arts informatica

Pask Present

2008-04-22T12:37:00.006+01:00

The Maverick Machines exhibition resulted in the development of Pask Present, a new Pask inspired exhibition held in Vienna (25thMarch-4thApril) co-curated with Ranulph Glanville and Stephen Gage from the Bartlett.

Ranulph was instrumental in making the exhibition happen in Vienna, finding a gallery space and arranging funding through his contacts at EMSCR.

Stephen and his students from the Bartlett designed and created the exhibition space, and in true UK style the exhibition was packed in a van and driven from London to Vienna and back again by two pioneering students .

Ruairi Glynn (famous for his Interactive Architecture website) designed the Pask Present website using the wonderful wordpress authoring system.

Albert Mueller and Ranulph produced a wonderful catalogue of the exhibition - details to follow..

I reworked many of the exhibits at Maverick Machines, including a new Electrochemical Glass System:

The exhibition was a great success and raised much interest in the work of Gordon Pask. There were many visitors, Cyberneticians from the EMSCR conference, Art and Architecture students from Vienna and a great deal of curious people who happened by the gallery - watch this space for further developments!

Maverick Machines

2007-06-01T19:15:00.001+01:00

Maverick Machines - an exhibition inspired by the work of Gordon Pask will run from 23rd July - 10th August in the Matthew Gallery, Edinburgh University.

Gordon Pask, from "An Approach to Cybernetics", 1961

See Paskian Research for more on Gordon Pask.

OnSite Opening 25th October

2006-10-20T14:40:00.000+01:00

OnSite is a series of Arts and Informatics interventions on and around the building site of the new Informatics Building.
See onsite01.blogspot.com for more details.

Kinetica Opening

2006-10-09T10:24:00.000+01:00

Kinetica a new gallery dedicated to Kinetic art opened last week in Spitalfields London, where you can interact with the Mimetic Starfish between Oct-Nov 14th 2006.

Photo by Mark Pilkington : Strange Attractor

Upstairs you can also see some beautiful kinetic works: solar powered mobiles by Daniel Chadwick:

and servo controlled floating forms in space by Elias Crespin ...

plus automated arms endlessly writing "la la la.." and signing Dali, ebbing colour kinetic neon forms..

For the next 2 weeks only - downstairs a robo-drummer-performance happening.

See Kinetica BBC news items on youtube and the more in depth item on C4.

Great video documentary here

Free Processing!

2006-06-19T19:03:00.000+01:00

The new Open Source Processing language is being used to create some very interesting interactive applets on the web. Its free, easy to use and full of powerful tools - vision blob analysis, google searching, quality real time rendering, particle systems etc
Processing is enabling a wide range of people to program - creating powerful interactive real-time generative graphic web ideas, visual tools and simulations.

"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound"

(simulated interactive real-time smoke web app)

Web graph of this site, grows organically using simulated physics as the site is analysed - see the structure of any website!

my work site: www.mimetics.com

Analyse a site: WebSites as Graphics

The Processing library is growing and its applications are moving into areas such as Mobile projects and embedding on micro processors

The creation of novel interfaces via projection and vision analysis: Musical surface / instrument

This may be the language of choice for the interactive cafe tables proposal and other interactive arts & communications and informatics projects requiring web, visualisation, interaction and real-time simulation - plus its easy to use and develop - and its free.

Light + Building

2006-04-26T16:00:00.000+01:00

Just back from an entreprenurial visit to the biggest lighting exhibition in the world!
Light+ Building in Frankfurt - over 2000 exhibitors - anything connected with lighting, LED's, spotlights, architecural constructions, domestic lamps, modern, classical, fittings, energy saving, controllers etc etc.
It took nearly seven hours to walk around the exhbition without actually stopping to look at anything in depth.
It was THE place to see where the future of lighting is heading - LED's everywhere, exhibiting strange and wonderful effects - pulsing, phasing and flowing colours, blinding in their new intensities, animating with cellular imagery..

