#ben fry

[mugglenet]

The wizards behind the Potions Cauldron in York have started a crowdfunding campaign for their latest concept: wizarding-themed miniature golf!

[tinoschwanemann]

From Dada to Data: What Contemporary Generative Design Can Learn

The recent exhibition on Raoul Hausmann at the Berlinische Galerie offered a compelling reminder of how relevant many questions of the historical avant-garde remain today. Looking at Hausmann’s photomontages, typographic experiments, and theoretical writings, one is struck by how familiar their visual logic feels. Fragmentation, recombination, serial structures, and the dissolution of traditional…

From Dada to Data: What Contemporary Generative Design Can Learn

[orsacchiotto-rugbista]

[rbolick]

Bookmarking Book Art - Nicholas Rougeux

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Innovative combinations of color and geometry in artists’ books — think of Ursula Hochuli-Gamma’s 26 farbige Buchstaben (1986), Jeffrey Morin & Steven Ferlauto’s Sacred Space (2003), Sarah Bryant’s The Radiant Republic (2019)Ana Paula Cordeiro’s Body of Evidence (2020) — make for a useful angle on which to focus in appreciating book art. Nicholas Rougeux shows that it is also a useful…

View On WordPress

[chrysovalanti]

“How to read an article”

[visualizingmoviedata]

Time Series A dozen years ago I heard the word ‘ubiquitous’ for the first time. I wondered for what it stands for. Looked it up and the word ‘ubiquitous’ means: present, appearing, or found everywhere. So these time series graphs are a type of graphs that you can find anywhere. Because this project is about visualizing our movie data I need three or more data sets. The idea is that I will compare these data sets with our own data set. I hope to find out how our qualifications relate to, for instance, the IMDb (Internet Movie Database), Metacritic and/or Rotten Tomatoes. Suppose I would like to see the first one hundred films compared to results of these websites I should be able to draw the necessary conclusions.

[robotcosmonaut]

All Streets

[elistine]

Intersection of Computation and Visuals

I wanted to quickly discuss a few programmers/artists who are doing work that explores the intersection of computation and visual art. These people have inspired me to create video art and interactive visual systems, to think about algorithmic/procedural composition tools in interesting ways, and also to rethink what a "gallery space" is in the 21st century.

First is Jared Tarbell's Complexification | Gallery of Computation.

Tarbell states:

I write computer programs to create graphic images.  With an algorithmic goal in mind, I manipulate the work by finely crafting the semantics of each program. Specific results are pursued, although occasionally surprising discoveries are made.

The images, interactive visual systems, and code that Tarbell creates is beautifully concise and free of any artistic "fat" (put another way, artistic choices are backgrounded to facilitate a deeper appreciation of the processes and algorithms at work, e.g. using a neutral, muted, black and white, or rainbow color palette). This choice, depending on your viewpoint, may make these works more or less engaging. A great deal of the work is done in Processing. For more work by Tarbell (albeit a bit older) check out the website of his company, Levitated.

Next is Mario Klingemann's (AKA "Quasimondo's") Incubator.

This gallery has a huge range of quality, from utilitarian to silly to artistic. The level of interactivity is also variable, from tapping into the user's webcam to simply being a smartly-programmed algorithm. These programs are primarily created with Adobe Flash or Processing. Some of the more interesting programs are Feedback, Pinupticon, and Cityscapes.  More works by Klingemann can be found on his tumblr.

Last is Casey Reas's website.

This website acts as a gallery for the huge number of works Reas has done over the past 10 years. Reas is the co-creator (along with Ben Fry) of Processing, and has acted as the catalyzer for many changes in data visualization and internet typography design in the last 15 years. As with the work of Tarbell, these projects generally lack artistic "fat" or silliness, I feel, which can be viewed as positive or negative. Regardless, they are impressively done and computationally beautiful. To get a look at some of the work that has been facilitated by Reas and Fry through Processing, check out the Processing Exhibition.

The creation of visualizations of algorithms, interactive visual programs, and more generally art that incorporates computation and visual elements has developed extensively in the past 30 years. Different forms of abstraction have extended the creation of visuals into the computational domain (through experiments by artists and programmers) and extended computation to the creation of visuals in new ways (through more accessible programming tools such as Processing, Flash, and others).

Programs that utilize live streams of data (whether mined from the internet, from a controller, or from video cameras) are of particular interest, as video manipulation is catching up with the real-time capabilities of audio made possible in the 90s through increasing computer speeds.