mural

tiles proposals

my work in plaster of paris

Roots, Rhizomes & Creepers - Hyungsub Shin

Roots, Rhizomes & Creepers - Hyungsub Shin

Left: Uprooted & Right: Uprooted - Hyungsub Shin
New York based artist Hyungsub Shin brings a new and fresh perspective to the realm of fractal artworks with site-specific sculptural cut-outs and complex rhizomatic symmetry-breaking drawings. An important aspect of Shin’s work, often realised in materials such as electrical wires, rope and plastic twines, is that of open growth and unlimited expansion - the artist notes that ‘the whole structure of the installation is not significantly affected by adding or subtracting its parts’.
The works on paper are as equally decorative as they are diagrammatic – data visualisations of social interactions are implied, as are biological systems such neuronal networks. In some cases the drawings attempt to formally capture standard fractal configurations – but Hyungsub’s human touch creates unconventional convolutions in the self-similar topologies – a welcome opposition to more rigid and fixed computationally derived counterparts. The complex works created with electrical twist-wires mimic capillary systems and brachial forms and are consolidated by the 3-dimensionality and resultant shadow play of the materials. The site specific sculptures, often juxtaposed within urban environments present structures as organic living forms infecting and encroaching upon brickwork. In other situations organic figures cut-out of anodised aluminium form bold silhouettes against the skyline to create a idolatry totem fractals
Related Posts:
Results 1 - 20 of about 156,000 for Fractal
The MandelBulb – Daniel White
Julya Sets & Fractal Cities

landed: 3/27/2011 in:

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The Diaroma Paintings of Jerry Judah

Paintings - Jerry Judah
Jerry Judah’s sculptural relief paintings depict haphazard structures, shanti-town sprawls, decaying settlements and the temple complex ruins. Taking inspiration from the landscapes of India, his monochromatic dioramas are generated from recollections of the ornate temple architecture he encountered there growing up as a child.
Many of the works appear to have been generated by a kind of emergent accretion, perhaps mimicking the organic growth of unplanned towns and urban self-organisation. The ’settlements’ are surfaced by a multiplicity of recognisable elements - aerial masts, satellite dishes and phone lines.
Judah’s imaginary landscapes (ften dystopian) are evocative of the rhizomatic architectural propositions of Lebbeus Woods. The structures are also reminiscent of algorithmically generated constructions and landscapes panoramas that have been defined by procedural techniques.
Originally spotted at Algorithmic Worlds
Related: Darlene Charneco - Dioramic imaginings

landed: 2/24/2011 in:

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The Transilluminated Drawings of Bette Burgoyne

Clathrus Morning (detail) & Whisper Vapour (detail) - Bette Burgoyne
Bette Burgoyne’s pencil drawings are phantasmagorical reinterpretations of observed and recollected natural phenomena – clouds formations, lichen colonies, mycological growths, and the reflections of light on liquids. Working with a while pencil on black paper, the dense accretions of nebulous lines create a luminous layered effect. Components of dynamic growth, transfiguration, and supernatural movement are implicated.
A post on Burgoyne’s work at A Journey Round My Skull reveals the creative process involved:
‘Similar to jazz improvisation, I begin with a thematic structure while encouraging form and movement to emerge by rubbing and scratching with my pencil. For example, I conceive a drawing with a flexible construct in mind of “smoke” or “waves” or “reflection” and elaborate from there. Impressions from my subconscious collection of trees, water, minerals, and clouds are defined by applying veils and layers of visual information’
A Journey Round My Skull goes on to note similarities between Burgoyne’s drawings and certain works from the surrealists period - The photograms of Max Ernst and the drawings of Hans Bellmer, for example. We are also reminded of certain algorithmic topologies with web-like surfaces appearing to conceal recursive motifs - directing us to three-dimensional fractal forms such as Daniel White’s Mandlebulb.

landed: 2/14/2011 in:

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The Constructivist Cosmologies of Richard Lippold

Ad Astra (photo: Kim Baker) &Fire birds (photo: Patti Sundstrom) - Richard Lippold
Dataisnature encountered the work of the American artist, Richard Lippold, while on a visit to the MOMA in NYC last year. Works such as 5 Variations Within a Sphere and Variation Number 7 Full Moon, created in the late 40’s and early 50’s are intricate abstract geometric sculptures using wire as the main medium. Both pieces are modest in scale compared to the larger works he created for public spaces, the lobbies of international institutions and performance spaces. The most well-know large scale construction, The Sun, commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, used nearly two miles of wire filled with 22-carat gold and was held together by 14,000 hand-welded joints.
An important aspect of Lippold’s work is the interplay of light on reflective metals and wires to create complex spatial illusions within precisely defined utopian constructivist forms.
Considering the recent importance being given to Lippolds work, it’s unfortunate to find very little information about this artist available on the web. The Richard Lippold Foundation website seems to be permanently unreachable. Fortunately Flickr throws up some great images of his work – particularly Ad Astra, a 115ft high double spire bearing wires in star-like configurations, created in 1976 for the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Further reading:
Wired: Preserving the Installations of Richard Lippold

landed: 2/11/2011 in:

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The Generative Song & Sound Pattern Matrixes of the Shipibo Indians

Shipibo ceramics and textiles
The intricate linear geometric and symmetrical artworks of the Shepibo Indians, a large tribe of the Peruvian Amazon, act as visual music maps – scores notating the chants and songs (Icaros) associated with Ayahasca healing ceremonies.
The textiles and embroidery, all crafted by women, contain recursive and self-reflective motifs, including geometric configurations common to those generated computationally by iterative functions. A characteristic recurring visual system found in the textiles are bilaterally generated cellular patterns containing space-filling curves.
The mathematical self-similar nature of indigenous artworks has been noted extensively before - Ron Eglash’s book African Fractals, being a good example of research in this area. The vibrational pattern networks of the Shepibo are specifically connected to the visionary experience during the Ayahasca ceremonies and to this end we are directed to a note in James Crutchfield’s paper, Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. In it he posits the idea that visionary artefacts may well be generated by a kind of biological feedback mechanism in the visual cortex due to the action of psychedelic agents. The linear tessellations of the Shipibo embroiderery have a strong visual resemblance to the patterns generated by video feedback especially those systems containing symmetry breaking transformations.
Shipibo embroidery & a space-filling curve
According to Howard G. Charing, in his article on the visual music of the tribe, ‘the Shipibo can listen to a song or chant by looking at the designs – and inversely, paint a pattern by listening to a song or music’. He goes on to mention how the designs are mapped using specific songs during the creation of the artefacts – in this sense the periodicity and repetitions in the songs appear to act as a generative grammar system – perhaps the song or musical equivalent of an L-system.

landed: 1/23/2011 in:

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Outer Trajectories in the Blog Galaxy #1 [Infrabodies, Evsc, Noiseforairports & Doraballa-ommo]

Hiroshi Sugimoto at Doraballa-ommo & Willem van Weeghel’s Dynamic Structure 29117 at Infrabodies
InfraBodies deals with hybrid artworks, installations utilising embedded technologies, responsive environments, and info visualisations. Katrin Kalden’s focus leans heavily towards scenographic projection mapping and recent advances in technological fashion, including bioluminescent couture as well as fluid fabrics.
Eva Schindling, whose own artworks have been featured at Dataisnature in the past, has built a number of info-conduits well worth visiting. Her blog mentions artworks utilising electro-depositional ionisation & electrochemical computation techniques, while the research section of her site examines aspects of perception, dreams, and EEG states.
Hypercubes, 3Dprint and Zoetropes at Evsc & Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale at NoiseforAirports
From posts on early pioneering visual music, such as Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie Diagonale to current investigations into musical robotics, Noiseforairports specialises in sound, music, and technology, their ongoing entangled mutations.
Doraballa-ommo has been an excellent source of reference on monochromatic artworks for sometime now, collecting images of work with mathematical, optical and ornamental characteristics. Expect view a diverse compilation of images, from graphical schematics of sound vibrations to photographic imaging of static electricity on large format film.

landed: 1/16/2011 in:

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Selected Tweets #10 (Sept14 - Oct 16th 2010)