Something for the new Informatics building? An LED curtain? Some LED wall tiles? Building as information display?

Walls, tubes and curtains of LED Lights: ElementLabs and G-Lec
Huge USA company: anything LED on any scale: ColorKinetics
Experimental walls, tiles and creative effects: Traxon (tunnel above)
Magic Monkey (webcam on cooling tower!)

Generative Art

2006-03-13T22:24:00.000Z

We've come along way since the first ascii images and plotter machines..

Combining high quality graphics, the internet as a database, interfaces and linguistic input, the generators become almost useful - instant posters, animations of abstracted information processes - subtle communications, generative intelligent graphic streams for ambient building art..?

TypoGenerator generates posters from text (informatics, brain)

Debris Visual Art
Automatic ever changing collage from google image searching:
(keywords included electronics, robot)

Dreamlines
A generative drawing montage from text terms and web image searching - very beautiful and constantly engaging...

Imagery merges and endlessly changes, as if from a live video stream

snapshots of a sequence generated from cat, bird, mouse...

See GenerativeNet for more links to generative art works and resources.

AV festival - LifeLike?

2006-03-13T15:05:00.000Z

Over the weekend I visited Newcastle to check out the AV LifeLike festival - where "the world's leading electronic artists hold a mirror up to the modern world".
Luckily I was there to visit some friends in Newcastle...
We - three adults and toddler, drove to Sunderland to see Ken Rinaldo's Spiderbots.
Joe (ex Sussex COGS) and myself having a technical curiosity and some experience of interactive installations, public art and robotics.

12 robots in a pen, only three feebly working.
Not so impressive, the child was bored, the mother annoyed and we were amazed.
We spoke to the poor assistant who was answering irrate visitors, yes the batteries only last an hour and we only have 1 charger and the charging station does not work.
Its a pity for the robots were very interestingly constructed - if only they were actually working! One did walk a bit while we were there.
Lessons to be learnt here, especially showing work in a public arena - systems have to be robust, and things must work.
The woman who ran the cafe had some very strong opinions about the show - she was very underimpressed, especially as there had been a lot of money spent on the hype with PR events, wine etc.

Finally the AV guide, a disaster of mis-information! It was set out on a daily basis, all well and good, but if you wanted to find out where something was or what it was about, see another date, so you do, then back to find out where it was, no opening times, so you go through it again.
So that was Saturday, and on Sunday, lots to see said the guide. Where they were, what were they about, found that - opening times?
At the back of the guide all the venues were listed as being closed on a Sunday....

What's New?

2006-02-23T15:28:00.000Z

New to the blog: the beginnings of the Resources and References section - soft sensing: how to create magical interfaces, very useful for those interactive tables.. see Ideas Pool.

Another blog with an eclectic mix of links to interactive installations - including a wild proposal for a holo projector - just like out of Startrek....

www.pixelsumo.com/tags/installations

New UK Art

2006-02-07T11:38:00.000Z

Its all out there somewhere.. new art buildings, new art projects, experimental inter/transdisciplinary projects...

Last week I met up with Stella Couloutbanis, the curator of the Nottingham Bonnington Gallery, part of Trent University - a similar venture to the proposed Inspace of Informatics...
They are now part of an ambitious multimillion contemporary arts project:
CCAN Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham

£13M of funding, due to open in 2008
"At an overall size of more than 3000 square metres and offering 1300 square metres of gallery space on one floor alone, CCAN will be one of the largest contemporary art galleries in England in terms of exhibition space"

And there is the ongoing "The Public" - another extremely ambitious project in the West Midlands, due to open this year:

"Working with interactive designers, Digit and AllofUs, and interior design team, Ben Kelly Design, we are creating a networked series of galleries in the new building. The Gallery is a platform for the exploration of the nature and future of collaborative and participatory arts practice, delivered in a highly visitor focussed format."

These are major projects, I would hope that InSpace and the new Informatics Building will incorporate on a smaller scale, but with the same fire, similar ambitions, dreams and ideas...

