by pixelpusher on Saturday 12 December 2009
[Blog]
Blogging from MakeArt 2009 in Poitiers, France. Tonight I’m watching presentations from IOhannes M. Zmölnig (AT), Gábor Papp & Agoston Nagy (HU), Wesley Smith (US).
IOhannes’s talk was about software as “intelligent” agents, which boiled down to programming using Pd (involving visual boxes you connect by wiring together bungee-like “patch cords”) using visual objects. What I really enjoyed about his talk is depth of his curiosity and his willingness to experiment. For example, making cannibalistic objects, where one ropes another with its patch cord and sucks the life (screen size) out of it. Or boxing, and using that as controller data for a performance. With his agents, though, the idea of making your computer code work with (or against) you is a powerful notion.
Gabor Papp fooled us all into thinking he was livecoding his talk, but it really turned out he recorded movies of his livecoding and edited them together or loaded them into fluxus. Still, bonus points to Gabor for doing his entire presentation from within Fluxus. And of course, he’s been doing some really interesting things, especially with “simple” geometric animations. (Not really so simple, but they look that way)
Wesley is demoing yet another amazing-looking audio-visual programming environment called LuaAV. Seriously, the last thing I need to distract me from doing something productive is another audio-visual programming development tool in a language that I should learn. The system itself shows the experience of the developers; it’s an asynchronous events-based system, which in plain-speak means that you can set up many interesting audio-visual things to happen at different times and they all occur independently, as if you were a big shot investment banker with a bunch of secretaries whom you could trust to carry out all of your wishes once told, and not step on each others’ toes (too much).
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 25 March 2008
[Blog, Software]
You’ve probably heard of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia. If you haven’t, and especially if you have, and you happen to live somewhere near London, go directly to the Tate Modern to see their new exhibition of their combined works, do not pass go, do not collect $200. This exhibit is so chock full of major works that you can easily get lost, or worse, distracted.
From the Tate Modern exhibition website:
In the 1920s Duchamp ostensibly gave up making art works to play competitive chess. But he was fascinated by the idea of creating virtual forms. Helped at times by Man Ray, he experimented with stereoscopic views and built a number of devices that generated the illusion of seeing a drawing or design in three dimensions.
The devices that “generated the illusion of seeing a drawing or design in three dimensions” consist of what look like CAD drawings on circular plates; circles of increasing diameter nestled inside one another, filling the whole disc, or filling part of the disk along with the skeleton of a 3D cylinder, and other fractal-looking drawings composed of similarly nested, self-similar shapes. The discs (there are many of them) are aligned in a grid pattern, and each slowly rotates. Staring at them gives the impression of a 3D objects slowly spinning on an off-center axis.
I was a bit blown away by this concept, dating from not long after the invention of electrical machines. I’m not a great art historian, but a friend called this Op-Art and I agree with that classification. Now, the brilliant thing about having computers around to do drawings for us is that we aren’t limited to making a simple disc of optical illusions spin at a constant speed. First off, we aren’t even limited to a single version of that disc. I can make an almost infinitely variable sketch of rings-within-rings, and spin them at a variable rate based on a simple software program (Processing; source code included).
I showed this to a few friends the other night at one of our OpenLab OpenSalons (a fairly casual get-together where a few of us show some works in progress, drink, eat, and geek out), and Robert Atwood pointed out that there’s no reason to limit the sketch to rotating the entire disc – we can make every inner ring of it spin independently. As we discussed what it might look like, Claude quietly made this happen (using Pd/GEM).
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 4 December 2007
[Blog, Past Performances]
Nov. 25, 2007
Here in the European heart of global finance that is London, there are no shortage of closed, corporate-sponsored, invite-only events promoting proprietary products with secret formulas and patented ideas. A refreshing break from this trend is the perennial [tag]Openlab[/tag] series of events, now in its fourth incarnation. Openlab is a loose collective of artists, computer industry professionals, and performers whose main goal is to spread free software an ideas through events with talks, workshops, and performances.
Openlab4 took place 25 November at Melange, an aspiring art-friendly venue just north of east London’s art-clogged arteries of Old Street and Shoreditch. Read more… »
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Openlab4
>>=========<<
25th Nov 2007
Free Software and ideas
talks + music + visuals + performances
brought to you by Openlab
Event Details
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