Each week we chat about the tools of the trade with one outstanding creative to find out exactly how they do what they do. The questions are always the same, the answers, not so much. This week: Robert Strati. Click here for more User Preferences Tech Q&As.

The Creators Project: Who are you and what do you do?
Robert Strati: My name is Robert Strati. I make digital compositions exploring the fundamental visual language of diagrams (points, lines, and curves). They can be found as .JPGs around the web and I also make them into prints and scrolls, which I show in exhibitions. I just had a show in December at Robert Henry Contemporary in Bushwick, New York, run by Robert Walden and Henry Chung, both great artists who have created a gallery with a truly unique vision. Also, a number of works are up now in L.A. at the Arena 1 gallery at the Santa Monica Studios in the group exhibit “Infinity +1” with Casey Reas, Debra Greene, and Mitra Fabian, curated by the incomparable Christine Duval.

I also make paintings, installations, performance projects and sculptures (made of tape, wire, helium balloons, light, and space). In the past few weeks I’ve started a project on Tumblr about Creating Civilizations.

I should also mention that I spend a lot of time thinking about and discussing user experience and helping people make software and websites easier to use.

Composition of Entanglements.

What kind of hardware to you use?
I use a MacBook Pro. I also get help from Scott Kiernan’s skills with his large format Epson 9800 printer.

What kind of software do you use?
Adobe Illustrator.

What piece of equipment can you simply not live without?
Although I rely on all kinds of amazing equipment, I have a secret dream of living without any at all.

Composition of Inverted Spheres.

If money were no object, how would you change your current set-up?
I would look into getting a MakerBot Replicator 2 3D Printer to experiment with. I’m interested to see what some of my digital compositions would look like in 3D.

Is there any piece of technology that inspired you to take the path you did?
In my user experience work I often make maps of websites in Illustrator. I use one layer in Illustrator for the wireframes and a separate layer to draw the lines between the wireframes. There was a fairly complicated map I was working on and I turned off the layer with the wireframes, so that only the lines between them were showing. It was just a glimpse, but it reminded me of lost and forgotten text. The emptiness between the directional lines allowed me to imagine new ideas that could fill the space and sparked the desire for understanding the imagined ideas in more detail. This showed me the power of the most basic elements of diagrams and helped me to move forward in creating my digital compositions.

Composition of Relational Dynamics.

What is your favorite piece of technology from your childhood?
OPERATION® Silly Skill Game… I loved the precision required to do the surgery and how the game would respond to your actions.

What fantasy piece of technology would you like to see invented?
An application that would use mapping technologies, GPS tracking, distribution system and supply chain applications, financial sharing tools (Kickstarter, Strike Debt, CES) and social networks to actualize Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game.” It is fascinating to me how all the parts and pieces required to make this game a real world active technology are essentially in place. It could be a step in realizing the true promise of technology—making people’s lives substantively easier. I would definitely be interested in diagramming the UX on that one.

Images from Creating Civilizations and “Infinity +1” at Arena 1 Gallery", January 12th—February 9th, 2013.

@CreatorsProject

You probably don’t pay much attention to the gestures you make on your touchscreen handset. The constant swiping through articles or news feeds, pinching to zoom closer, flicking through virtual pages in iBooks, and all the other hand movements we do on a daily basis to interact with our phones.

Royal College of Art student Gabriele Meldaikyte has taken a bit more notice of them than most and transformed these simple, yet integral, movements into a series of sculptures in Multi-Touch Gestures. Meldaikyte notes that there are five actions which makeup the way we engage with our phones using our fingers. These are flick, pinch, tap, swipe, and scroll, what she calls “‘signatures’ of the Apple iPhone” (and, presumably, Android phones and other touchscreen devices).

But these interactions will inevitable change, just like the way most of us don’t type onto a tactile keyboard anymore on our cell phones. User interaction is a constantly evolving and changing field, adapting to user demands as well as technological advances.

Meldaikyte says her sculptures are an act of preservation, capturing these interactions so people can look back and see how it used to be. “I have translated this interface language of communication into 3D objects”, she says on her website, “which mimic every multi-touch gesture. My project is an interactive experience, where visitors can play, learn and be part of the exhibition.”

The sculptures consist of simple mechanics like pulleys and leavers and are made from acrylic and wood, contrasting with the precious metals and circuit boards of an iPhone. Newspaper clippings, book pages, and paper maps replace their virtual equivalents. So you flick a cog to turn the pages of a mini newspaper, pinching involves moving a magnifying glass up and down, tapping becomes a spring-mounted acrylic keyboard, swiping lets you navigate over a real map, while scrolling becomes a pulley system which lets you read through an article.

Flick

Pinch

Tap

Swipe

Scroll

Images: Gabriele Meldaikyte

[via FastCo.Design]

@stewart23rd

If you’re someone who still watches TV, then you’ll still be using a TV remote control to change the channels. What a fine and dear ally it is, sitting there next to you and your junk food as you stare at the screen and numbly flick through the channels looking for something to sustain your interest. But with smartphones now beginning to replace remote controls on some networks—like the Sky+ app in the UK—it could well become another piece of dead media (along with television, as it now stands) to add to the heap.

