For project 2, I am currently playing with “pixels” and this interactive art, Wooden Mirror is a little related to it and got me amazed. Using digital tech, it was made elegantly and beautifully in an analogue way. I heard a term, “digitized analog” at the TEI conference and I really liked the concept. We are working on computational art but sometimes we are focusing on digitizing data too much forgetting analog’s beauty (which is not only about aesthetics). Anyways, here is the video and enjoy it!

Surfing net for generative art, I came up with this databases of links for Generative Art (List 1). However, many of the links was obsolete or uninteresting. So, I listed the links worth sharing (List 2)  with a short description.

List 1 – Pages with lots of links to Generative Art examples

1- http://www.generativeart.com/ (The who web part has links to works of many Generative Art researchers and artists)

2- http://www.generative.net/links.cgi (Some of links contains plenty of works from various artists)

3- http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/generative-art-links/ (It has links to tools, resources, sites, and blogs related to Generative Art)

4- http://delicious.com/search?p=generative+art&chk=&context=main (Combination of famous and less famous Generative Art related sites)

5- http://www.subblue.com/links (Links to anything a Generative Artist may find interesting)

6- http://philipgalanter.com/generative_art/links.html (Old-fashioned look but believe me links are invaluable)

7- http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/wilson.artlinks.org.html (Tons of links to works related to intersections of art, technology, science, and culture, and lots of dead links)

List 2 – Intresting Links from List 1 Pages

1- http://www.complexification.net/ (Gallery of computational art before year 2005)

2- http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/ghost-diagrams (Ghost Diagrams is a program that takes sets of tiles and tries to find patterns into which they may be formed. The patterns it finds when given randomly chosen tiles are often surprising.)

3- http://www.solaas.com.ar/dreamlines/ (Insert your dream in words and get picture of your dream)

4- http://www.levitated.net/ (Has lots of free source examples of Generative Art for Flash)

5- http://picbreeder.org/ (Picbreeder is a collaborative art online application based on idea of breading pictures almost like animals. For example, you can evolve a butterfly into a bat by selecting parents that look like bats.)

6- http://philipgalanter.com/generative_art/wiki/index.php5?title=Main_Page (This wiki is dedicated to gathering and presenting information about generative art.)

7- http://davebollinger.com/works/ (Works of Dave Bollinger including online applets and source codes)

8- http://www.shiffman.net/teaching/nature/ (A resource to applets and source codes for every aspect of form synthesis and simulation by Daniel Shiffman.)

9- http://fractalcomposer.com/library (While surfing these links you can listen to some algorithmic music. Personally, I don’t like them.)

Here’s the beautiful piece I found:

It is called “Dynamic Ferrofluid Sculpture: Organic Shape-Changing Art Forms”…nice long name.

The work uses a substance called Ferrofluid (a product commonly used for forming liquid seals and electronic parts. Ferrofluid strongly reacts with magnetic fields. The artist set up this piece such that the controlling magnets would moved based on how many people walked by his piece and how long the people stood by it.

More information on this piece can be found here.

This piece popped out at me because I liked how it created forms using not only technology, but an actually substance as well. Ferrofluid was invented in the 1960s, which is fairly recent. I think it would’ve been interesting to have the magnets change position based on a music piece as well. I’m not sure if that’s what the artist did in the youtube video demonstration, but that may have been interesting to see.

Here’s my prototype applet.

The final project will look like the prototype pretty much exactly–except the buttons and circles will move and interact differently.

The user (or audience, hehe) controls the “Queen” organism, represented in the prototype by the large circle. There are three types of ways the “Queen” can interact with the environment, as a breeder, hunter, or the prey. The user can select which environment in the top left corner.

As a Breeder, the user can spawn smaller organisms (at most 15). This isn’t in the prototype, but the smaller organisms will then follow the larger one around in a queue. The Queen will only be able to breed if it is large enough.

As a Hunter, the Queen can swallow smaller organisms. If it swallows an organisms it gets larger. The smaller organisms will avoid the larger organism.

