Glen Marshall’s sound visualisation software, built with Processing, combines the incendary colours of pyrotechnics with organic growth where particles, clouds and rhizomes react and grow as the music develops. The Zeno Music Visualiser is the latest in the sequence of his works combining generative and audio reactive animation. The engine is based on his ‘Zeno Snakes’, where multiple oscillators acting at a local and global level create undulating pathways for snake-like entities to follow – a process that was used in his Music is Math video.

Agent Orange (detail) & Thinking Nothing, Then Everything (detail) - Jill Gallenstein

Biological and floral patterns define their own elaborate development, producing complex organic geometries in Jill Gallenstein ink drawings on paper.

‘The patterns created are not static and they are not perfect. There is room for anomalies that lead to mutations….As time and space move on, larger patterns begin to appear. Something which was once thought to be a lone structure in the universe may actually be part of a larger whole’

Much like the process of chemotaxis where multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals in their environmental system, some cells continue to grow in self-similar formations while others move onto new horizons, forming new systems, and creating triggers for new structures.

Jill’s compositions could be the equivalent of Josh Davis’s computational abstractions, both provide manifold decoration for instant retinal pleasure. The drawings were recently included in Radialvedic, a show exploring ‘the subtleties of intrigue with simple objects, zippers, needles, ink and glass, transformed into complex and curious spectacles’ at the Johansson Projects in Oakland, US.

The 2-day Playgrounds Festival of Audio Visuals Arts begins on Thursday 30th Oct in Tilburg, Holland. The yearly festival is featuring such notables as Tokyoplastic, the animation crew who came to fame with the perfectly syncopated Drum Machine, Eyesupply, the Resolume championing VJ collective and OnedotZero, the DVD label promoting progressive moving image and experimental animation. The program included lectures, workshops, screenings and live music.

I’ll be winging my way over to Tilburg to talk about my generative work and artistic practice.

left: Surface Works 2 – Capturevision
Right: Rotation7 - Don Relyea

The growing trend towards producing generative works that mimic human gestures continues. Whitecross has produced a fresh set of works that use Miró as a reference point, whilst combining a space filling splatter pattern.

Don Relyea has used a programmed slitscan technique to generate distorted multi-forms from simple primitives. The process has transformed squares and rectangles into delicious wildstyle graffiti

Capturevision’s Surface Dimensions set contains deformations, transformations and superformula reconstructions, many with tantalising complexity.

Fdecomite’s Olive Oil Circles are another great example of the aesthetics of immiscibility. The gradients appear more synthetic as the colours become more metallic. Elsewhere you can view his solution to George Harts (72) pencils sculpture puzzle.

Daniel Brown - Flowers Construction Kit

Daniel Brown well known for his excellent work back in the days when Director was king of browserspace interactivity with his eclectic collection of interactive toys at the famous Noodlebox - now archived at his play-create site. Back then much of the web was composed of black pages with flickering stars, decorated with animated gifs of flames and luminescence text. Noodlebox was a major breath of fresh air.

Recently Daniel has uploaded images of his ‘Flowers Construction Kit’ where beautifully crafted AS3 plants and petals combine a touch of synthetic surrealism with succulent colours, symmetries and geometries. This kind of algorithmic botany has been appearing in Daniels work for quite sometime, check out the recent SAF project where the flowers are computationally nurtured in real-time. The ‘On growth and Form’ set documents his ‘non-commissioned’ flower projects from 1999 to the present, and it’s a real treat to the eye.

On Growth and Form, by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, is one of the first books ever published to tackle the subject of morphogenesis, the science of the formation of cells, tissues, shells, plants and other living organisms from a mathematical point of view.

‘The harmony of the world is made manifest in form and number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of natural philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty’ - D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson

related:

Lia’s Spirographic Florals
Algorithmic Botany
Superformula 3D

I little note to the friendly readers of Dataisnature. This site may well be in a precarious position. The hosting company who I registered this domain with 4 years ago seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet leaving a poorly maintained, non-functional automated system for administration and billing. A little while back I noted I had some other domains/hosting with this company that needed to be renewed. The billing system would not allow me to renew the domains online, which resulted in numerous tickets being raised to rectify the problem. No reply. More tickets, many phones calls and still no contact. The result is that two of my domains have expired and I could do nothing but watch as they did. Allthough the Dataisnature domain is registered until 2009 unfortunately the hosting for Dataisnature is on the point of expiration.