In a new exhibition, which opens in London tomorrow, artist Chris Shen uses 625 used remote controls to create an “infrared light sculpture” called INFRA, repurposing these once-loved pieces of tech to make a TV out of them.

“Each of the 625 remote controls is second-hand without the corresponding TV set—the remotes were discarded, or deemed useless by their previous owner.” Shen says in the press release. “I will reverse the roles of these devices that are intended to control our TVs, to become the TV itself. By exploring infrared technology, I hope to provide insight into a world that is by its very nature unseen.”

How the installation will work is explained below:

Every TV remote has a small infrared LED at the front. When viewed through infrared goggles a small light that cannot be seen normally becomes visible. Shen uses this invisible light to create a display capable of showing recognisable images in the form of live television, the infrared light then brings light to the room, but only in the infrared spectrum.

INFRA, 17/01/13 – 03/02/13, 18 Hewett Street, 
London, EC2A 3NN


@stewart23rd

Over the holidays you may’ve been gifted a Kindle, allowing you to download books digitally to read them at your leisure. While you might be aware of the convenience and immediacy with which the device allows you to read the latest part of the Fifty Shades trilogy, you might not be aware that Amazon are happily recording data from your Kindle using their Whispersync technology. The software is turned on as a default on your Kindle under the pretense that it syncs data across multiple devices, giving you a helping hand.

But it also gives Amazon a helping hand, letting them accrue data on where you bookmark a page and how much of the book you’ve read over a period of time. As with lots of digital media, it brings up issues of privacy and how we’re constantly being monitored, even if that activity is as innocent as reading a novel.

Well, artist Johannes P Osterhoff has had enough! In a new performance piece he jailbroke his Kindle so that every time the Whispersync technology logs the data, it also sends an email to Amazon CEOJeff Bezos with the same info, as well as publishing it online here. The project began on 12th January—Bezos’ birthday—and is called Dear Jeff Bezos, so we emailed Osterhoff to find out bit more about the piece.

The Creators Project: What was the reasoning behind doing this performance?
Johannes P Osterhoff: As an interface artist I am particularly interested in controlled consumption interfaces such as the one used on the Kindle. These interfaces are very simple, engaging, and easy to use but have lost their purpose to reflect on the actual data flows in the background—and they usually offer no reach-through to lower technical layers. Recent examples—like the installation of trojans via faked iTunes updates on the iPhone, or the logging of location or keystrokes without knowledge of Android users—show the deep gap between the actions performed by modern gadgets on root level and the simplistic representations on their user interfaces.

This is also true for the Kindle. Its user interface is kept extremely simple to disturb the user’s “reading experience” as little as possible. But, of course, Amazon’s interest in an undistracted reading experience and smooth syncing between devices is not a philanthropical one. It is also a way to learn more about its customers and to use this knowledge to increase sales. I use interface art such as the Dear Jeff Bezos performance to focus on the underlaying processes and the business logic of controlled consumption interfaces, so as to make their influence on culture and the role of users a subject of discussion.

You say the piece is about how the act of reading is changed by ebooks and closed platforms. How do you think these have changed our reading habits and do you see this as positive or negative or both?
On the surface these changes look very positive. I do not have to carry heavy tomes with me, I do not have to go to a far-off bookstore to buy books, and reading on the Kindle feels OK.

But the Kindle with its closed system also fundamentally affects notions of ownership and privacy. Companies like Amazon are interested in exclusive ownership of data, because with this exclusivity comes its value. As a user of such services, one loses not only control but also authorship of the data one generated with one’s own reading.

And even though I read on the Kindle, I sometimes wonder what was so bad about physical books. I actually owned them, I could lend them to friends, and I could also read in private. With the Kindle and Whispersync all of this has become impossible. And, particularly, I am required to surrender my privacy during the reading on my Kindle. And I don’t even share my reading to the benefit of a community, with the Kindle and Whispersync this data goes exclusively to Amazon.

Have you had any comments from Amazon or Jeff Bezos about the project so far? Is the idea to antagonise Bezos or just make him aware or what his company does?
I have not received any comments yet. But so far I’ve only written six emails to Jeff Bezos (because I’ve only set six bookmarks). And I don’t want to antagonize him. Jeff Bezos undoubtable has contributed to modern reading at large, it has been made easier to buy and transport books. But for ages the act of reading has been a private matter, and with Amazon’s setup it is no longer private but has become accessible to their data centers. And, for me, to change an age-old tradition of privacy due to a company’s commercial interest and market power is not the best reason.

Personally I wasn’t aware that Amazon logged your reading habits through the Kindle via Whispersync. Do you think this kind of secretive accruing of data about people is just part of a networked society or is that sort of complacency dangerous?
I would not call it complacency. Contemporary user interfaces are made to be simple, engaging, and beautiful. But their purpose also should be to make users aware of their context and the consequences of their actions.