As Prey, the smaller organisms will swarm and chase the Queen. The smaller organisms will get bigger the longer they touch the Queen, and the Queen will get smaller.

So, I suppose my first question is if this simulation counts as organic simulation. I mostly was interested in doing this because I wanted to experiment with the behaviors we talked about in class. I also wondered about my interface.

I’m also wondering how I could make this more interesting, or if there is already enough going on. I was considering making it a game so that another organism could become the Queen and the object of the game would be to remain as the Queen.

Snowflakes can be considered as a complex structures, which most of us find them beautiful. Formation and morphology of snowflakes have been subject of  many researches since 200 BC. Here is timeline of snowflake research by wikipedia. Among these researches, there have been efforts for generating snowflake forms. Here are some useful links, about simulating snowflake creation,  with short description of each:

1- SnowCrystals.com

This website contains many articles about snowflakes, snow crystals, and other ice phenomena. It mostly discussed snowflake from scientific point of view. In addition, it has a descriptive information about generating physical snowflakes.

2- Nakaya Ukichiro Museum of Snow and Ice

Nakaya Ukichiro Muesum of Snow and Ice website contains links to works of arts inspired by snowflakes and works of Nakaya Ukichiro.

3- snowflakebentley.com

This web site is dedicated to Bentley’s life work and the stunning images of snowflakes he left behind.

4- Gravner-Griffeath Snowfakes

This website includes information about works of Gravner-Griffeath to model 3d snow crystal growth.

5- Snowflake Generator

A simple snowflake generator that use L-systems to create snowflake forms, it has advanced controls, can save snowflake images, and most important it is fun.

6- Fractal Snowflake Generator

It contains a small freeware utility for creating fractal snowflakes, patterns and backgrounds.

7-  Fun Stuffs

This website contains links to various fun applets for creating snowflake like forms. They are all fun, and some of them are good source of ideas for snowflake generation.

You can find lots of other interesting links by searching for: “snowflake generator”, “snow crystal growth”, “snowflake site:processing.org”, and simply “snowflake”

So, for publicity (the 75th anniversary of Monopoly), Parker Brothers has come out with a new version of Monopoly.

And for the first time ever, for unknown reasons (publicity I assume), it’s round.

It never occurred to me that the Monopoly game board *could* still be played if projected onto a circle. So much of my mental model about that game feels tied to the square. “I can’t find St. Charles, which side is that on?” “That’s the expensive side.” “That’s the side with the Luxury Tax.” “Oh I hate going through this section.”
But when I really think about it (and clearly Parker Brothers realized this too), the groupings that come from what’s on what edge of a square are not part of any of the rules at all. No rules or cards that I can think of ever explicitly refer to the board being square; it is totally possible to play this exact same game on a round board. However, the square shape was reinforced by the placement of special items on the corners and having one railroad on each side. In the new design, they try to maintain that “four anchors” metaphor by making the four special squares larger wedges at 90 degrees from each other – but the circle shape winds up making the four special “wedges” just look sort of arbitrary.

I bring this up because the mere existence of this new version gives me a chance to totally reconsider my mental model of this game, and figure out just how much of the game’s “feel” is structured around the physical shape of the board itself, as opposed to the rules. At least for me, quite a bit of the game’s *experience* is tied to its shape – even though in terms of strict game theory, it’s the exact same game with the exact same optimal strategies. And yet, we’re all human, imperfect economic actors – so I suspect people would unconsciously play with different strategies on a round board than on a square one, despite there being absolutely no reason to. I assume Parker Brothers is smart enough to know that this is just an interesting thought experiment they have here, and is still planning on producing square versions in the future.

http://elien.tatssachen.de/

While continuing to try to come up with ideas for the simulation project, I also came across this project. “Elien” is a tool built in Processing for creating typefaces. Click on “launch elien demo” in the upper right corner of the above link to play with it– there are a number of parameters that you can set to define the look of the letters; also you can drag the circles that form the framework around to customize the letters further. Thought it was an interesting idea, thought more of a toy than a functional way of creating letterforms.

