View it here: link
I think this is a particularly well done project. This idea has been done before, but the zoom ability makes it more accessible and easier to compare the relative sizes of things. I like his selection of objects, as well as his occasional commentary about some of the chosen items. It is a contemplative piece.
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.)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I highly recommending trying the program for yourself: link
Note: some antivirus software complains about this. It is not a virus.
In 87kb, Peter Sotesz creates self balancing automatons whose sole purpose is to knock each other over. The game is complete with breakable walls and secret mode. I chose this as for my Looking Outwards because I think it’s a great demonstration of entities behaving according to rules within a prescribed universe, in this case, blocky ‘people’ attempting to push each other to the ground, with the universe following the rules of Newtonian physics.
http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html
It is the best work I have ever seen.
Amazing visualization of Choreographic.
From Dance to Data to real Object.
A new Wexner Center exhibition features artist William Forsythe’s collaborations with Ohio State.
I don’t know where these anthropomorphic but alient “sculptures” fit on the uncanny valley chart. It seems to be on another dimension. And I love these delicate and vulnerable and disturbing spirits… Look at a few photos here and be sure to check Mark Jenkins‘ website .
Another approach to text visualization see from TEI10. Coinciding with the idea rasied in critique today, this visualization retains the context…though the words are not very eligible.
It is interesting piece of display, because it has two folds of information as viewers zoom in and out. The application on demo allows users to draw on tablet with strips of type, the size and color of which changes with the force on stylus.