@stewart23rd

NRK, the Norwegian equivalent to PBS, has made some pretty bold moves in the realm of documentary filmmaking. While many audiences might not have the patience for it, they’ve documented travels around Norway in films that account for every second of the journey, the lengthiest of which covered the full 134-hour boat trip from Bergen to Kirkenes. In this spirit, NRK sought to document train rides on the Nordland Railway, but managed to condense it into something more easily consumed.

Recording the same 10-hour journey in each of the four seasons, NRK producers then synced them into a single 10-hour film in which the seasons change seamlessly. They describe the challenges of this process on their website:

Even though the Norwegian State Railway managed to keep the schedule on each of our recorded trips, the four journeys differed in position at any given time. The train will, for example, not enter a station at the exact same second in both June and March, and cannot keep the exact same speed at all times. In other words, we had to synchronize the video files in order to make the train appear to be at the same place at the same time in every video stream.

The television version of the film lasts 10 hours, not missing an inch of the 453 miles of track. However, if you don’t have ten hours to spare, the ultra-condensed, minute-long version above will give you a pretty good idea of riding the rails in Norway. They’ve also provided this video mixer that allows you to create your own version, switching between footage of each season as well as all four journeys simultaneously. See an example of that below.

@ImYourKid

The subjects of Nydia Lilian’s photography are varied—everything from landscapes to insects arranged in kaleidoscopic patterns—but she captures all of them in a similarly gloomy, evocative light, sticking to black and white for all of her creative projects. For her newest series, bad dream, Lilian explores the format of the venerable GIF.

Looking at landscapes, cityscapes, and wild patterns through a dynamic eye, she presents each piece flashing between its actual color (in black and white) and its negative colors. The alternating images give the illusion that you are eternally zooming in on the picture, moving quickly enough that they create a disorienting feeling akin to this psychedelic gem, although significantly more pleasing to the eye. Fun as they are to look at, let’s hope no one is actually having “bad dreams” of this nature.

You can find more of Nydia Lilian’s work in our Behance Gallery. Join now for the chance to be featured on our blog, website, and at our events.

@ImYourKid

In the age of “Big Data,” data visualizations are all over the place, giving us insight into the election, the economy, pop culture, and even ourselves. At The Creators Project, we wanted to use data in a different, more creative, and slightly more playful way. We asked three artists to re-imagine our Facebook profiles as a unique artistic experience and partnered with 3D printing service Shapeways to bring these works of art to life as 3D printed sculptures.

Try all three experiences for yourself here: create.thecreatorsproject.com (Works best in Google Chrome.)

The artists we chose—art and technology studio Sosolimited, design and animation studio Sticky Monster Lab, and architecture and design studio SOFTlab—all come from different parts of the world and different creative disciplines, which resulted in three wildly different interpretations of our online identities. Each experience yields a 3D printable sculpture that you can bring to life with some 3D printing magic from Shapeways.

Astroverb by Sosolimited

In the past, the wordsmith data maestros at Sosolimited have given us such text-driven interactive experiences as ReConstitution 2012, a live deconstruction of last year’s presidential debates. This time, they developed their own tongue-in-cheek astrological system called “Morpholuminology” and set their algorithms to work on the text in your Facebook profile—analyzing your status updates and posts to create an absurdist horoscope (called a “Lexoscope”) and a unique zodiac symbol (called a “Morphogram”), which you can 3D print and wear as a good luck charm. The app tracks and deconstructs your language, assessing it according to six key personality dimensions like “Extrovert,” “Blasphemer,” “Utopian,” and others. Your personal ranking across each of the six dimensions determines your unique Lexoscope and Morphogram.

Monster Me by Sticky Monster Lab

Korean-based design studio Sticky Monster Lab are known for their painfully cute yet sinister characters and animated films, such as Lonely, as well as a recently launched line of collectable vinyl toys. For their Monster Me experience, they used information from your Facebook profile to generate a custom monster in their signature style. The monster’s shape is determined by your birthday, his environment is determined by your geographical location, and he’ll have some miniature friends to keep him company—the fewer friends you have on Facebook, the more virtual friends your monster will have to keep him from getting lonely. When you first meet your monster, he’ll be a newborn—just an itty bitty thing. You can grow him to full size by exploring the app, customizing the monster’s world by adding buildings to represent your interests and likes, snapping some pics of him, and eventually 3D printing him.

Crystallized by SOFTlab

SOFTlab is a studio that has its roots in architecture, which is apparent in their structured design aesthetic, which is often modular and uses parametric design, a code-based process, to come up with unusual shapes and forms. In Crystallized, SOFTlab have created a geode rock crystal that’s made up of your social relationships. Each point on the geode represents a friend and its shape is determined by the strength of your relationship. The more friends you add, the more interesting the form will be. When you first launch the app, you’ll see a geode made up of the people whose social graphs are most similar to yours. Crack it open to explore your friends’ interests and likes and customize the colors before snapping a photo to share with friends or 3D printing the sculpture on Shapeways.