Bloom Flower Tool – Daniel Brown & Cindermedusae - Marcin Ignac
Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream:
Cindermedusae - Marcin Ignac. Sphere deformations - the starting point for Haeckelesque creatures.
Reassuringly ‘mad scientist’-like: Circuit Explorations – Evsc. Visualisations of analogue circuit behaviour.
Eve1 – Numbercult. Delaunay and Voronoi strolling in Bézier, wrapped in a succulent colour palette.
Lego Tinguely 2 - Roman Gerold. Lego-noise-rhythm-machine simulates the sounds of synthetic synthesis.
Daniel Brown has uploaded his generative Bloom Flower Tool. Attributes can be customised via XML.
StalacTile: Tessellated Manifolds - Students of Washington University. Following the logic of Alhambric Muqarnas and Stalactites.
The Courtesan Formation. A complex naturally occurring artefact in the Agen Allwedd cave, Wales.
Algorithms to analgoue. Human computation: Basil Safwat recreates Jared Tarbell’s Substrate.
Cells - Yukiya Okuda. Voronoi meets starfield simulation with an interactive & organic twist.
Morild. A fibre-optic specular ‘light tapestry’ by Astrid Krogh.
Intricate cityscape drawing/collages - Thomas Bayrle. NDR, 1977 & Yamagucchi, 1981
On the vacuous and empty nature of finance & banking. Jill Syliva’s ledgers and balance sheets.
Detektors.org - The rhythms of electromagnetic emissions, their psychogeophysics and micrological auscultation.
Double Room / Blauwe stad - Karin van Dam & other scaled-up sculptural installs.
Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise - Ken Jacobs. Nervous Magick Latern performances with John Zorn at Ubu.com.
Neusilber - A landscape of metal palm trees by David Zink Yi.
Human generated landscapes in SW Florida with a predominantly printed circuit board aesthetic.
The End of Perspective - article on abstractive disorientation with mirrors.

landed: 1/1/2011 in:

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The Biological & Botanical Glass Models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka

Portugese Man-of-war (Physalla arethusa) & Actinophrys Sol - Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka
Glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka were a father and son team from Dresden in Germany, known for their exquisite sculptural models of plants and marine animals. Active around the turn of the 19th century they created thousands of finely crafted objects that were destined for the display cabinets of esteemed institutions and natural history museums throughout the world.
Originally a craftsman of decorative items, Leopold would soon shift his emphasis to the natural world, with commissions by the scientific community to make glass models of exotic flowers, particularly Orchids. The Harvard Museum of Natural History, once a prime destination for many of his creations, has a large collection of glass flowers.
Leopold’s reputation quickly gathered pace, and soon curators of natural history museums began to commission the production of different kinds of animals, including marine life which was difficult to present in a museum setting as preservation of specimens couldn’t be attained by any kind taxi-dermal method.
Sea worms & Doliolum mülleri - Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka
Rudolf would later join his father in the productions of thousands of models including squids, sea slugs, octopi, cuttlefish, and other marine invertebrate. In much the same way that Ernst Haeckel added extra artefacts to his own biological illustrations, some of the Blaschka models would be imbued with more than a little of the craftsman’s own imagination.
As this article at the Design Museum notes: Even in their own era, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka resisted conventional definitions and described themselves as “natural history artisans”. As for their work, it was hailed at the time as: “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art.”
Further Links:
The Blaschka Marine Invertebrates at Cornell University
MuseumWales’ Flickr stream with ‘Blaschka’ tags
Nature in Glass – The models of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka
Blaschka sea anemone glass models at the Australian Musuem

landed: 12/20/2010 in:

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Notice: Comments are now Switched Off.

Unfortunately due to excessive spam comments I have finally relented and switched off comment functionality. Sometime soon I hope to upgrade to a version of Wordpress that supports adequate spam filters.
Dataisnature is always happy receive comments, suggestions and corrections. If you would like to comment on a particular post please mail me directly and I will manually add it to the blog.
If you have made a comment at this blog in the last 2 months unfortunately it will have been lost in a sea of spam - please resend the comment directly to my mail account.

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Updata: N8 Museums Night / NODE10 / MFRU / HAIP10 New Nature

