This is a work by Muriel Cooper and her students at the MIT Visible Language Workshop from 1994. Muriel investigated in how the computer can enhance and what it means to graphic design. It does not only simulates known tools like scissors or brushes. A technology provides its own and unique abilities and she tried to explore them. Muriel Cooper is a really interesting person to be explored in more detail the next years. right kow she kind of is nearly forgotten. Among a lot she inspired John Maeda and this is how I got to know her. One does not finds much about her in the net but finally and luckily today there is this video above digitized. More to be found in infosthetics.
Daniel Franke and I created this Sound Sculpture / Augmented Reality Installation. It is based on his excellent Diploma Thesis about the Mobile Observer he did at the University of Arts Berlin. Come and see it at the Club Transmediale this year.
The piece is inspired by VR-sculptures, though technically and
conceptionally transcending the helmet-like “90ies data-glasses”.
The basic thought is to re-organise the relationship between
“the viewer and the viewed” whose traditional functions are
expanded technologically; the starting point however remains
set in “real space”.
A portable screen is used to visualise the soundsculpture; a
camera attached to the screen collects information of the space
surrounding it from markers distributed on adjacent surfaces.
The screen becomes a transmitter superimposing a digital layer
-the sculpture onto “real space” (the unmanipulated space that
greets the naked eye). The process allows the viewer to abandon
the passive position of the “merely on-looking” consumer; he is
enabled to visually and acoustically intervene with the sculpture,
to model and module it. His changing positions and movements
affect the visualisations on the screen, rendering an “extended
reality” accessible. The sculpture generated is individually linked
to each observer and thus singular.
The traditionally static and inactive viewer position is replaced by
a mobile, navigating and active observer position. The one-way
reactive relationship between sender and receiver is abandoned
through a feedback channel to the moving image. The sound
sculpture interprets a composition by Rutger Zuydervelt, that,
parallel to the visual sculpture spreads spatially around the
viewer through four loudspeakers. Employing FFT data the
generated sculpture changes depending on the position of the
user which is calculated by spatially distributed AR-markers. As
it is Algorithm-based the sculpture is non-haptic – it is a
generated but manipulable projection. Nonetheless the starting
point remains set in “real space”: the technology does not
attempt to conquer reality through VR, but rather seeks
intersection points with the real-space context of the observer.
The Laszló Moholy Nagy quote “Colour becomes light, mechanic
turns into sculpture” resonates in this work, only here one might
rephrase “Colour becomes thought, mechanic turns into narration”.
“These drawings are executed purely by hand, using paint pens. I begin with a curve, from which lines and forms begin to emerge, evolve, morph, and grow organically, in an intuitive flow, while maintaining delicate, elegant precision. The methodology is rhythmic, spontaneous, and direct, reducing interference with mark-making. Much like zen calligraphy, they are improvisational, and intuitively composed, where the physicality and the mark making become one.”
“In traditional design, the role of the designer is to explore a solution space. Solutions may be aesthetic, semiotic, cultural, dynamic, industrial, corporate, political, or any combination of these and other determinants. The key relationship between designer and artefact is a direct one (even if mediated via some third-party or medium). There is a direct relationship between the designer’s intentions and that of the designed artefact. In contrast, design using generative methods involves the creation and modification of rules or systems that interact to generate the finished design autonomously. Hence, the designer does not directly manipulate the produced artefact, rather the rules and systems involved in the artefact’s production. The design process becomes one of meta-design where a finished design is the result of the emergent properties of the interacting system (McCormack & Dorin 2001). The ‘art’ of designing in this mode is in mastering the relation between process specification, environment, and generated artefact. Since this is an art, there is no formalized or instruction-based method that can be used to guide this relationship. The role of the human designer remains, as with
conventional design, central to the design process.”
The abstraction-of-a-problem-into-rules is what appeals most. Its a thinking that is worth practicing more and tightly knit with coding.
My latest generative experiment. This video is created entirely by code. The shapes are made with the help of the java framework Creative Computing. It is rendered using the open source java renderer Sunflow.
I am playing with the contrast between static generative terrains and fluid isosurfaces. Sometimes the fluid surfaces are only visible by mirroring the static terrains.
Since the rendering took three weeks I was not able to improve the camera movement. This video is a fight between images in my head and my ability to put it into code and furthermore saying to sunflow : “Please hurry up”. So there is a lot left to improve the workflow.
“One of the essential properties of Near Field Communication is nearness, but this is set against one of the paradoxes of touch-based interaction where, in fact, nothing needs to touch.”
Film by Nearfield
My mate Daniel Franke put up the We Are Chop Chop Reel 2009. We Are Chop Chop is a fine collective of a few berlin based artist and designers interested in motion design. I’m proud to be one of them
Testrenderings for a new generative system I am developing. I am practicing terrain generating and am really bad at it. But I like the errors and weird paths it is going some time.
The music is by my mate David Pasternack (davidpasternack.com) Lets hope this becomes a full music video.