Try all three experiences for yourself here: create.thecreatorsproject.com

@juliaxguila

Taking place tomorrow at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image is a live performance piece from artist Peter Burr. Special Effect takes inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic sci-fi-art film Stalker, particularly from the idea of “the Zone,” a strange place in the film where desires are granted and anything is possible.

In Burr’s performance, he’ll be staging a live show featuring specially commissioned videos (check out the teaser trailer above) by artists like Yoshi Sodeoka and Sabrina Ratté, among many others, and interspersing these into what he’s calling “a live television show from the future.”

The performance will mix up different types of media and will feature a live setup of laser beams, green screens, and a Kinect. This will all take place in the suitably futuristic setting of the MOMI theater, which looks like the inside of a spaceship or what Burr describes as “a movie theater that looks like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The whole thing sounds like an intriguing blend of theatrics, insane futuristic musings, and interactive artwork. We asked Burr some questions so he could further explain this “experiment in live cinema.”

The Creators Project: Can you explain the concept of a “live television show from the future”? What can people expect from the performance?
Peter Burr: It’s a live movie. The main feature is interspersed with commissioned commercials, channel-surfed cartoon fragments, and musical interludes. All of this is played out in real time via a custom Max/MSP/Jitter patch, props, costumes, and a live video feed.

Burr performing “Special Effect”

Is it purely the concept of “the Zone” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker that inspired this piece? Or have you also incorporated other aspects of the film, like the aesthetic, the mood, or any other parts of the narrative?
The aesthetic and mood of the original film are big reference points for the show. In fact, the genesis for Special Effect was in a suite of computer images I made while watching the film over and over again last winter. The specifics of the movie weren’t in those images, but some of the mood and framing was there. They were striking pictures to me, so I decided to explore them in four dimensions. Around this time, I was talking with a bunch of other video artists and animators and noticed there was a thread here that these artists were also inspired by. So that, in turn, gave birth to the whole project.

What was the brief you gave to the video artists and how did you go about choosing them?
I reached out to artists whose work I admire on the basis of accepting a small commission to create a commercial inspired by the world of Stalker and the book it’s based on, Roadside Picnic. That premise is that aliens landed on our planet and left a bunch of junk in their wake: almost-used-up batteries, half-empty bottles, things like that. The people on earth don’t know whether or not it’s junk though because the aliens came and left so quickly. Maybe these aliens are just car-camping in the wilderness, leaving behind their hot dog wrappers, puddles of anti-freeze, etc. and we are just on the outskirts trying to make sense of that stuff the next day when they leave.

It is unclear, but what happens either way is that a whole industry pops up around trying to figure out what these things are and how we could use them ourselves, but nobody is ever really sure if we are doing the right things with them. Are we using laserdiscs as battleaxes? Sledgehammers to open bananas?

Still from one of the video works

Are there any themes or ideas that you feel the piece explores, particularly with regards to our relationship to technology or with regards to technology fulfilling our desires?
Totally. I like Tarkovsky’s use of defamiliarization here. The idea is to make us unfamiliar to ourselves—to gain perspective on the artifacts of our desire. We use the tools of fiction to understand who we really are, what we really want. Of course, its unclear whether anybody knows what he/she really wants and so we play Angry Birds in the meantime.

Burr performing the piece

What are your own ideas about the future of cinema and television?
Cinema and television have a remarkable capacity to create illusions. With special effects, we have gained the ability to make anything possible. I see us entering a world of maximum lens flare, total drop shadow.

“Special Effect” Friday January 18, 7PM. Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue Astoria, NY 11106. Tickets: $15 public / $9 Museum members / Free for Silver Screen members and above. Order online or call 718 777 6800 to reserve tickets.

@stewart23rd

When it comes to technology and creativity, one of the big ways technology can change how we perceive the arts is its impact on storytelling. How can breakthroughs in software and hardware assist an artist in how they want to tell and relate a story? Storytelling is as old as humankind, and the way we experience it changes with the tools we have to hand. From the oral traditions of Homer and the Ancient Greeks to the multimedia, interdisciplinary methods artists have at their disposal today.

Exploring the potential of new technologies in relation to storytelling is the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab, a retreat for artists and technologists in the snowy pastures of Park City, Utah. “We’re in one of the great sea-changes of how work is created, how work is seen and consumed” says founding director Michelle Sadder in the opening of the video above. And what the lab does, is facilitate this change by offering artists support and a place to stay where they can be free from distraction—encouraged to experiment and innovate and play around with new ideas.

Ideas like audience interaction and the advent of tablet and smartphone devices have allowed us to experience a narrative in new ways. This has given rise to projects like The Silent History, a novel designed specifically to be engaged with on an iPhone or iPad—rather than, say, adapted from a book. The novel takes the form of serializations that are sent to the user as a daily update, and these segments are augmented with location-based stories which can be experienced only when you physically take your iPad to the location specified, blending the capabilities of a digital device with the physical experiences of everyday life to create a new narrative experience.

