive vertices collide to produce musical notes. The resulting piece sounds collectively homogenous despite its inherent randomness.

This coming Saturday in London’s East End I’ll be providing an all-night video installation for a funky electro & breakbeat party organised by Schtum. If you can get there expect to find a range of disparately connected layers of nature, glitch, esoterica and erotica spun together on the fly. The details are as follows:

SCHTUM vs Sculpture
Sat 6th August 2005 8pm - Late
Breaks, Electro & Funk
Breakdancers, Live Instrumentation & Art

Venue: TRAFFIK, 331 Old St, EC1.

Flyer