Optofonica Museums Night: Anharmonium - TeZ & Felix Kubin Live
Its been a little quiet in here in the last 6 weeks but full transmissions will resume shortly. This blog has often oscillated between regular postings and quieter periods. But its rare for Dataisnature to go into hibernation for more than month in its entire 6 years of existence. The main reason for the recent lull in postings, however, is that my time has increasingly been taken up by personal projects.
In late October I visited New York City to take part in The Root of The Root - a small show of generative art also including Marius Watz and Aaron Meyers. Curated by Phoenix Perry the show incorporated works of visual abstraction , including printed pieces (myself), laser-cut works (Aaron Meyers) and a real-time sound responsive software (Marius Watz). A small Flickr set documenting the show can be found here. My contribution was a new set of prints from my Autotroph series.
The Root of the Root at Devotion Gallery, Brooklyn. Magnetic Burn - Aaron Meyers & Autotroph XCIV (detail) - Paul Prudence
Early November saw a visit to Amsterdam to take part in Museum Night - an annual event where virtually every gallery in Amsterdam opens its doors to 2am to the public. My feedback piece, Talysis II, was included as part of the Optophonic Lab showcase. ‘Optofonica is an art-science laboratory engaged in the research, production and dissemination of artworks investigating photonics, acoustics, fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry & cognitive science based in Amsterdam’. Documentation of the event, the artworks and performances can be found here.
Node 10: The Conversation - Ralf Baecker & Achilles - Brandon Morse
The Node10 - Forum for Digital Arts was held in Frankfurt from the 15th-20th of November. The densely pack schedule of festival events included two exhibitions, an extensive program of workshops, nightly performances, informal Patcha Kutcha presentations and culminated in a day of lectures. Central to the festival’s core was an exhibition of works by international artists curated by Marius Watz and Eno Henze. ‘Through the exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt - the systematized world’ the curators sought to analyse the nature and effect of abstraction systems’. For a more detailed documentation on the show I recommend Marius’s post at Generator.X. My contributions to Node 10 were a couple of short audio-visual performances. Click here to a access my Flickr set documenting the festival.
MFRU: CFO-JAM session & 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid - Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
From Frankfurt I took the Alpine train to Slovenia for the 16th International Festival of Computer Arts in Maribor. I joined the Optofonica collective, once again, for a night of audio-visual performances in the Kino Urdanik (literally: cinema for the super-productive worker) invited by the current festival director Marko Ornik. The performances curated by Maurizio Martinucci, were brought together to ‘encourage a combined exploration of sound and light in space, and their deepening synthesis’. I gave a performed of my spatially shape-shifting piece Rynth. Further pictorial documentation of the festival as a whole can found here.
Haip10 New Nature: 7k, A new Life form - Saša Spačal & The Root of the Root: Blocker - Marius Watz
Last, but by no way least, was trip to Ljubljana for HAIP10/New Nature festival curated by a team at Zavod K6/4, Kiberpipa organisation. HAIP10/New Nature set out to investigate such subjects as nanotechnology, bio-hacking and robot-nature interfaces. The week long festival included an exhibition, a series of lectures and live-cinema performances related to bio-technological systems, both actual and metaphorical.
Haip10 New Nature: Nomadic Plants - Gilberto Esparza & the Hackeria Workshop with Marc Dusseiller
My lecture given at the festival, Dataisnature: Systems, Processes & Emergent Computation, explored many of the ideas, philosophies and works written about at Dataisnature. This included the intersections of generative art and scientific data visualisation techniques, computational art history, procedural art and earth processes. In the latter part of the lecture I discussed the concepts of Pancomputationalism and Universal Automatism in a quest to outline the spatio-temporal subroutines of runtime planet Earth from a biological and chemical perspective. The club event on the final night of HAIP10 included a performance of my Bio/Hydro/Acoustic Phenomena piece.
Further posts on my personal projects will be found at www.paulprudence.com

landed: 12/8/2010 in:

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Quayola – Architectural Augmentation & Digital Constructivism

Partitura & Strata #1 - Quayola
London based Quayola creates audiovisual works, using software based systems, as well more traditional photographic and video compositing methods to create geometric and architectural visual music films and performances. His most recent work utilises Delauney Triangulation techniques and Voronio sub-divisioning to overlay and augment classical imagery. This, in his own words, ‘enables the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously’. Crystalline topologies and coloured facets are derived from the computational analysis of classical works such as Velazquez’s Las Meninans. In Strata the topographies imply geological terrains, as the triangulation folds into 3 dimension space, and degenerates into wire-frame landscapes.
Quayola’s visual music projects include crisp syncopated graphic forms which appear equally suited to minimal tech-house (as in PTA) as they are modern solo piano compositions (revealed in a preview of Partitura). In both cases success is achieved by the use of precise audio-visual synergies, constructivist idioms and a sense of an unfolding abstract narrative.
Quayola’s work is realised with the input of specialists such as sound designers, programmers and photographers, details of which are annotated for each project.

landed: 10/5/2010 in:

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The Melodies and Megaliths of Pseudocrystalline Terrains