It’s these kinds of hybrid experiments—blurring the lines between old and new media, high and low culture, digital and physical, storytelling and technology—that the New Frontier Story Lab is supporting and pioneering through an eclectic range of artists, from Adbusters co-founder Michael Simons to Flight of the Conchords’Bret McKenzie.

@stewart23rd

In an age of Google Earth where satellite imagery can be viewed at the click of a button, we’re all familiar with what the world looks like from above. Scientists use the application to discover new forests and islands that don’t exist; artists use it to create animations and digital installations.

In FIELD‘s seventh story for their Energy Flow project, called “Skynet,” the duo recruited the help of digital artist Andreas Nicolas Fischer to explore the aerial landscapes and bird’s-eye view narratives of the world from above—along with detailing unfamiliar surfaces seen very close up.

Stills from “Skynet” show birds-eye-view images inspired by Google Earth as well as macro shots of organic landscapes.

A long time practice of the surveillance industry, the secretive world of satellite imagery has now been opened up to the public-at-large and in this animation we journey through unusual textures and lands, witnessing them from the perspective of a soaring drone or the unnatural abstraction of an extreme zoom. These digital imaginings offer the viewer a landscape of desolation as they explore unknown terrains filtered through the viewpoint of technology’s roaming eyes in the sky and on land.

These new sights and strange plains were created by randomly stitching together satellite images and changing their photorealism through generative practices, along with adding in swooping camera movements to create the sensation of flying. For the more close-up angles, plant surfaces, skin textures, and fabrics were utilized to create an abstract aesthetic.

Fischer spoke to us over Skype to explain more about the project.

The Creators Project: What was the idea behind the “Skynet” story?
Andreas Nicolas Fischer: The name is a reference to the ubiquitous computing network from the Terminator movie and I took that as inspiration for the piece. It started out with the idea of viewing the world from the perspective of a drone. So I took some NASA satellite photos that they have on their website that people can use and repurpose and I wrote a little script, a piece of software that would rearrange these images. First I had the idea to use a specific landscape, but I didn’t want to reference the specific parts, so instead the script uses textures and satellite photos from all around the world and it recombines them into a new landscape—so that’s one part of it.

And then there are other parts of it where I experiment with macro photography, like in my video KT I – Les Embiez which was shot on a island in the south of France—I started gathering references and recording sounds and taking macro-pictures of the specific plants from that region. I then took them and created a digital landscape out of them. And that was the same technique that I used in “Skynet,” only using different textures for the Energy Flow project. So the idea was to explore the perspectives of an all-knowing ubiquitous computer network that can see in these different scales, from the macro to the micro. So you have a bird’s-eye view—a very high up perspective—but it can also communicate with, for example, nanobots that see things on a nano level or on a bacterial, microbial, microscopic level.

Andreas Fischer’s cognitive map project, KT I – Les Embiez.

Was the direction of “Skynet” something that FIELD came to you with? Or was it your own devising?
No, I just got the brief from them and it was something that I came up with on my own. I see it as a continuation of the KT I – Les Embiez project, the cognitive map project I mentioned. So that was something that I was interested in for a while. To continue that, and to work more with that, and refine that. And I thought that fitted very well with the Energy Flow project. We had a couple of Skype conferences and we talked about making something that Marcus and Vera would be more involved with. But as it turned out, during the time of the project I had a lot of other stuff going on so I couldn’t really fly over to London and I couldn’t really make it into a collaborative effort, because of the coordination.

What are you hoping people will get from watching “Skynet”?
I think this is something that’s really different depending on the viewer, it completely depends on the person who’s watching it, depends on so many circumstances. There’s nothing that I’m really hoping for. I want it to be open for interpretation—I can’t think of anything specific that I would want it to trigger. It’s more the associations that you might find you have with it.

Visit EnergyFlow.io for more information on the project and more behind-the-scenes imagery. Check back on The Creators Project every week for an in-depth look at a different storyline or feature of the film.

Meet FIELD in the video below…

@CreatorsProject

Sonification is a simple concept: translating information into sound. A synthesizer could be considered a form of sonification: taking a predetermined electrical frequency and mating it with a speaker to possibly pleasurable result—or at least interestingly unpleasurable. Just that is one of the best things ever, and by screwing around with those frequencies, usually adding or subtracting them, we can make just about any sound imaginable. Just by playing around with some numbers, you can make a violin, handclap, human voice, guitar, or really anything else.

We've figured out over a fairly recent history that most anything in the universe can be made audible as long as it has associated data/numbers. And, of course, anything you can think of does (brain waves, pulsars, whatever). A generated electrical frequency isn't quite the same thing as solar wind, but there's good reason one can be made into sound and the other can't. It's just a matter of translation. In doing so, we can hear the universe. Sometimes this adds to our appreciation, or gives us a way of experiencing something distant in the cosmos that otherwise we might just have to conceptualize through diagrams, or through the words of scientists.

Coronal Mass Ejections, giant bubbles of magnetically-charged gas from the sun, disrupt the flow of the solar wind and produce disturbances that strike the Earth with sometimes catastrophic results. They occur at least once a week; this CME captured by SOHO occured on April 7th, 1997.

