Painfully aware of sometimes breaking my own manifesto, specifically the “small steps more often” part, I had to rely on ye olde “no news are good news” wisdom on your side to excuse & endure the lack of blog updates around here. Rather than disappearing from the face of the earth though, I found myself more busy than ever for the past 5 months and so have actually a lot more to blog about too, but instead of actual blogging have adopted Twitter and Flickr as a more 2-way medium to fluidly document & discuss what's happening around here.
So below is a brief newsletter type summary of the past few moons since the last blog entry, in reverse order. I'm still intending to fully document a lot of these projects in more detail over the next months. I also recommend to check out my Twitter & Flickr streams for somewhat more continuous updates. However, if you'd like to sign up to the low frequency, vegetarian (i.e. non-spam) PostSpectacular newsletter, please click the link below and register via email:
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Social Collider launched
Only launched last night as part of Google's collection of Chrome Experiments, the Social Collider is a collaboration with Sascha Pohflepp (aka Plugimi), a JavaScript web application to reveal cross-connections between conversations on Twitter. It acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to visualize how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work. The next blog post will go into more detail about this project…
This Happened London #7
Last week, Matt Pyke and myself were invited to talk about the creation of our audio-visual installation at the V&A. We of course obliged and it was a true honour to be amongst the superb line up of other speakers. The realtime 3D of Heartworks was probably the most awe inspiring thing I've seen so far this year. This Happened really is becoming even better everytime (also proven by the fact it sold out within 40 seconds!). Videos of all talks will soon be online on the This Happened website.
Designing Seeds exhibition
I have been collaborating with Universal Everything on 8 projects to date and was very pleased when we got invited to exhibit our work for 2 weeks at the Sheffield Institute of Art & Design. The exhibition purely focused on the software based pieces I also had a key involvement in and included: a 6 screen projection and the display of a selection of 1300+ unique postcards we created for the Forever installation at the Victoria & Albert museum, wallpapers of thousands of generative Lovebytes monsters as well as interactive versions of several other projects. For the exhibition poster I re-purposed and extended the software used to grow the generative type for my older New Shoots project.
Processing & Digital Fabrication workshop at Sheffield Hallam University
As part of the above exhibition, Sheffield Hallam University invited me to conduct a 2 day Processing workshop with students of their art & design department. Two days turned into three fairly long & intense days with full access to the uni's fabrication workshop incl. 3D printers and CNC machines. It was a true pleasure to see students picking up code as expressive tool and even within such a short timespan, to work with them to turn their ideas into physical objects.
Fid.Gen nominated for Designs of the Year 2009 @ London Design museum
Fid.Gen is an open source fiducial marker generator used for creating tangible interactive installations based on the reacTIVision framework. These markers act as machine readable identifiers which can be attached to physical objects and we've used them previously for the award winning installations at London College of Fashion and last year's Lexus Luxury Lounge @ Detroit auto show. Markers created with Fid.Gen however, also resemble cute abstract characters and so cleverly blur the line of perception. The far less technical look also makes them more suitable for large scale public installations. I'm absolutely thrilled that the project has been nominated and included in the Designs of the Year 2009 exhibition currently shown at the London Design Museum.
Forever @ Victoria & Albert museum
Another collaboration with Universal Everything and Freefarm: The Victoria & Albert museum commissioned UE to produce a large scale outdoor installation in their central John Madesjki Garden. Spending the entire autumn on this project we've created a fully generative audio-visual installation in the form of a monolithic LED screen seemingly floating above the garden's water feature, showing mesmerizing animations in synch with an ever evolving, never repeating piece of music. Surrounded by the classical architecture of the museum this created a tue Zen like setting & atmosphere unique to each visitor. At the heart of the installation is a custom rule based music composition framework which engages with the generated visuals into a feedback loop causing an infinite stream of minuscule variations over time. The project also involved the creation of 6000 unique postcards and weekly podcasts (ranked #2 in the iTunes podcast charts).