Fingals Cave - Yackeroeni & Giants Causeway – Nonsequtir
We can only speculate on the kind of microbe, plant or animal Thomas Molyneux had in mind when he postulated that the strict geometric configurations of the basalt columns found at the Giants Causeway might in fact be a huge fossil. An immense crystalline kelp or a scaled-up multicellular sodium-phillic slime mould?
Basalt column structures form part of a group of generative landforms known as Pseudocrystals. Aside form the well-known Giants Causeway in Ireland there are countless other fine examples around the world - Here’s a Flickr gallery compiling pictures of these multiform structures.
Fingal’s Cave in Scotland is an excellent example of this kind of polygonal scenography. It provided inspiration for Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote an overture on the spot during a visit in 1830. The cave formation resembles a giant church organ with pipes of varying lengths – perhaps Mendelssohn noted this visual cue? He was not the first to feel its musical overtones. The naturalist Joseph Banks, who landed on the island in August 1772, named it The Cave of Melody.
Giants Causeway - William Asanome & Dverghamrar - Santi Rodríguez
Iceland has more than its fair share of exceptional Basalt columns. Dverghamrar has a structure which looks like an austere ancient temple relic – a previous home to an sect of non-regular tessellating-polygonal worshipping stone masons. At Kirkjubæjarklaustur you’ll find the remains of a carpet of pentagonal paving stones laid in honour of their megalithic idol.
The Devils Postpile in California, and The Devils Tower in Wyoming proposes an architect of a more malicious and sinister nature - the real story behind these metamorphic patterns had eluded geologists [or appropriately geognostics, as they were originally know] until quite recently.
Basalt columns were actually formed by a heat diffusion process during the cooling of volcanic lava as it interfaced with cold air or water, mostly during the Paleogene era. The process of contraction generates linear cracks and the extensive fracture networks that collectively create these fascinating psuedocrystalline mosaics.

landed: 9/23/2010 in:

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NODE10 - Forum for Digital Arts

NODE 10 - The Forum for Digital Arts
There are more than a few good reasons to write a post on VVVV - the video synthesis tool-kit developed by the VVVV Group in Germany. The first is Node 10 - The Forum for Digital Arts which takes place between the 15th and 20th of November in Frankfurt. Looking at the program with workshops, lectures and exhibitions it looks every bit as good, and most likely better, than Node 08.
Marius Watz & Eno Henze have curated the accompanying exhibition, adapting a similar policy to Node 08 Lecture series, whereby work and ideas totally unconnected to the software have been included. Works chosen explore the wider context of procedural design and more specifically that of systems for abstraction. Expect to see work by Jorinde Voigt, who creates complex drawings of networked elements, and Zimoun who makes kinetic sonic contraptions. There are also works from a variety of artists well-known within the generative art and data visualisation communities.
A structured workshop program is defined to cater for specific interests with an emphasis on the practical. Whether it be visual music, data visualisation, or physical computing, there is something to cater for everyone.
Genesi - Abstract Birds
There are also evening events with club-orientated material, live visuals and a VVVVinisage. Certainly not to be missed is Pedro Mari and Nata Singaglia’s performance under the name of Abstract Birds. Pedro recently posted a preview of a new piece called Genisi, which contains organically developing systems and organisms displaying life-like kinematic motion.
Yet more important news from the developer HQ is word of a new and significant release of the software. As a user of VVVV myself, and someone who has seen over 4 years of releases, I was very excited to see one particular piece of new functionality – the ability to edit and create nodes using a code editor within the standard visual programming environment.
Update 300910: I’m excited to add that I’ll be heading to Node 10 to perform two live audio-visual pieces, Rynth and Untitled[BioAcoustic Study] at the one of the nightly events. A video of the latter, which was originally made as a collaborative work with the sound artists Francisco Lopez, can be found here.

landed: 9/19/2010 in:

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Selected Tweets #9 [July24-Sept13 ‘10]

Subway Drawing Translation #2 - Oliver Vernon & Excerpt from the score for Galaxis - Roland Kayn
Microblogged: Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Very occasionally a post may have additional descriptive text, overriding its original 140 character version.
Color A Sound - Blair Neal. MAX patch transforms glyphs drawn onto projector transparency into sound.
43200 constellations within 12 hours. One Perfect Cube - Florian Jenette. Time as abstraction.
Sprawling Conglomerates by John Borowicz, and other obsessive infeasible architectures.
Solu: Multisensorial Instrument [Audible & Visible Spectrums - a proposal of correspondence] – 3kta.
Whorl & Tornado. Complex and dynamic paper cut sculptures from Mia Pearlman.
Bisymmetric Hendecahedron [Protuberant Cloud workshop] – SPAN at Designplaygrounds.
Dynamic Structure 1586 - Willem Van Weeghel. Computer controlled kinetic object.
The artwork of Joe Kievitt contains linear abstractions and colourfield patchworks.
Whorl [Detail] – Mia Pearlman & Tower of Babel, 2010 [detail] - Dan Slavinski
LYDUR - Timon Botez. Installation/sculpture object[s] that orchestrate[s] an infinite composition.
Repeated Squares - Roma Cintilante. Flickr set of analogue pixillation studies and patterns.
Subway Drawing Translation #2 - Oliver Vernon. Plus other marvels of amorphous complexity.
Acousmata on Roland Kayn’s “Isotrope,” Part II. Including excellent images of his scores and visual music systems.
Composing with Process: Perspectives on Generative & Systems Music. Curation of works by Mark Fell & Joe Gilmore.
The tracking of ‘bizarre robot traders’. Algorithmic Automata evolving in the stock market datastreams?
Architectural plans from the end of time - Dan Slavinski.
Genetic Exploration of Bio Micro Structures for Architectural Apps [presentation slides] - Maria Vera Van Embden Andres.