To sonify, then, is to make beauty available to our human senses—a way to understanding but also, through the work of artist and NASA fellow Robert Alexander, a means to discovery. For three years, Alexander has worked with the University of Michigan’s Solar Heliospheric Research Group, in a project he concocted, sonifying the sun using data captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a NASA/ESA spacecraft that for 17 years has been staring at the sun, providing our most reliable source of near real-time data about solar weather. He's rendered solar flares as a human choir, and turned the sun’s rotation into a a tribal beat.

Read the rest of this article over at our sister site Motherboard.

The definition of a musical instrument has been in flux for the past decade or two, with the advent of technology allowing us to control sound in innovative new ways. You can assign any action or physical manipulation to control any parameter of a sound, inventing a new instrument all together. That means that the practical idea of what is considered an instrument goes out the window and even a piece of cloth can be an instrument.

That’s the thought behind Luiz Zanotello’s Nama, an installation consisting of a piece of fabric outfitted with the textile-specific LilyPad Arduino, accelerometers, and conductive thread that controls the audio as well as the visualizations projected onto three screens. The sound and projections are “played” and manipulated by contorting the cloth, bending it, wringing it, and even spinning it over your head “like a helicopter,” as one Peter Pablo suggested so many years ago.

The cloth interface and sepia tone of Nama gives it a rustic feel, masking the breadboards and wires and allowing the user to focus directly on the experience, one that seems derived from some ancient magic buried in the desert.

Zanotello also put together the video below explaining how the instrument works in more depth.

@ImYourKid

If you’ve never seen a plant called a touch-me-not before, it’s a “bashful” herb that grows in warm climate areas and has the unusual characteristic of shrinking from human touch and folding inward, as if hiding, only to reopen minutes later. As a child, I would run my hands through a patch of touch-me-nots by the sidewalk, and in my imagination I’d hear them make an inaudible squeal in concert as they folded up their leaves and went into hiding. It was like nature’s own uncanny animation.

Taking inspiration from this phenomenon of finding liveliness in unexpected places, new media artist Keith Lam has created the project Mutual Symphony with his studio Dimension+. The reactive work is a sea star-like kinetic sculpture made with dozens of geometric origami parts that, just like touch-me-nots, can be triggered by human touch.

The piece is part of Lam’s on-going Dynamic Livings series, which explores the relationship between human and objects.

“New media art often gives people an impression of coldness. But we want to create something that is alive when we make art,” Lam explains. “By creating a conversation between men and objects, we hope the viewer can use a different way of thinking about life’s origin and its various forms, as well as to show a more fleshy and warm side of new media art.”

Image courtesy of Keith Lam.

If you owned a SNES in your youth, you probably spent many, many hours racing around Koopa Beach, Ghost Valley, Rainbow Road, and Choco Island—these were some of the tracks that could be found in Super Mario Kart, a game that you could lose days of your life to. The great thing about it was the fact you could pick up different power-ups, laying an opponent to waste with the dreaded red shell or speeding past them using a mushroom.

Such is its enduring appeal that the hackers at Waterloo Labs created a real-life version of the game where they got to ride around in go carts and not just dress up in stupid outfits, but also grab RFID-tagged icons that changed the behavior of the go carts—creating a real-life version of the power-ups. This meant they also had to hack the go carts so that the gas, brakes, and steering could be altered when different icons were picked up.

You can check out a full overview of the project over on their site.

[via PSFK]

@stewart23rd

In Part 1 of Hacking The Shit Out Of Everything, we introduced our installation-based documentary project Empire and laid out our reasons for wanting to adapt the work to the web. In Part 2, we spent the weekend at the POV Hackathon, where we turned a section of Empire into an award-winning digital storytelling prototype. Now it’s time to show you what our team pulled together in the meager hours we had to hack the shit out of Empire.

Screen grab of the Empire: Bakermat prototype: The Instructions.

Our prototype is an adaptation of the video installation Empire: Bakermat, which we shot in and around Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in early 2012. Bakermat (which means “cradle” in English) consists of two films that share one soundtrack. These two films are projected on opposite sides of a single screen, so audience members can never watch one without missing the other. The piece grapples with the binary nature of life choices: when you choose to do one thing, you are also choosing not to do something else. In the installation, as in life, it’s impossible to be in two places at the same time.

A big reward of exhibiting the original version of Bakermat in Amsterdam was watching people interact with the installation. Some would run around the screens and try to take it all in, while others would hang back to watch one film all the way through, then walk around the screen to do the same thing on the other side. Our central challenge during the hackathon was figuring out how to transpose this unique viewer experience to the 2D world of the web. Given our limited time, our goal wasn’t to craft a polished finished product, but was instead to create a functional, proof-of-concept model that replaced the act of walking around the screens with an equivalent mouse or trackpad action.

Screen grab of the Empire: Bakermat prototype: The Slider.