Finally, a major project and archive in Sunderland "Call for Artists"

"...over £8 million will be levered in from the private sector to be spent on art. Uniquely this commissioning fund is in a single pot, the Cultural Masterplan, which means it can be spent across the entire city in order to realise and contribute to the cultural regeneration of Sunderland."

(more as and when discovered...)

Emergence

2006-01-22T15:59:00.000Z

Complex patterns and behaviours produced from networks of simple interacting processes.

Harnessing emergence for creativity, "intelligence", surprise, wonder and incomprehension.

Emergence in multiple interactive time based processes, micro to macro.

Digital, biological, electrochemical, societal and perhaps even cultural (meme?)

Experimental Emergence:

Dendrite

Army of Clerks

Dendrite is a simple computation device based on electro-deposition.

Information in the form of electric impulses controls the formation of metallic threads in a metallic salt solution, which in return modify the way that information flows through them: the longer the thread between two points (a cathode and any of the anodes), the smaller the electric resistance and the reduction of the signal between them.

Associated with:

SmartStudio Interactive Institute Sweden
(home of the mind reading brainball!)

Brainball is a game where you compete in relaxation. The players' brainwaves control a ball on a table, and the more relaxed scores a goal over the opponent. | view project

Computing for Emergent Architecture
From the Bartlett Weblog:

Comment Wall:

Comment Wall is a wall where people can write their thoughts directly onto a wall using their fingers. The camera-recognition system remembers their text and displays it over time. The further away you stand from the wall; the most distant texts are displayed. As you come forward, more and more recent texts are uncovered until, when you are in front of the wall itself, a blank area is created for you to write your own.

Unreal Art - prints generated from Unreal game bots

www.unrealart.co.uk

From the artist PaulStGeorge - who also makes minumental sculptures...
Shockwave example using Conways game of Life to generate designs:

Electrochemical and evolving systems:

Extract from:
Towards Epistemically Autonomous Robots: Exploiting the Potential of Physical Systems
Jon Bird, Paul Layzell, Andy Webster and Phil Husbands

The sculptor and theorist Ken Rinaldo has surveyed the use of artificial life (ALife) techniques in the arts and argues that the greatest potential for their application lies in developing interactive artworks that go “beyond the hackneyed replicable paths of interactivity that have thus far been presented by the arts community” [1].

Rinaldo’s vision is of a “cybernetic ballet of experience, with the machine and human involved in a grand dance of each sensing and responding to the other,” which will result in “sculptural and virtual algorithmic manifestations that will far surpass our wildest imaginations.”
Motivating this vision is what Mitchell Whitelaw has identified as an essential driving force in contemporary ALife art: the “will to escape, the desire for emergence” [2].

1. Kenneth E. Rinaldo, “Technology Recapitulates Phylogeny:
Artificial Life Art,” Leonardo 31, No. 5, 371--376 (1998).
2. Mitchell Whitelaw, “Tom Ray’s Hammer: Emergence and Excess in
ALife Art,” Leonardo 31, No. 5, 377--381 (1998).

Post Radiator and Finding Fluid Form

2005-12-15T16:01:00.000Z

Two Conferences - Radiator in Nottingham - technology, art, dance and performance.. with a Creative Collaborations workshop event on Social Software and Finding Fluid Form, relating biology, natural growth and form and the computer generated, with a touch of architecture and interactive dance (it was in Brighton :)

Radiator
Radiator had its stock of location based experiences using GPS, mobiles, wi-fi etc - I felt at times there was an overplay of technology over content - Blast Theory telling yet another situation based experience - and Nottingham Mixed Reality Lab featuring behind the scenes of a many a work. Bringing into question relationships between art practise, industrial sponsorship and Academia. Hidden agendas, where art may simply become a means for illustrating principles, and suffering a lack of integrity, soul or depth.