It turns out that the company I’ve used in the UK are a reseller for domains and hosting from Enom based in the US. At this present time I’ve sent Enom a few mails to explain my predicament, who knows, fingers crossed. At the very least they might let me buy back my lapsed domains and give me access to domain transfer keys.

If this site disappears at any point know that I will do my best to get it back online as I’ve put a lot of work into it over the years and know from positive emails that many people use this site as a resource for research of their own.

As nothing is certain at present I’m going to choose to carry on posting regardless.

Dataisnature

ps. If anyone has any ideas about how I can resolve this issue I’d be happy to know about them.

The Limits to Growth (details) - Mitchell Whitelaw

‘Computer herding’ is the term given to computer driven automated trading systems’ similar self-operation that produces a feedback loop of procedures creating a vicious cycle of share selling. From the late 70’s computational models for financial trading have become more prevalent, much of the problematic dealing that has occurred in the last few days has been done without human intervention. Computer herding is a classic example of self generated behaviour and recursion. The stocks go down, the computers automated response is to sell, thereby reducing values, and subsequently causing closed computational models to sell more shares, which reduces their values even more. Limitations of computer models explain this financial feedback loop in depth.

Mitchell Whitelaw uses the Eden Growth/Aggregation algorithm to produce a generative sentiment regarding these interesting times. The blog post regarding this work includes mention of The Limits to Growth, a report from 1972 on the economic implications of exponential growth. For generative works they appear decorative and free of rigidity often associated with algorithms, almost hand crafted. We also see them as ultra organic city plans with curly streets and spiralling pathways. You can check some similar outputs at Mitchell’s Flickr page.

As it becomes harder to escape the images of down sloping share index graphs I’m reminded of Terrence Mckenna’s Timewave Zero software, a graphing system to calibrate not share values, but ‘novelty’ against time. This pseudo-scientific treatise proposes, via graphing events in history, that we are more prone to excessive novelty (major events) at certain times, and there are other periods where not too much goes on at all. This makes sense since novelty creates more novelty.

‘The graph shows at what times, but never at what locations, novelty is increasing or decreasing. According to the timewave graph, great periods of novelty occurred about 4 billion years ago when Earth was formed, 65 million years ago when dinosaurs were extinct and mammals expanded, about 10,000 years ago after the end of the ice age, around late 18th century when social and scientific revolutions progressed, during the sixties, around the time of 9/11, and with coming novelty periods in November 2008, October 2010, with the novelty progressing towards the infinity on 21st December 2012’ - Wikipedia

I’ll leave you to speculate on the plausibility of this idea and research the possible outcomes of novelty progressing to infinity.

left: Drawing - Jim Denevan
Right: Spiral Jetty - Robert Smithson

At low tide Jim Denevan makes large-scale freehand drawings into sand, temporal earth-art works that are consumed by the next incoming tide. Particularly of interest are the rule-based works, where circle-packing and space-filling processes are employed.

‘After finding a good stick and composing himself in the near and far environment Jim draws - labouring up to 7 hours and walking as many as 30 miles’

Jim’s spiral drawing immediately reminded me of one of the most celebrated of all earth works, Robert Smithson’s, Spiral Jetty. While over the years there have been many appeals against environmental erosion of the Spiral Jetty, Smithson has, interestingly, maintained that entropy is essential part of the work.

Denevans drawings also reminded me of Richard Longs work, another land artist who’s most well know pieces were based around walks. Long incorporated natural sculpture, photography, text and maps of the landscape he walked over. His sculptures also used space-filling arrangements of natural slates, Midsummer Cirlces could be imagined as a natural data visualisation of the earth from which the slate was taken from, in accordance with it’s relative temporal heliocentricity.