To do this, our team came up with a slider interface that allows viewers to flip between the two stories. Slide it to the left and you’re inside the airport mortuary, a one-of-a-kind facility that handles bodies in transit into and out of the Netherlands. Slide it to the right and you’re outside, watching planes take off and land with a group of plane spotters.

Empire: Bakermat production still, spotter side.

Empire: Bakermat production still, mortuary side.

The final layer of our prototype’s interface is a tracking system that records how users move the slider as they watch the piece. About 10 seconds after the film ends, these movements are transformed into a data visualization that reflects how much time you spent in each location. The visualization juxtaposes the faces of Bakermat’s two lead characters—one old, one young—into a jagged, bisected portrait representing your viewing choices. The personalized image serves to re-emphasize the interlinked themes of decision-making and loss that run through the two films.

Try the first version of the Empire: Bakermat prototype here.

[NOTE: the current version is optimized for Chrome and Safari, and may not work properly on other browsers, or on mobile devices. Switch browsers to save yourself a headache.]

Big thanks to Clint Beharry, Claire Mitchell, and Sam Bailey for all the work and inspiration, and to POV for their support.

Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma are the directors of the Empire project. Follow them @EmpireDoc to find out what kind of shit they’ll be hacking next.

United Visual Artists are known for their monumental light pieces and experimental artworks, like the epic LED sculpture Origin, which they collaborated on with Scanner, and which toured our events in 2011.

This piece, which featured at the Gazelli Art House exhibition “Let There Be Light” in London last September, is a more subtle affair. But while it may not have the pulsing presence of Origin, it’s no less stunning, utilizing light to explore our perception of time. Called Always/Never, the design was inspired by the sundial and features triangular forms made from powder-coated steel, along with timber and LEDs. An algorithm that controls the light ensures the display is constantly in flux, so that it imitates the changing nature of light throughout the day.

Here’s how United Visual Artists describe the piece:

Always/Never is the result of UVA’s recent investigations of the perception of time. Always/Never is a grid of pyramidal elements inspired by the sundial, each passing through time at a different rate. Changing patterns of light and shadow create the illusion of a fluid surface; shifting combinations of colours from nature recall different times of day.

You can find out more about UVA in our short doc on them below and also watch a documentary on their installation Origin.

UVA

Origin

[via Design Playgrounds]

@stewart23rd

On the blog this week we explored how Shapeways is leading the 3D printing revolution, saw what the world’s cities would look like lit just by stars, looked at video game studio Tale of Tales, found out about a jailbroken Kindle that emails Amazon’s CEO every time a page is bookmarked, found out what bad dreams look like in GIF form, spoke with Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab, and launched our Facebook 3D printing art project.

And on the web…

· Animation ponders the decline of print media using a 3D rendered dinosaur.

·Rafaël Rozendaal and Jonas Lund have built a Chrome add-on that gives you Text Free Browsing.

· A guy outsourced his job to China so he could browse Reddit and watch cat videos when he was meant to be working.

· Swiss art collective Bitnik have sent Julian Assange a package that photographs his surroundings and uploads them to a website so the parcel can be followed in real-time.

· Exhibition “Juxtapose” by Daniel Schwarz shows contrasting Google Maps images of far away places shown in different seasons (above).

@stewart23rd

Our Creators are a talented and prolific bunch, and our inbox is always overflowing with alerts of new remixes and mashups from the incredible DJs and producers in our line-up. We just couldn’t keep these fresh new tunes to ourselves because, after all, filesharing is caring. Here are our top picks from the past week. For past Creators Remix Roundups, click here.

Metafore: “Live My Life” (prod. by AraabMUZIK)

Filled with beats that collide through outer space, this track produced by AraabMUZIK is especially fresh. With clean and grounded rhymes by young and rising New Jersey rapper Metafore, “Live my Life” should be bumped loudly in either your Maybach or spaceship.

Jinbo: “Fantasy” (directed by Digipedi)

Korean visual team Digipedi and multi-talented vocalist Jinbo have delivered a chilled out, super-freaky collaboration. The video for the second single off Jinbo‘s February-slated album (above) replaces all the grit and intensity of the first video with lovable and gluttonous play. Although it’s a tad less eccentric than some of Digipedi’s previous work, this video still manages to offer up a simple fantasy world filled with space soul, R&B jams, and lots of snacks.

Tropkillaz (aka DJ Zegon and Andre Laudz) : “Si Voce Pensa”

Touching down to earth just long enough to murder some tropical beats, DJ Zegon of N.A.S.A collaborated with Brazilian producer Andre Laudz to form Tropkillaz. “Si Voce Pensa” (“If You Think”) is their first bass kill of 2013, sampled from Peruvian funk group Bossa 70. This heated track is packed with all the trap sounds you want to hear—get ready for a bass slaughter.

@CreatorsProject

The open world video game design has produced some of the medium’s most popular and critically lauded hits in recent times, from Batman: Arkham City to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, and of course, the Grand Theft Auto series that kickstarted the trend’s current popularity with Grand Theft Auto III in 2001.

These titles and their ilk allow gamers to immerse themselves in non-linear, user-created narratives where you can wander around at your own pace, exploring the virtual lands at your leisure and taking on missions as and when you want.