landed: 9/14/2010 in:

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The Music of Woven Weather Data - Nathalie Miebach

Twilight, Tides and Whales - Cape Cod ( February/ March 2006) & Musical Buoy in Search Towards a New Shore
Nathalie Miebach translates astronomical, ecological and meteorological data into sculptural structures using the technique of basketry. The regular intersecting format of weaving acts a base grid on which to plot complex parametric interrelations of natural time-based interactions. The final sculptures are playful three dimensional datasets that resemble complex childrens toys as well classic models of exotic maths surfaces.
One group of works transform weather data into musical scores which are then further abstracted into her trademark sculptures. Their drum-like shapes and convoluted cylinder forms are populated with little spheres (notes) which as a whole evoke some kind of music-box device. We are, perhaps, enticed into imaging these objects as media which can be inserted into into a larger reader mechanism for the generation of audio. Taking the pieces to their natural conclusion she has invited chosen musicians to interpret the sculptural notation.
Via Nathan Selikoff

landed: 9/8/2010 in:

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The Radial Foranger Patterns and Memory Networks of the Sand Bubbler Crabs

Sand Bubbler Crab Patterns - Finstr & Georg Scholz
While a lot of attention is given to primates, elephants and even members of the canine group, in respect to ‘art’ created by animals, the tiny Sand Bubbler Crab could be the unseen hero of the process art category. It creates various kinds of organised patterns with radial symmetries and branching structures in the sand, the result of food foraging activities.
Naturally there is no interfacing with tools such as paintbrushes but the species Dotilla Fenestrate does create circle packing patterns and emergent aggregations that may well interest the algorithmic artisan. During low tide these crabs emerge from their holes to find food. They sift the sand and extract food from it then leave behind little spheres of processed sand creating a memory network to indicate where food has already been extracted. Environmental factors, such the local tidal system, as well as predatorial variables act as is a parameters in this system to effects the final configurations of the patterns generated.
Marquisde has created a Flickr gallery of Sand Bubbler Crab artworks and Stretta has uploaded a HD video of one of these little wonders busy at work.

landed: 9/7/2010 in:

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International Symposium of Electronic Arts RUHR 2010

The Snail on the Slope - Vladimir Todorovic & Moids 2.0 - Saita Kazuki & Soiichiro Mihara & Hiroko Mugibayashi
August saw the yearly International Symposium of Electronic Arts take place in the RUHR region of Germany.- spreading over Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg. To say the program was a dense one would have been an understatement. Over the week the festival presented recent works, along side well-known ones, workshops, conferences, club events, and concert performances.
The group exhibition TRUST, held in the iconic Dortmunder U building, explored ‘the aesthetics of trust by questioning its status, attempting to challenge the audience’s convictions and by encouraging a reflected dialogue with machines and media’. Carsten Nicolai’s piece Rota is a large scale Dreamachine – where light penetrates holes on a revolving cylinder to generate a specific stroboscopic effect which can induce different kinds of mental/cognitive states. Seiko Mikami’s piece, Desire of Codes, consisted of multiple sensors, cameras and a projection that resembled the multifaceted geometry of an insect eye. On moving through the gallery space the sensors triggered cams which recorded images and footage of viewer. A tapestry of images is generated and projected onto the gallery wall containing both past and present fragments of the ongoing surveillance process.
Rota - Carsten Nicolai & Epiphora - Yunchul Kim
The ISEA2010 RUHR Exhibition held at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte housed an equally impressive and diverse group of works. Yunchul Kim’s Epiphora, resembling an alchemists laboratory set-up, presents a ‘fictional pathology’ where fluids pulsate and react with one another simulating the actions of a group of imaginary organs. Vladimir Todorovic’s movie The Snail on the Slope utilises Processing to generate sequences of abstract/organic forms. The film, which can be viewed here, consists of narrative sequences which are based on a story of the same name by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky.
Running alongside the exhibitions were a number of concerts of electronic music from the likes of Thomas Köner, Asmus Tiechens and Eliane Radigue. The evenings saw a program of related club orientated events. For the Audiovisual Pilots night I was invited to perform an newly adapted version of ryNTH - a real-time piece where transformations and modulations of geometric forms are generated by sound.
My Flicker set documenting the symposium can be found here.