Long also made artworks that were textural desciptions of aspects of his walks that he called Textworks, Watershed is a good example. Aside from having the kind of resonance you might encounter with a Haiku poem, the Textworks also seem to have a strong connection with Sol Lewitt’s procedural descriptions for making drawings.

“Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes each with colour ink washes superimposed.” Description for a wall drawing, No. 766, Sol Lewitt.

left: Soundscape - Mati Klawein, Right: Waterlines - Richard Long

A FIVE DAY WALK.

FIRST DAY TEN MILES
SECOND DAY TWENTY MILES
THIRD DAY THIRTY MILES
FOURTH DAY FORTY MILES
FIFTH DAY FIFTY MILES
TOTNES TO BRISTOL BY ROAD

ENGLAND 1980
Richard Long

Lewitt’s drawing descriptions have more recently be accepted as a precursor to contemporary generative/software art and this is explored in depth by Casey Reas’s in his excellent essay on Software & Drawings. Lewitt’s ‘drawing poems’ are designed to generate artefacts, whereas Long’s ‘walk poems’ are documentary fragments or ‘recordings’. For the enthusiastic psychogeographic rambler there is no reason not to apply Long’s descriptions to generate walks in themselves, or even generate computational art for that matter. Long’s textworks are essentially scant recipes reversed.

left: Pi crop circle
Right: Step Farming (Terracing)

The most mathematically complex of all earth/land artworks are undoubtedly crop circles – rigorous algorithmic outputs of higher intelligent life forms, also known as humans. Here is a report of one of the most complex circles discovered recently in the British countryside.

Before we disembark it should be remembered that earth itself is a gigantic canvas for the algorithmic patterning processes caused by climatic systems, weathering, geological erosion, and other metamorphic programs that have been running for millions of years. More recently, humans arrived and brought along agricultural processes that have created unintentional procedural earthworks, take for example the sinuous steps created by terracing in paddy fields in much of Asia. Dataisnature favourite, Mati Klawein, produced a set of landscape paintings celebrating repetition found this kind landscape. If you’re interested in the aesthetics of farming formations, Your Next and Soundscape are certainly worthy of your time.

The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit – the punched paper cards used to program early computers are direct descendents of similar cards used to program Jacquard looms during the height of the industrial revolution, More so terms like ‘interlaced’ (among other synonyms) which describe the way pixels are weaved onto the screen, only tighten this relationship.

Natureisdata is always happy to see complex non-Euclidean mathematical computation combined with textiles and handicraft. Helle Jorgensen has been a long time contributor to one of our favourite projects, the IFF’s Hyperbolic Crochet Reef, and its many different accumulations over the years. Gooseflesh is a blog of works in progress, completed creatures and associated inspiration combined in one repository. Byte sized wonders include Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Nature Study and Secret Strangeness of the Ocean.

Robert Walden’s drawings are overt process based recordings of labour intensive mark making journeys, which result in his Ontological Road and Surveillance Maps. Using ink, pencil and acrylic on paper his city structures move from linearity and order and gradually transform organically into urban sprawls. The cellular nature of these drawings, not surprisingly, also implies biological entities with tendrils, lichen colonies or even tree bark – nature’s little cities. Yet again these kinds of procedural drawings hint at universal pattern formulae generated by loop-based self-organising principles.

Related
Julya Sets & Fractal Cities
Borges, maps, terrains & Neogeography
Human robots and space-filling emotions

While deep below the earths surface at Cern physicists try to unravel the secrets of the formation of the Universe, artists Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand send a probe through the slight space of a soap bubble membrane allowing a different perspective on our embryonic cosmological past. ‘A Vacuum or semi-vacuum encased within a gravity and temperature sensitive elastic skin – the scenario of an early universe’. The probe in this case is a laser beam that scans the emergent thermodynamic surface patterns of the bubble which refracts back to us images of galactic whorls and vortexes.

Aside the excellent documentary pictures for 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid, you can also read of a historical context for this piece. Their annotation includes mentions of the intriguing soap film calculator and more recent soap film soft drives as well a sonic eavesdropping device made by Leon Theremin for the KGB in 1945.