In the latest installment of our Kill Screen series, The World of Far Cry 3, we look at the open world environment of Far Cry 3 where the action is set on a Pacific island riddled with pirates, savage animals, and the many distractions a tropical paradise has to offer. But with the freedom of an open world game comes challenges for the designers, especially in the way they tell the story when everything is so open-ended, unrestricted, and so many disparate elements are involved.

“Open world games are a natural evolution,” explains Far Cry 3‘s executive producer Dan Hay in the video above. "And they’re a response to the consumer. They want variety, they want emotion, they want passion. And so the trick of open world is, yes, you build a sandbox where there are no rules and it’s just fun to play, but for us on Far Cry 3 the real trick was to tie it into something that was meaningful and personal in a story where it’s OK to go back and forth."

The game does this by presenting the player with a moral dilemma: your friends have been captured by pirates, do you man up and try to rescue them or just enjoy the splendors a tropical island paradise has to offer? The consequences of this conundrum are made even more dramatic by the fact that the protagonist is not a heroic badass who eats alien entities for breakfast, but instead is a typical young guy who’s taken time out to do some traveling—and so, the player’s actions inform, enrich, or destroy his life in what becomes a dynamic, interactive storyline.

Check out The Escapist’s review of Far Cry 3 below…

If you missed them, catch up on Kill Screen episodes one, two, and three.

@stewart23rd

Dutch high-tech couturist Iris van Herpen presented her new collection at the Spring 2013 Haute Couture shows in Paris today, and a few of the looks have since surfaced online. But before then, the one-minute teaser video (above) was our only source of insight into her new collection, Voltage.

Looks from Iris van Herpen’s S/S 2013 Haute Couture collection Voltage. Images courtesy of Show Studio.

Since she started showing her line five years ago, van Herpen has become a major proponent of the 3D-printed garment, and her inspiration ranges from all sorts of conceptual alchemy—micro-organisms, chemical processes, synesthesia, and responsive architecture. She’s even made custom designed dresses for Björk.

Looks from Iris van Herpen’s S/S 2013 Haute Couture collection Voltage. Images courtesy of Show Studio.

If the Voltage teaser video was any indication, directed by Geoffrey Lillemon and Joost Korngold, we predicted her S/S 2013 couture collection would be gilded, opulent, and maybe even musical (OK, so not quite).

We spoke to Lillemon and Korngold who broke down the visuals, meaning, and tech behind the fashion film.

The Creators Project: How did you come up with the concept video for Voltage?
Geoffrey Lillemon and Joost Korngold: We wanted to play with the idea of the shapes’ presence in a physical space, a lot of the beauty of the garment sculptures is how they bounce and reflect light in space. The first inspiration came from seeing her show at Paris Fashion Week last year. This lead to conversations about making a video. First off, we wanted to combine the warmth of the luxurious interiors of Versailles and mix that with the alien couture ideas of Iris. So in this case the brief was very open, and we all collaborated in a way that used everyone’s strengths.

What was the feeling you were trying to invoke with the opulent setting?
It was important to juxtapose a warm romantic interior with abstraction, so we sourced the 3D palace data from Evermotion for the interiors. This allowed us to produce the project rather quickly and in an efficient way, allowing us to focus on a beautiful shader that would re-texturize the environment to feel like a magical kingdom made of glass, and create the 3D shapes to interact in that space.

How were the 3D sculptures created and how do they relate to the collection?
The 3D sculptures were inspired by Iris’ collection, but did not directly relate to the designs. This interpretative approach gave us liberty to make something beautiful without having to focus on the details of making a 3D translation of a physical garmet.
Joost Korngold: I used 3ds Max to create the 3D sculptures. I started by drawing a single spline and deformed it by using twist and bend modifiers. Then I multiplied the splines to create the base spline model of the sculpture, and added the render spline modifier to give thickness to the spline model. From here, I animated the values of the twist, bend, and angle of the render spline thickness to bring the sculpture to life.
Geoffrey Lillemon: Then I took the assets from Joost and brought them into 3ds Max and started working on a reflective shader and the lighting mixed with our assets of 3D palace interior data. The idea was to merge the warmth and luxury of a palace with 3D shapes to put them in the context of sculptural forms that are real and making music, like the ghost harp idea, giving a new life to abstract 3D.

Korngold creates a single spline in 3ds Max.

Then multiples the splines.

And finally increases the splines’ thickness.

Do you think a fashion film is an essential asset to a fashion collection? Why or why not?
Yes, it provokes a fantasy and a curiosity to lure people into the experience of the collection. It sets the mood and template for art and fashion dancing, and in this case, doing so to the metalic ghost harps of the electrified movement of Voltage.

Take a closer look at the 3D forms below…

Credits:

Directed by: Geoffrey Lillemon and Joost Korngold
Sound design: Breek (Salvador Breed and Stijn van Beek)
Production design: Random Studio

Images courtesy of Joost Korngold.

@kfloodwarning