landed: 9/6/2010 in:

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Inside Insides – Unlocking encoded spatio-temporal morphologies

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of fruits and vegetables
InsideInsides offers a collection of animations made from sequences of Magnetic Resonance Imaging of fruits and vegetables. Taking a slice at a time in topological order, and then animating the slices in sequence generates intriguing results. The vegetal forms are translated into quasi-morphological figures and biological entities. These classic archetypes, encoded spatio-temporally into the layers of the foods, act as natural visualisations of morphological development and growth.
Sections of a cucumber appear as microscopic bacterial entities with short-lifespans - fading in and out of existence, using a filtering mechanism, as if it were processing food.
The symmetry breaking movements of the watermelon animation, on the other hand, yield the kinds of geometric transformations we might find in an analogue video feedback experiment.

landed: 8/19/2010 in:

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The London Psychgeophysics Summit

Psychogeophysical scrying Plot – Martin Howse & Persinger Helmet – Jonathon Kemp & Martin Howse
The London Psychogeophysics Summit has been and gone - the dust has settled. If this dust were measurable the Psychogeophysicists would surely have recorded and annotated its behaviour with a DIY contraption of their own making. Titled ‘Sites of Execution and Memory’ the week long summit consisted of daily workshops to create experimental devices for the forensic study of geophysical phenomena surrounding noted past execution sites and related locales.
Psychogeophysics enhances the classic notion of the Dérive with earth science measurements, sonology and geophysical archaeology. Add to this a geohistorical context and a species of atemporal psychogeography comes in to being. Taking the science of imaginary solutions into the physical domain, and making verifiable readings of the environment in relation to these conjectures, adds a welcome Pataphysical ingredient into the mix.
Psychogeophysics.org documented the week’s proceedings in detail:
Socialfiction facillitated one of his algorithmic dot walks in Greenwich Park, which utilised the minimalist Brainfuck programming language as a generative navigation system. Using ‘The Physics of the Outdoors’ by Marcel Minnaert as a starting point urban adventurer Petr Kazil exposed an array of deep observation techniques to enhance any kind urban interfacing. Other activities included geographical emotion mapping, Psychogeophysical scrying, remote viewing sessions, Thoughtography [Projected Thermography ] and the construction of a Persinger Helmet. The latter was put to use at the Crossbones Cemetery in Southwark, an unconsecrated graveyard dating back to the middle ages.
Flickr documentation of the summit can be found here

landed: 8/15/2010 in:

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Flickr Fruits #35 [Mapping & Topography]

Paris Mapcut - Studio Kmo & The Geotaggers’ World Atlas #3: Paris - Eric Fischer
Eric Fischer’s Geotaggers’ World Atlas set contains a serious of maps derived from photographers timestamps and geotags found on Flickr. The data has been used to calculate the speed at which the photographers were travelling and plotted on OpenStreetMap. In all there are 50 cities covered, each with density paths indicating the most navigated and photographed areas. Can the Geotaggers’ World Atlas be interpreted as map of tourism and sightseeing? The Locals and Tourist set goes some way to answering this question.
Studio Kmo has a group of sets dealing with cut-out and drawn maps, predominantly cities, which exude a staggering amount of graphic detail. The cites of New York, Paris and Singapore are covered in stencilled form, among others. There are also sets documenting the development of the paper cut pieces themselves.
The Linear Landscapes set by Leonardo Solaas contains a series of algorithmic topologies generated by sampling images, and transforming their colours into striated configurations of lines. We are reminded of landscape contours as viewed from a distance as well as geomorphological features at closer inspection.

landed: 8/5/2010 in:

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Lauren Seiden – Gardens of Noise

Looped & Into My Crawl Space (detail) - Lauren Seiden
Lauren Seiden uses found images obtained from the web, which she manipulates, to use as a base to map out complex gestural compositions that allude to natural forms, intricate webs, venation patterns and other botanical conglomerations. Her meticulously precise technique allows for the creation of patterns systems that bare notable similarity to those created using computational techniques such as pseudo-random noise generation (Perlin Roots and Perlin Sketch, by Stinging Eyes on Flickr, are good examples of this comparison)
Many of the drawings contain overlayed translucent cellular colonies inter-connected by tendrils which resemble the networks generated by surface colonising symbionts such as the Lichens. In others works, such as Looped, there is a strong insinuation of movement - as if small filaments or hairs are responding to tiny turbulent air currents. In many of the drawings we are left guessing as to to the nature of the original blueprint images used, and possible transmutation from the mundane to the miraculous.

