Great news! Our latest project »unnamed soundsculpture« won an honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica in the category »Computer Animation Film VFX«. Established in 1987, the Prix Ars Electronica has served as an interdisciplinary platform for everyone who uses the computer as a universal medium for implementing and designing their creative projects at the interface of art, technology and society. Find a list of other fantastic projects on the PrixArs Website.

Prix Ars Electronica Winner 2012

Produced by onformative and chopchop the “unnamed soundsculpture” is a project by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer, building from the simple idea of creating a moving sand sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For the work the team asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect) using Processing, in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud) in 3D Studio Max, so they were able to use the collected data throughout the further process.

unnamed soundsculpture project documentation

During the last few month we have been working on one of our latest projects, a real-life augmented reality performance for Marco Tempest, a virtual magican who is well known for his multimedia magic and use of interactive technology and computer graphics in his illusions. His performance as a special guest during the Campfire Session of the TED2012 conference was created in collaboration with Marco himself as well as checksum5, the developers behind vvvv, a hybrid graphical/textual programming environment, that was used for the development of the performance software.
More information about the software framework and a detailed documentation about the development process is available on the project documentation page. Also check out the official post on the TED Blog with some more impressions as well as some of the other impressive tricks Marco performed in the past. (Photos: Ryan Lash)


Marco on TED Blog
Project documentation

After the success of our first PAGE Workshop in November, we are holding it again. In association with PAGE Magazine we are organizing a workshop on the subject of »Generative Design« and how to make reasonable and effective use of generative design strategies and custom built applications in the design process. The workshop will be held in German.

29. Juni 2012
Hotel Gastwerk,
Hamburg, Germany

Download Info PDF
Sign up at page-online.de

Together with Till Nagel who is a research associate at the Interaction Design Lab, and a lecturer for Advanced Media we wrote a six page article on collecting and visualizing geospatial data, and how it influences the perception of our environment for the latest issue of Weave Magazine.

After a very brief cartographic history, we argue that the massive generation of geo data in recent years might lead to information overload, yet opens up new possibilities of seeing and understanding former invisible worlds.
While Till Nagel was responsible for the main text we introduced several interactive map and visualization projects that completed the article.

Links of the projects and maps that were mentioned in the article can be found on the Weave.de website.

We are happy that our project »Growing Data« was chosen for the exhibition »Moving Types« in the Gutenberg Museum Mainz. »Moving Types« is a media exhibition, which presents international examples of 125 years of moving typography.

Opening event:
October 19th, 7pm to 9 pm

Duration of the exhibition:
11/10/21 – 12/04/22

Tue – Sat: 09:00 – 17:00
Sun: 11:00 – 17:00

Gutenberg-Museum Mainz
Liebfrauenplatz 5, 55116 Mainz, Germany


More information:
Gutenberg Museum and moving-types.com

Moving Types Trailer

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media just opened a new exhibition called »InForm – turning data into meaning« curated by executive editor of Wired Magazine, Thomas Goetz. For several years he explored how data could come to live and be visualized in ways that help us to understand our actions and environments. In this exhibition he has selected works that exemplify this potential of data to render meaning. The exhibition showcases a range of projects by different visual pioneers who convert raw data into compelling visualizations and beautiful displays. We are proud that our Skype Visualization is part of that fantastic selection of projects by artists like Aaron Koblin, Moritz Stefaner and Eric Fischer, just to mention some.


Tim Leong, art director at Wired magazine about the exhibition:
This exhibit celebrates a new generation of visual pioneers—part graphic designers, part statisticians, part artists—who have a faculty for turning data into meaning, often with beauty and urgency we don’t expect from data. In this exhibit, we have asked them to turn their talents to help us see what we do when we log on. Strictly speaking, these are simply visual displays of quantitative information. But in their beauty, clarity, and urgency, these visualizations don’t just tell us about our world, on- and off-line; they tell us about ourselves, through and through.


Adobe Museum of Digital Art