Melbourne based artist and musician Dylan Martorell uses an organic procedural method to build up complex mythologies using ‘structural building blocks of nature as a reference point’. Mostly drawn in ink, incredible complex filigree structures contain animals and other worldly people that betray his influences including occult material. Aleister Crowley, psychic self-defence manuals and witchcraft miscellany infuse his work. The other side of the coin seems to be an interest in the accounts of explorers and naturalists – the two interests combine convincingly in his drawings. At times the imagery almost becomes unsettling as it combines with excellently executed complexity. Also of interest are his related sculptures and metal-musical drawings.

Today, the 18th September sees the opening of Le Name Festival in Lille, an electronic music and multimedia showcase organised by Art Point M. Hosting a spectrum of techno/electro DJ’s and VJ’s it looks to be a crammed packed, giddy event. If the Channel Tunnel permits (A fire destroyed part of it last weekend) I’ll be heading over to do a 5 hour, 9 screen real-time geometric visual set with the talented info-visualiser and generative artist Oli Laurelle (Transphormetic Vs Yesyesnono) on Friday - Ivan Smagghe and Tim Paris will be spinning the discs. On Saturday I’ll be performing a 360-degree live show of my sound synched feedback visuals & other anti-gravity structures at the Lille Planetarium.

Busy times, Dataisnature will resume normal services shortly!

This weekend, 12th-14th September, sees the arrival of Minitek Festival of Electronic Music & Innovation in midtown Manhattan, New York. The festival features 3 club nights of fine minimal tech and electro house music from the crème of the scene, including the crowd pulling Ritchie Hawtin who’s headlining the last night. Aside from the music the festival includes a day and night program of generative visuals, electronic performances and interactive installations. The day event, it should be mentioned is at the legendary the Astroland amusement park at Coney Island!

I’ll be winging my way over to Minitek to show some of my video feedback pieces reworked for the club environment. See you there.

left: ‘Sound Memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto)’ - Marius Watz
Right: ‘not-an-artist_0150′ - Sting Chen

Marius Watz’s ‘5 Days Off: Frozen’ set is a document of an exhibition Marius curated recently at the Melkweg Club in Amsterdam. The exhibition took a novel approach to the presentation of work using sound analysis. Rather than present the usual software real-time work, the show was concerned with static works, either prints or sculptures – audio transmissions frozen in space-time.

Appearing to blur the boundaries between human handy work and computational precision are some new doodle/scribble systems by Dave Bollinger. Particularly refined is 20080826A from the OCD set. There’s is a real sense composition through the use of spatial arrangement and scaling of individual elements, as well the kinds of marks used. Never has a Processing sketch looked so hand drawn.

Yuji’s Systematic Transformation Structure set contains a development cycle of work done at the Crankbrook Academy of Art and Architecture. Elegant geometric constructions are made in MDF and paper.

Pavillion Tone’s Pattern collection conveniently groups found, drawn and painted patterns into 12 sets. Dataisnature’s eye immediately homes into the optical/mono patterns. Not to be missed though is the colourful Repeat Patterns set containing no less than 275 photos. Radiant photons dazzle the eye in modulation.

Puntsche’s Strips and Stripes set takes you on a journey along undulating monochromatic highways and flyovers, classily rendered in pure space.

Sting Chen’s set of graphic works from 2005-2006 contain detailed drawings of what appear to be parts of alien organisms, organic biological matter, tendons, cells and morphogenetic filaments. The rounded cellular elements are often counterparted with sharp spikes - these things look they were not designed to interact with human beings!

left: ‘Everything, Everything’ (detail)
Right: Kasparov Vs R13’ (detail)

Matt Shlian’s large ballpoint pen drawings are refined outputs of personal human computation system. ‘Everything, Everything’ delivers an undulating landscape through a procedural triangulation technique creating an angular web that might have been made by a giant mechanical Voronoi spider. ‘All Possibilities’ reveals the wireframe contours of a mountainous landscape directly from above, computational synthaesthetes will feel immediately at home with its FFT-esque peaks and troughs as though it was informed by sound analysis. Elsewhere on Matt’s site we find geometric tessellations reminiscent of Islamic tile patterns and the enigmatic ‘Kasparov Vs R13’ - an apparent mapping of one of Gary Kasparov’s more difficult games of chess.

left: The Oramic Machine
right: Daphne Oram in 1962

A lesser known but important contributor in the field of ‘drawn’ electronic music is British composer Daphne Oram who worked at the legendary BBC Radiophonic workshop in the late 1950’s. Oram dreamed of making a machine that directly translated graphical notation into sound and this dream came to fruitful realisation with her technique of Oramics. The set up ‘consisted of drawing onto a group of ten sprocketed synchronised strips of 35mm film which covered a series of photo-electric cells that in turn generated an electrical charge to control the sound frequency, timbre, amplitude and duration.’