landed: 8/4/2010 in:

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XXXY - Scenographic Transfigurations

Luma - XXXY
XXXY, formed of the Rome based duo of Sladzana Bogeska & Giuseppe Pradella, are currently creating live cinematic performances that eschew typically fast moving graphics or explicit sound reactivity. Luma, their most recent piece, is an extremely slow transforming abstraction that alludes to landscape topologies and psycophysiographical terrains. The shifting movements of the contoured surfaces, in Luma, takes place at a very slow pace rendering the transformations almost imperceptible, creating a kind of chimerical and paradoxical effect - as seen in the video documentation. Sound forms an important expressive aspect to XXXY’s live cinematic performances, augmenting the alluvial transfigurations, with passages of slowly shifting noise envelopes and drones. XXXY most recent performance of Luma was on a 3 screen span at that the Cronosfera Festival in Turin in May.

landed: 7/31/2010 in:

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Selected Tweets #8 May-July 2010

Another Soundscape - Chung-Kun Wang & Fabricmachine - Kathrin Stumreich
Microblogged: Recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Very occasionally a post may have additional descriptive text, overriding its original 140 character version.
Black Rain by Semiconductor utilises Heliospheric imaging of solar winds and coronal mass ejections.
1-Bit Symphony by Tristan Perich is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip.
Organizing Critters, by Seung Joon Choi, where Critter bots double as frenetic action painters.
ButDoesItfloat collates drawings by Robert Horvitz, who’s Quantum Symmetries were mentioned previously at DataisNature. http://tinyurl.com/33vholl
Variable4 uses meteorological sensors & algorithmic scores to translate weather conditions into music.
Tele-present wind, by David Bowen, where Installation dynamics are derived from outside wind measurements.
Magic Mountains & Impossible Clouds - Alex Yudzon’s pattern-map scenographies.
The Pyramid by Subblue. Hazy pyramidal recursive structures that transform into mountains over time.

Impossible Cloud 9 - Alex Yudzon & The Pyramid - Sublue
Defetto’s Moiré consists of 3-Dimensional trapezoid transformations set to Jan Jelinek’s music.
The kinetic sonic sculptures of Chung-kun including Kong, a light sensitive percussive contraption.
Fabric Machine - Katrin Stumreich. Light sensors measure moving fabric opacities and use the data to generate sound .
UVA’s Speed of Light. A fibre optic installation that generates intersecting light beams.
Alex Mclean & Geraint Wiggins have uploaded their paper on ‘Bricolage Programming in the creative arts.’
Sphere & Torus Autologlyphs [ via Selective-Laser-Sintering] by Henry Segerman for Bridges 2010.

landed: 7/27/2010 in:

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Clint Fulkerson – Autocatalytic life-forms

Vesicle (detail) & Cross Section of a Pre-Fab Pollen Grain - Clint Fulkerson
Clint Fulkerson is one of a growing number artists dedicated to hand generating computer-like patterns, geometries and complex mathematical forms. The procedural aspect of mark-making Clint uses is derived from an auto-catalytic self-organising principle, a self-reflexive recipe that has as much in common with morphological systems as it does drawing.
‘I create my artwork through the slow application of decisive marks. As I draw, I follow a loose formula based on what I’ve already drawn, filling areas of the picture plane gradually, without making initial layout sketches. This makes the final product somewhat unexpected and emergent.’
In this sense the drawing could be seen to be a system in action whereby local agents (drawing marks) define successive marks to create global structures of complexity that are often unaware of their ongoing mutating configurations.
This emergent behaviour has been noted in morphological systems and biological colonies, at length. No surprise, then, that many of Clint’s drawings have titles alluding to the development of organisms such as meiosis and mitosis. In some some of the drawings Voronoi-like meshes appear to generate tensile forces of subdivisioning cellular activity.
Related:
Emma McNally - Emergent Cartographies
Bruce Pollock - A Scroll Through the Alluvial Cellular Terrain
Robert Horvitz – Quantum Symmetries
Matt Shlian - Everything, Everything
Erwin Keustermans - Patterns by Partition
Human Robots & Space-Filling Emotions

landed: 7/21/2010 in:

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