Pseudo-Academic Art speak really annoys! Dressing up a simple idea with obscure strings of wordage to make it sound "intelligent" - "polyrthymic intuitive interplay where control is traversely emergent..." ?? Why do some artists feel the need to speak esoteric academia to give the impression of impenetrable intelligence - insecurity? (add the Emperors New Clothes Syndrome and they all get away with it)

And the Big Question seemed to be a discourse over the real and the virtual body - something perhaps keenly felt by the large proportion of dance/performers.
Though for me it seemed that a technology assisted performance (especially networked - telematic) may well add value to the performers experience, but generally did not enhance that of the viewers..

Gob Squad were great though - ideas driven, pushing the boundaries of audience/performer and social etiquette with humour and wit rather than being led by a technology - arf arf..

However a melting pot of ideas, events and cultural exchanges were had by all and it was good - a warm, but not quite hot radiator.

The Creative Collaborations workshop event focussed on social software initiatives, with some great work from Internova - the Springwatch web/BBC event showing where and when various natural events occured, bumble bee, swift, frogspawn were first idenitifed by local folk across the uk - a very effective interactive map that lets you to see the results as a temperature led wave running across the UK...
What makes a social software site work and what can sustain interest and participation? Critical mass, sharing a common goal, value...

Then came..
Finding Fluid Form in Brighton ...
A heady mix of seriously academic and accessible speakers: Margaret Boden talked about D'Arcy Thompson with extracts from her new book, who suggested mathematical ideas On Growth and Form that represented an alternative to Darwinian evolution...
Bill Seaman inspired by the works of Rossler Otto talked about complex theories of electrochemical systems and Exotic Kinetics, Peter Cariani on the differences between analogue and digitial systmes, continuous over discrete and ideas on temporal encoding - something for the symbolic AI folk to chew over.. the idea that knowledge might be represented as temporally based firing patterns with indications that neurons do indeed code and recognise music in this way; ending with a reference to Gordon Pask and his electrochemical ear - all very fascinating and representing an alternative wet paradigm to that of the dry digital.
Then some very real biological work from Neil Theise on stem cell plasticity - apparently we all have stem cells and there is no need for embyronic research - highly controversial apparently to those funded bodies that have ploughed this furrow. With collaborations between Mark D'Inverno, Rob Saunders and Jane Prophet on visualisations that are aesthetic, have artistic possibilites and mathematical accuracy - whatever next?!
A matrix of glowing floating buoys representing a cell diffusion system for Herne Bay? mmm :)
Wonderful - visions of the near future

We were also treated to two short contemporary dance performances involving sensing and generative imagery...

A great evening meal at Terre a Terre, thanks to Jon Bird of Blip, Mette Ramsgard Thomsen and Karen Martin for making it all happen.

This was quite a special temporal gathering, from which there may well emerge an electrochemical systems interest group...

electrochemical glass july 03

In the beginning...

2005-12-05T17:16:00.000Z

I arrived in Edinburgh Informatics in November 2005, the first RAiR - "Research Artist in Residence".

AIR: Arts Informatics Research looking to the new building in 2007 ... not pictures, nor sculptures, but experimental possibilites - robotics, kinetics - a view to Cybernetic Serendipity perhaps.. In-house narrowcasting channels, screens, projections, the building that dreams, fertilising connections, the outside in, community, research, the public and the private. Knowledge, revelations, interventions and interactions.

There are many possibilites, desires and agendas, constraints, restraints and opportunities. Visions of the future - a new building for informatics with added value art research, art objects, art events, artistic discourse...

First there is immersion, catalysing the discourse - visits to the institutions of strange acronyms..
Second the distillation and then the crystallisation...

Questions:
What Art?
Why Art? Why not visualisation, communication and representation?
Who is it for?
Who decides?

A dialectic - to challenge, provoke, inform, stimulate, entertain, relax, inspire, contemplate..

Hence this blog - a place to start the discussion, a place to state my case, where I am coming from and hope to go. A place for others to join in - perhaps this should be mediated by a wiki a cms, someplace that can be shaped and formed, somewhere softer than a blog.

Its a start, a beginning.

See Informatics News - for information on the new building and informatic events...