Oramics, released on Paradigm Discs is a great entrée in Oram’s exotic experimental electronic compositions. The short track Power Tools is a head on collision between cute dinky electronic pop and industrial noise, or perhaps a cartoon interpretation of an offshoot Faust might have produced – had not Daphne arrived decades earlier. The beginning of Bird of Paradise predates the heuristic aesthetics of the uncompromisingly excellent Raster Noton label before sliding into an accomplished music concrete and then dropping the listener back into a computational meditation chamber.

In all tracks there is a good balance between experimental noise/concrete and segments of melodic counterpart, distorted 50’s beach music, skewed fairground rides and abberated bossonavas. Comical noise art abounds as does ironic gestures towards 50’s utopianism, it seems – or, at least, it sounds that way today.

Goldsmiths College in London has become something of a centre for the precipitation of Orams works to the general audience and researchers a like. It has been involved in the production of numerous music events showing rarely or never heard pieces by Daphne.

Related links:
Drawing Sounds in Both Directions
ANS Synthesizer – Drawing Sound
Radiophonic Workshop Gallery

left: Snarl 2 - George Hart
right: 120 cell - George Hart

A recent, random encounter in Florence with a reconstruction of Leonardo de Vinci’s illustration for Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione triggered me to re-explore the complex mathematical sculptures of George Hart. In 1999 George recreated wooden models from Pacioli’s book including the Ycocedron Abscisus Vacuus and the stunningly complex Duodecedron Abscisus Elevatus Vacuus, the latter consisting of 120 equilateral triangles, made from 360 pieces of wood. These pieces are only a tiny fragment of George’s huge output of intricate geometric sculptures. Initially specialising in novel polyhedral structures he has produced hand made sculptures as well as utilising solid freeform fabrication techniques. More recently he has used rapid prototyping with laser sintering to explore forms from the hyperbolic domain. The popular Echinodermia spieces are good examples of the latter process.

George explains:

‘I like echinoderms, and these are toroidal sculptures inspired by their forms. They are not models of actual species, but more like some kind of parallel universe evolution of maniacal echinoderms. All are made by selective laser sintering of nylon, on an SLS machine, then I dyed them’

left: Sound Camera - Eric Archer
right: Bird Box Sequencer - Eric Archer

Eric Archer’s oscillographic work has been featured on these pages before, then Natureisdata focused on the harmonic autographs from his bespoke plotter-oscillator set-up. But Oscillographics are only a tiny fragment of the story. Eric has modified and created a whole spectrum of surprising and unusual devices. Each hand crafted audio-visual mechanism a beautiful thing in itself.

Take his Sound Cameras for instance. Eric has designed a system whereby 8mm film cameras are converted into audio transducers. The output is connected to headphones allowing the roaming headphonic troubadour to go out on ‘listening expeditions’. Be sure to read through the notes especially his stepfathers analysis on what the Aurora Borealis might sound like.

Elsewhere you’ll find all manner of quirky brilliance. The gorgeously finished Bird Box Sequencer, which uses the linear feedback shift register method, can produce a single loop that could last up to 17 years!

Other favourites include the Circuit Bent Tabla Machines with added keyboard control to generate glitches and the irresistibly named, immaculately finished, Drone Commander. It should be noted that all audio devices have audio clips on the documentation pages.

left: Attractor 1 a3, b9, c4, d-4, s2 – Subblue
right: Deliverance - Evsc

The Oscillographic elegance of Subblue’s Simple Attractors set are based on two simple equations by Peter de Jong and Cliff Pickover. While a few of the outputs have non-deterministic complexity in their overall form, others appear to describe specific harmonic progressions to create lightweight space-time gauze-like glyphs.