Bristlebot is a tiny ‘robot’ made out of a toothbrush, a motor, and a battery. It is deceptively simple, but reflects the complexity of the environment remarkably well.

It turns out it has been picked up and manufactured into a toy called Hexbug. What strikes me about the following videos below is how ‘life-like’ the motion and ‘behavior’ is. They ‘navigate’ their way around the track and appear to interact with others.

So I am curious as to what simulation means. Golan’s description in class seemed to drive towards something akin to the FFCA.

• Does simulation mean software mimicking physical phenomena?
• Does it mean human-made mimicking nature-‘made’?

I was staring at the snow out of my window yesterday and decide to make myself a curtain with laser-cut patterns of snow, or something like that. The next few hours I collected some patterns I remember seeing from MoMA and elsewhere.

Compare to drawing vector patterns and scatter them randomly over the window, I am more interested in exploring how plant leaves cover a surface to maximize photosynthesis area. The idea dates back to last autumn, where I fantasized a self-regulating curtain that grows where sunshine is, and withers where there is not (see video sketch Mark Gross and I made together: plant a curtain).

The final approach is a processing program composed of these parts:

Ivy Generator is an open-source graphical interface for generating ivy vine around imported .obj 3D forms.Users can control the growth of the vine with parameters.

The ivy grows from one single root following different forces: a primary growth direction (the weighted average of previous growth directions), a random influence, an adhesion force towards other objects, an up-vector imitating the phototropy of plants, and finally gravity. This simple scheme reveals that the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene. The ivy generator imports and exports obj+mtl files

You can download the application along with the source code here. The gallery is pretty cool, too.

This is a cute and cool iPHONE application by Francis Lam.
The website is here

iPhone App: Goldfish Music Box from Francis Lam on Vimeo.

This application captures images from the built-in camera, then converts color in to music.
It can turn the goldfish or any moving objects into an interactive music box.

http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/project-tree-growth

tree.growth is a really nicely done example of simulating the growth of trees using L-systems. The artist, Jer Thorp, has a nice short explanation of the concept in the comments section of the project post on the site:

“The concept behind L-Systems is really straight-forward. You start with a string, then you successively apply a string replacement rule. So, let’s say we have a string:

A

And we apply this rule: Every time you see an ‘A’, change it to ‘AB’. Every time you see a ‘B’, change it to ‘A’. The first time through, we get:

AB

Then:

ABA

Then:

ABAAB

Then:

ABAABABA

That’s the root of it (pun intended). Once you have a long enough string, you can then run it through an engine to translate it into some result. In our easy example, maybe A draws a line forward, and B turns 90 degrees to the left. Or maybe A plays the next note up on a piano scale, and B plays the next note down.

In my system the symbol set is different. My strings look something like this:

FF-[-F+F+F-]+[+F-F-F+]

In which F moves one unit forward, – rotates to the left, + rotates to the right, and the brackets start and return to ‘branch points’. “

I liked that he designed the program using adjustable parameters that allowed him to adjust the features of the tree/plant he was creating- a useful way to create many different-looking plants from the same basic code; also referencing the biological variables that control the way actual plants vary from species to species.

Dear Students,

Below is a prospectus for six $500 grants, which will be competitively awarded next month to students currently enrolled in any ETB (Electronic & Time-Based) Art course at CMU. The grants will be awarded for the best project proposals, for projects which will be completed by the end of the semester. This is an ideal way of funding your final project. These grants are supported by the Fine Foundation.

STUDENT GRANTS IN ELECTRONIC TIME BASED ART

The Fine Foundation has generously granted the ETB area with funds to support student projects. There will be 6 production grants, in the amount of $500 each, awarded to students as completion funds for Electronic Time Based Art projects.

