Next Tuesday Julia is talking about Generative Art and the »Generative Gestaltung« Book at the HTW-Berlin. The HTW hosts a series of events, workshops and speeches under the name »Einsichten« every first Tuesday of the month. Feel free to join us this time if you want to. Where and when ?

Tuesday June 8th 2010
5:15pm

HTW Berlin – Campus Wilhelminenhof
Room 444, 4. Floor, Building A
Wilhelminenhofstraße 75A, 12459 Berlin

Few days ago ORF Radio asked us to give an interview about working with generative methods for the broadcasting »matrix – computer & neue medien« with the topic »generative art«. Richard Brem interviewed Benedikt Groß and me at the conference »Typo« Berlin.


broadcast: Sunday, May 30th, 9:30 pm
arrangement: Richard Brem
broadcast station: OE1 orf.at

The new shiny glittery golden issue 3.2010 of weave magazine was just released two days ago. onformative was responsible for the cover design, that is the result of an 8 page tutorial about collecting and visualizing data we wrote for the same issue. There are four different versions of the cover, that are based on different network data log files collected by different artists like Joachim Sauter or Simon Rushmeyer during a 24 hour period. A more detailed explanation of the development of the logging software and the creation of the visualizations will follow. In the meantime you can download the source code of both sketches.

Download LogTool and Visualization Source

Eight golden, 56 silver and 123 bronze nails were awarded at this year’s ADC-Festival, that ended in a grand show yesterday evening at the congress center in Frankfurt. With 242 additional honorary mentions, altogether 429 prizes were given away.

We were delighted to receive a silver nail for »Generative Gestaltung«!

Together with Karin Schmidt-Friedrichs I received a silver nail for our book at the ADC award show. The IKEA book titled »BILLY – 30 years old, 30 years young« (published by Zweitausendeins) also won a silver nail in the category of Literature. Andreas Ueberle’s catalogue »Alphabet Innsbruck« (published by Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz) which uses typography to visualize anecdotes about places and buildings received an honorary mention in the category of »Literature Catalogues«.
In August all winners and awarded work of this year’s award will be published in the »ADC Yearbook 2010« (published by Avedition, designed by Magma Design).

see images of the award show

While at the Ars Electronica in Linz last year, we saw a promising program from the MIT Media Lab called MIDE at the IMPETUS exhibition. Back then we couldn’t find a lot of information on the web but this:

One of the major barriers designers and artists encounter when programming digital media is the difficulty of translating the mental models of their interactive creations into a format and language that can be interpreted by computers. This arises from current software development environments demanding a sequential format for code. In contrast, today digital media is characterized by dynamism and interactivity, and creative individuals conceptualize these computational processes with a wide variety of mental models. MIDE proposes a new interface for visualizing, editing, and manipulating code. It seeks to enable a user-defined conceptual visuospatial representation of computation that complements the traditional text-based perspective, and by maintaining continuous relationships between them, allow users to navigate code in multiple perspectives synchronously. Further, MIDE allows fluid transitions between different modes of computational representation and different levels of representational detail by enabling zooming and information abstraction mechanisms.

We believed that this would become a really useful addition to the standard processing IDE as it looked like it could make structuring and organizing code much easier and speed up programming for all of those who doesn’t want to switch to an IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans.

Now after some heavy development. Agnes Chang, finally released Kaleido. Right, its not called MIDE anymore. But that’s not everything that has changed. Kaleido is now a tool that is designed to help visual-thinkers program. You can use Kaleido to create personally meaningful visuals for your code. Draw little circles, rectangles, and all other kind of shapes and link them with different parts of your code. So right now it is more a sketching tool to layout your program structure and to plan your code before you start programming and not a visual interpretation of your already written code and an easy way to navigate, what is what I was actually hoping for. Nevertheless we are glad to see that a lot of people put so much effort in enhancing the processing IDE in several ways.

For a little demo of Kaleido, watch this video at vimeo.

Download Kaleido for MacOSX

Bene and Hartmut are talking about Generative Design and the book »Generative Gestaltung« in Kontanz at KD Lounge

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
7:00pm – 8:30pm
KD Lounge
HTWG Konstanz
Brauneggerstr. 55
78462 Konstanz

Update:

see the images
see video of the lecture

We just bought our tickets for this years offf conference that will take place from 24-26 June in Paris. As always there is a great list of over 20 artists and collectives from all over the world that represent the cutting edge of contemporary visual culture of today. Just to mention a few of the speakers. Joachim Sauter, Berlin based media artist, designer and founder of ART+COM, who will speak at the TYPO Berlin conference this year as well.

Matt Pyke, Creative Director of Universal Everything which is a design studio that acts as global network of designers, artists, musicians and programmers. If you haven’t heard of them by now, you should take a look at their recent activities.

Somebody else I haven’t met in person yet is Dan Shiffman, well known for his »nature of code« processing tutorials and author of the »Most Pixels Ever« library for spanning Processing sketches across multiple screens. Beside his talk he is hosting a workshop introducing the »Most Pixels Ever« framework. I will probably take the chance and take part in this quick two hour workshop as I haven’t worked with this library yet.

Oh and not forget Craig Ward, this guy is a great designer and typographer working for Grey New York but also does a lot of typographic experiments and work like the Creative Review Annual Cover 2010 or the »You Blow Me Away« piece you have probably seen before. A lot more of the work he has done under the pseudonym »Words are Pictures« can be seen here or at debutart.com.. By the way, we recently started to work on some generative typography projects together with Craig Ward. So we are excited to meet him in Paris soon.

You shouldn’t miss it and get your tickets for offf Paris before they are gone.

Offf Paris 2010 ticket booking

A while ago we worked for a project called “Mapping Museum Experience”, eMotion in short. Supporting a great team that was already working on this project since July 2008. We were responsible for the programming of the »Kraftfelder« visualization. To understand the whole project you need to know that every visitor who wanted to take part in this project, received a wristband at the exhibition entrance that included several measurement sensors. The wristband device, allowed for the precise measurement of the path of each individual through the museum, its speed, the time spent in front of an artwork, when and how strong an emotional arousal occurred, and lastly, when and how strong a cognitive arousal occurred.

All this information was then interpreted by different visualizations like the one we have been working on and finally screened at two large projections and a terminal showing the current data and artwork rankings in real time at the exhibition space itself. But all the data collected by the measurement procedures and the empirical surveys will be evaluated by the organizers as well to hopefully answer some of the following questions. Does age- or gender-specific art perception exist? What influence does information dissemination have on the process of perception? How does a visitor’s background correlate with the process of perception? Is there an ˝ideal˝ path through the rooms, independent of the conceptual? And many more.

The field research phase of the project installed at the Art Museum St. Gallen (CH) where these visualizations was shown, took place from the 5th of June 2009 until the 19th of July 2009. The whole project lasted until January 2010 and the team finally updated their website with some interesting artistic results that can bee seen here . The scientific evaluations of the statistical data by psychologists, sociologists, art theorists and art historians will be completed by the end of 2010 and presented at a press conference in Basel in September 2010.

We liked the project and the whole concept of it and enjoyed working on this project as visualizing emotions and feelings is something that is on our minds for a while now.

For more information about eMotion you should visit there website

http://www.mapping-museum-experience.com