Using film dialogue taken from subtitle files as a base material, Evsc’s Cinematic Particles data visualisation set appear as calligraphic branching doodles – ‘Smokey watercolour drawings emerge from each movies individual frequency of spoken words and their letters’. Could this method hint at the hidden combinatorial code inherent in language and the spoken word?

Actop’s Random Graphics set appear to have the deconstructed aesthetic of a render from an unruly visual programming environment but were infact produced using Adobe After Effects. Fresh minimal colour palettes enhance a fragmented and iterated multiform environment.

Related:
More Oscillographical art can be found here and here
More meta-calligraphy can be found here

’Since the early years of video art, works have been made which do not actually produce a standard TV signal waveform and therefore cannot be directly recorded. Some are based primarily upon magnetic distortion of the normal TV scan pattern, others utilise a Cathode Ray Tube as if it were an oscilloscope screen.’

Gert-Jan Prins and Bas van Koolwijk’s Synchronator project continues a lineage of experimentation originally embarked upon by the likes of Nam June Paik and the Vasulka’s. Both artists teamed up after a shared need to transcend the technical limitations of the video signal and through a shared aesthetic. Accessing the inner working of their audiovisual equipment, they crosswire sound and image to produce a glitchy synaesthetic montage - sometimes with tantalizing hints at representation as seen in the online video.

Syncronator is dysfunctional roboid ghost in the machine, choreographing an interference dervish to a montage of extreme noise textures.

left: Portal - Istvan Orosz
right: Toroidal Helical Sweep - George Hart

Recently back from a sojourn in Holland were for the most part I attended the Bridges 2008 conference on the intersection between maths and art, music, crafts & architecture. The annually held conference was rich with a very diverse range of lectures on topics such as:

Mathematical visualization, mathematics and music, computer generated art, symmetry Structures, origami, mathematics and architecture, Tessellations and Tilings, aesthetical connections between mathematics and humanities, geometric Art and geometries in quilting.

I was invited to give a lecture on my real-time video signal feedback work regarding tessellation and symmetry and present ideas compiled in a paper which was included in the conference’s proceedings.

This year’s conference was held in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, in honour of one of it’s most famous sons, MC Escher – this year marks the 110th anniversary of the artists’ birth. It seemed fitting to have a special set of Escher day lectures since Escher himself was continually in an oscillating dichotomy between arts and maths. Incorporating extremely complex maths in his artworks, such as hyperbolic tessellations, without any real solid mathematical understanding.

Aside from the lectures, there was large exhibition of Mathematical Art in the location of the conference. Works ranged from Op-art-esque space-filling curves, 3d prints of hyperbolic tessellations, laser cut fractal tessellations through to module based sculptures utilising Fibonacci numbers as well as a polished steel sculpture of the Lorenz Attractor.

Spread around the surrounding countryside in Gothic and Romanesque churches there was a Bridges & Passages exhibition of works by artists who have come from abstract mathematical backgrounds. Artists included were Gerard Caris, Istvan Orosz, Rinus Roelofs, Koos Verhoeff, Yvonne Kracht, Oscar Reutersvard, Ulrich Mikloweit and Elvira Wersche.

I expect to devote some time writing about these artist’s works in the not so distant future.

Full Flickr set HERE

Related: Exotic Mathematical Surfaces

left: Welte Light-tone disk Edwin Emil Welte
right: Vibroexponator soundtracks - Boris Yankovsky

Tonewheels is a concise historical appraisal of sound-light synthesis with some exciting new inclusions of lesser-know contraptions and artists. Lots of interesting charts, diagrams and musical notation. Vibroexponators, Photonas and Optigans!

James Peels article for the online tendril of cabinet magazine, The Scale and the Spectrum, analyses the history of the chromatics of sound in the context of his own series of colour-music paintings which attempt at presenting a visual installation of silent music.