Proposal guidelines:
– 1 proposal (3 pages max)
– 1 budget (1 page max)
– Sufficient visuals to support your proposal.
All video must be on YouTube or Vimeo with links included in the proposal document. All visual documentation must be linked to a website or included in the 3 page proposal. No DVDs or hard copies of material will be accepted.

Proposals should be emailed to Professor Jim Duesing duesing@cmu.edu by 6PM on March 17, 2010. Late proposals will not be considered.

The students who receive grants will be asked to present their work at the end of the semester at a public event.

Also: In addition to these six grants, two additional. awards of $500 each will be given to completed Electronic Time Based Art work at the end of the school year. Details for how to compete for these 2 awards will be announced at a later date.

So I was browsing along and came across this interesting site:

http://www.mauriciogiraldo.com/vgline/beta/

While not at all related to Synthesis itself, it did have a quick mention of Spore, which was tagged as being related to the “Weasel Program”.  Unfamiliar with this curiously named piece of software, I, of course, had to look it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program

The basic idea behind this is that there is a set target, and then two “parts” to the program.  One (A) generates a set of random sequences of letters and/or punctuation marks that are a given length.  A second part of the program (B) then compares these “phrases” to a supplied phrase. If it finds similar characteristics between the two phrases, it tells the first part of the program. (A) then repeats the process with random mutations in the next generation and has them compared again.

Over time this causes the evolution of the target phrase through random mutations.  Reading the Wikipedia article shows this is almost exactly like what Golan showed us this morning. To put this in a more significant context:

The program is a vivid demonstration that the preservation of small changes in an evolving string of characters (or genes) can produce meaningful combinations in a relatively short time as long as there is some mechanism to select cumulative changes, whether it is a person identifying which traits are desirable (in the case of artificial selection) or a criterion of survival (“fitness”) imposed by the environment (in the case of natural selection). Reproducing systems tend to preserve traits across generations, because the offspring inherit a copy of the parent’s traits. It is the differences between offspring, the variations in copying, which become the basis for selection, allowing phrases closer to the target to survive, and the remaining variants to “die.”

Try this theory here: http://home.pacbell.net/s-max/scott/weasel.html

Considering the discussion of procedural city generation from Monday, this site has a great look at generating a realistic looking city.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=3220

I discovered a post about the interesting Korean artist Choe U Ram on interactivearchitecture.org

I found his work to be extremely interesting and organic.  The photos below are from a series of kinetic sculptures he named Anima Machines. You can find more information about them here.

Korean artist, Choe U Ram, creates massive, precision engineered sculptures with an eerie organic feel. He uses cut and polished metals, machinery and electronics to create kinetic sculptures inspired by sea creatures and plant life. Exploring the boundaries of archeological discovery and developmental morphology, Choe’s explanations and Latin titles for these creations follow the linguistic traditions of scientific nomenclature. Telling stories using gestural transformation and the tracing of imagined evolutionary stages, these pieces take on the silhouette of actual life forms, as intricate automata express a refined delicacy and weightlessness. Unexpected and fantastical, Choe’s kinetic simulations cyclically breathe with movement that recalls aquatic propulsion, flight and ritualistic courtship displays.

I found this project that involved generating a parametric typeface. I’m not sure if it exactly qualifies as simulation, so I’ll post a better example when I find one. I thought it was really interesting though and since we talked briefly about parametric design (quite literally involving knobs affecting form variables).

I really like the touches of animation that make the type appear alive and organic, and the interaction using computer vision in the projection installation version. Great and simple idea.

This post was due on January 25th, I apologize for its tardiness.

Augmented Table Concept by the Stanford University HCI Group

Click on the link below to see the video:

Augmenting Interactive Tables with Mice and Keyboards

This is an interesting concept showing possibilities for how physical devices can enhance a digital interface.

The virtual protest against internet censorship is calling for participants from over the world to join them on google map.

Particiapate by  mark yourself on Google map…

And they’ve come a long way…

Finally, you can join the protest here.