Category Archives: Uncategorized

chen

29 Jan 2015

Longhand Publishers — A way for the public to print their own art designs on one paper.

When I first saw this post, I thought it was just a regular printing machine. But I was wrong — people could use longhand publisher workstations to create fantastic works.

13939173245_f4bac8fac0 13994467394_c71b7666fb

Anyone could make interesting pages, using the control knobs to select certain filling patterns, using given shapes to substitute their ideas. The creativity is not bounded, however, the shapes and patterns and size are limited.

The inventors of this workstation used their art tastes to constrain the printing works to a certain style, which makes people easier to accomplish works, but also makes people’s talent get bounded.

____________________________________________________________TEARING_____________

Play the World is an interactive audio installation created by Zach Lieberman. He used chroma features of music to constrain audio into a certain pitch scale. What to do with pitches that out of bound? Shift the pitch inside this preset pitch scale is his solution.

I’m intersted in this work for that I know research relating to chroma features of sound has been done in LabROSA. And when I explored the post further, I found Creep, kind of my favorite song, is used as an example to demonstrate chroma features.

It’s really an interesting idea to explore what’s happening in the world right now using information from audio, and then transfer audio into a musical style. A potential problem I can see is that as the audio extracted from radio is not consistent with the same pitch, with the extension of note played by the keyboard player, the pitch might shift and the anticipated musical transformation from real radio may not happen.

Here is an audio generated from radio from all over the world —

pedro

29 Jan 2015

Generating a form is always an intriguing process… but what about generating a set of rules that generate a form? Or even more intriguing, a form that generates itself?

There are many roots of the generative thinking, but there is no doubt that biology provided in the 19th and 20th century the fundamental ideas to comprehend the natural phenomena as the result of rule-based processes. We can cite here Darwin’s natural selection, Watson and Cricks’ discovery of the DNA structure and the seminal work of D’Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form. Along the 20th century, with the propagation of systemic theories and information technology, rule-based processes occupied an important role in art and design. Terms like “complexity” and “emergence”, research fields as “artificial life” or techniques such as “form-finding”  or “evolutionary algorithms” permeate  current production.

The idea of this post is to present an interesting branch of art that instead of maintaining a inspiration in biological processes, utilizes theses natural processes as the raw material for a generative art. Cyberneticians such as Gordon Pask were also interested in things like slime molds and ferrous sulphate solutions in the 1970s. Particularly, slime molds (and other molds) are interesting because they morph from unicellular entities into aggregate.

molds1

The project magical combination (and here, 2012-2014) by Antoine Bridier-Nahmias explores the visual characteristics of different molds. It is very interesting to have all these organisms growing and presenting different patterns. However, I believe that the emphasis on the pictures end up treating molds as static visual compositions, and hides its growth process and all the techniques behind the project. Of course, if the author adopted a critical discourse, this conflict with the logic of an growing organism could be seen as the exposure of the arbitrariness of an artistic image or even a critique about the privilege of human creativity in aesthetics.

There is another project that tries explicitly to register the growth of the molds and also to influence it. The Nexto biologic workshop ( and partners, 2014) was based on the use of programming and 3d-printers to simulate/generate a pattern upon which the slime mold would growth and adapt itself to. I believe this project does not have a huge visual impact, it did not took so long as the first and it also does not have a space to question the structure of the artistic field and aesthetic discourse. However, it has a fascinating characteristic. As it explicitly exposes human interference (it is a workshop) the results depart from the field of visual aesthetics to a kind of curiosity associated with the development of simulations and (at some level) even with board / strategy games.

mileshiroo

28 Jan 2015

“Corpus-Based Visual Synthesis: An Approach for Artistic Stylization” by Parag K. Mital, Mick Grierson, and Tim J Smith recreates the styles associated with Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism using algorithmic means. The process matches geometric representations of images to corpora of representative images in a database. The researchers also created an augmented reality “hallucination” which applies the stylization process to a feed from a camera mounted on augmented reality goggles. The project page includes a video that synthesizes Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams” using an image database that of Van Gogh’s “Langlois Bridge at Arles.” The result is convincing and beautiful; I’d like to watch an entire movie this way. An accompanying paper, presented at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2013 lays out the technical details of the research. It would have been nice to interact with a working demo, but the powerpoint and paper are thorough enough for one to recreate the process independently.

More here.

ypag

27 Jan 2015

The concept-
Flock of birds flying on the phone in regular mode. When you want to see time, you tap on phone. The birds flock together to create hour and minute arms to show time.
birdWatch

Inspiration-

These tiny birds that form 3D shapes in air.

Flocking by Daniel Shiffman. This is a good example of recreating the  poetic motion computationally.

Progress- I’m currently lost in coding word. Need more time to finish the app. Here’s how it is looking so far
IMG_3660

Epic Jefferson

27 Jan 2015

This is a mashup of 2 anitype characters that I enjoyed. It kind of looks like a person reaching for a hug.

Here is a link to my character
http://www.anitype.com/entry/agtzfmFuaXR5cGVjb3IUCxIHbGV0dGVycxiAgIDA-rDCCgw/

[iframe src=”http://www.anitype.com/entry/agtzfmFuaXR5cGVjb3IUCxIHbGV0dGVycxiAgIDA-rDCCgw/” width=”620″ height=”360″]

/**
 * Register your submission and choose a character
 * For more information check out the documentation
 * http://anitype.com/documentation
 */
Anitype.register('*', {

 // Enter your name
 author: 'Epic Jefferson',

 // Enter a kickback website, must have http
 website: 'http://www.epicjefferson.com/',

 // Make your animation here
 construct: function(two, points) {

 // Reference to instance
 var anitype = this;

 
 var polygon = anitype.makePolygon(points).subdivide();
 var dimensions = polygon.getBoundingClientRect();
 var angleStep = (Math.PI * 2 / polygon.vertices.length);
 
 _.each(polygon.vertices, function(vert, i){
 var time = { value:0 };
 vert.oX = vert.x;
 vert.oAngle = Math.sin((vert.x / dimensions.width / 2) + (i*angleStep));
 anitype.addTween(time, {
 to: { value: 1 },
 easing: Anitype.Easing.Linear.None,
 duration: 1,
 start: 0,
 update: function() {
 var angle = vert.oAngle + (this.value * Math.PI * 2);
 vert.x = Math.cos(angle) * vert.oX;
 }
 });
 });

 return two.makeGroup(polygon);
 }

});