Frédéric Rossille’s paper Musicality of Victor Vasarely’s Plastic Works makes some convincing arguments for analogies of music idioms to the modular works of our favourite Op-Artist, Mr Vasarely. Discussions of musical modality, counterpart, variation and repetition applied to Vasarely’s works are eloquently taken care of.

Instruments for Natural Philosophy is a large and wonderful index of physics apparatus of special interest to sonophotophiliacs – those dealing with Oscillations and waves, Acoustics, Optics & Optical recreation.

Alain Lioret’s paper Being Paintings, published in 2005, focuses on art created with Cellular Automata, L-system grammar, Morphogenetic algorithms and neural networks.

Voronoi Patterns (detail) - Craig S Kaplan

Craig S Kaplan is well-know in the area of computational ornamentation, professor at the Computer Graphics Lab, University of Waterloo in Canada, his work is widely recognised in the intersecting fields of Maths and Art.

Among many papers and projects he has worked on one particularly caught my eye, ‘Aliasing Artifacts and Accidental Algorithmic Art’. The story of how unexpected imagery arose from a program he developed to render ornamental designs using Voronoi algorithms. Rather than the ‘force the glitch’ kind of attitude we’ve seen recently amongst the circuit bending fraternity or the ‘lets transpose one data set onto another’ methodology dear to the visual glitch worshipers, here the error appears to have originated inside the computer architecture itself. His program, with its unexpected combination of signal processing behaviour and aliasing artefacts, has created intricate ornamental lattices and Op-Art like mysteries.

A little more Voronoi and Glitch?

Euclidean space getting you down? Feel confined or constrained by the geometry world order of rectilinearity? Our friends at the Institute for Figuring have an exhibition in London of their wonderful hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. A ‘celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.’ It literally allows us to think outside of the box! You can check out the Bleached Reef, the Ladies Silurian Reef, the Branched Anemone Garden and the ever-growing Toxic Reef. You’ll also find new environments, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable Reef, the Bearded Reef and the Bottle Tree Grove. What’s more you can add to the exhibition with your own creations if you wish – it’s not too late, there are two more Crochet Nights left to go.

Hyperbolic geometry was developed independently by Nikolai Lobachevski and Farkas Bolyai in the 19th century. It differs from both Euclidean geometry and spherical geometry in that the sum of the angles of a triangle is always less than 180°. Henri Poincare devised a way to visualise infinite two-dimensional hyperbolic space as the interior of a disc’ Poincare’s tessellation pattern representing an infinitely large hyperbolic plane will be familiar to most through MC Eschers work, notably his Circle Limit series of etchings. Escher came across Poincare’s visualisation via the Geometer Donald Coxeter.

Poincare’s hyperbolic plane and MC Eschers’ Circle Limit I

The IFF has published a Field Guide to Hyperbolic Geometry. It’s a highly readable, and at times poetic, exposition of the fantastic world of the Hyperbolas. In it we read of all those names mentioned above and but more importantly the work of mathematician Daina Taimina who worked out a way of making actual physical models of hyperbolic space using a cunning technique – crochet.

‘If, as the Moors believed, repeated patterns connote the divine, we might conclude that Heaven itself would be a hyperbolic space.’

’In the next few years, the WMAP satellite currently taking pictures of the early universe may provide evidence one way or another if its shape and formation is in fact hyperbolic.’ – both quotes from A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Geometry.

22-f (detail) - Claire Morales & Spring 2 (detail) - Kat Masback

Proving that digital dysfunction can emit hermetic code and alchemical emotion, simultaneously, is (((o)))’s sonic visual glitch poem )22-f. The stills capture moments of moon transit, including its occlusion via an atmospheric pixallation process. The video, synaesthetic with syncopated sound, describes the moon in a fluttering dialogue with the light and dark horizons of the Underworld. Also check out the Mondrian Morse code contained within the NogoZone_soundtoy set.

K masbacks drawings, particularly of imaginary network configurations and charts, continue to bring joy! Network sketch comes across part musical notation, part Paul Klee whimsy and part psychgeographic conjecture. Spring 2 appears to be taken from an atlas of cybergeography or a textbook on molecular structure - here the association with computation is implicit.

Visual research can take many unexpected turns and the most unsurprising sources can prove influential. A great example is JosephKings Security Patterns set, an ‘On-going project to collect and organize envelope security patterns from around the world’. All the scans possess a space-filling pattern and/or decoration, but some point in the direction of Optical Art while others imply the morphology of dots and dashes seen on the coats and fur of some of this planets more exotic animals.

Dataisnature has been lying dormant for over a month, until now! I’ve recently been enjoying English culture shock, bringing its noise after an intense Indian adventure. The return has found me nestled in lower level loop, constrained by mundane activities rather than recreational research.

A few days ago the malicious compacting algorithm that automatically runs once in a while in Outlook Express (I know, don’t scorn) corrupted my inbox.mbx enough to kill off all my received mail. If you have sent a mail to Dataisnature in last month, you might want to send one again. I was just getting to the point where I had some time to process those lost mails.

Ps. No recovery software was able to rebuild my inbox encase you are wondering. Be careful if your running OE, the problem, it seems, has been widely documented already.

Graphic Music Sequencer - Caleb Coppock & Untitled #06 - André Gonçalves

Algomantra recently posted on a project by Caleb Coppock, which allows the composition of music by directly drawing onto paper discs. Since the kind of graphite marks made by ordinary pencils conduct electricity it provides a system for drafting a visual score in sectored patterns on paper discs. The Graphic Music Sequencer uses wire brushes that contact a paper disc as it spins on a standard record player. When the wire sensors move across the conductive graphite a tone is generated, the pitch of the tone is further regulated by the thickness of the pencil line. It’s interesting that in nearly all musical scores, including those of experimental layout, there needs to be some system of decoding and mediation to translate mark into sound. In this case it would be fair to say that score is a direct isomorph of the music it makes, requiring no human mediation. Another example of a similar system could be claimed to be that of the experimental Russian ANS synthesizer mentioned on these pages a while back.

Reversing the information flow in the opposite direction we find André Gonçalves ongoing Untitled #06 project, which also utilises the turntable, this time with a servomotor attached to the needle cartridge. Sound captured from a microphone is processed, then digitised into data and used by the servo to move the cartridge accordingly. The cartridge, which has an Indian ink pen attached, draws the audio events in real-time. The resultant visualisations have semi uniform spirgraphic geometries, and as André says ‘the drawings can be seen as histograms of the audio activity of a space during a certain period of time. In his biography André describes himself as an ‘empathy programmer with googlian self-education’, something many of us with an autodidactic learning will identify with.

Finally, it would be interesting to hear what one of André’s Untitled #06 disc visualisations, if drawn in graphite, would sound like on Caleb’s Graphic Music Sequencer.

Gelling photographic and videographic materials via a 3-d modelling tactic, Lorenzo Oggiano’s Quasi Objects series of prints and videos presents a set of synthetic organic landscapes and microscopic biological particle simulations. The added surface noise, those glitches, grains & flecks found on aged celluloid have been superimposed to give an impression of a labtech documentary aesthetic. The concepts of cellular division, morphogenesis, evolution and creationism are implied, here however they are the product of digital collage & generative grammar. In Lorenzo’s own words ‘Quasi-Objects regards actualisation of data, production of biologically a-functional occurrences (bio-politically dysfunctional), dealing about Life, but without reference to the outcomes it is used to recognize; possibilities that can be viewed as transient outputs of an operative practice’. The excellent Digimag has a good interview with the creator of Quasi Objects, while Flux is one of the few sources I found with some video footage of Oggiano’s wonderful video compositions.

Maia Valenzuela’s ‘The Sea Inside’ Flickr set proposes a convincing mix of storytelling and space-filling decoration, micro narratives existing in the hand-to-pen algorithms. Alluding to a miniscule whimsy of particle physics we approach Aunty Matter where mandalic energy patterns radiate from emitter particles. The patterns remind us of Leadbeater & Beasant’s Theosophical work Occult Chemistry exposing an ancient insight into modern subatomic particle structure. Chlorophiliacs plants the possibility of cellular entities inhabiting a globular tree – like a living Archigram-esque treehouse. In Double shelix an organic bilateral symmetric motif unfolds into a resultant floral totem.