Experimental music instruments by Luigi Russolo.

Russolo, an Italian futurist painter and composer, made these wonderful noise-making instruments 1913. There were 27 different versions, each named, and each making some sort of noise or sound; like that of machines, but turned into music. Inside each of the boxes was a rotating wheel. The wheel would cause a string to vibrate, and the vibrations would be transmitted to a membrane and create the sound coming out the speaker. The wheel would be set in motion either by simply turning a crank, or in some cases, electrically. A lever on top controlled the tension of the string, and so also the pitch of the sound.

This embrace of noise and machines are of course emblematic of the futurist movement. There is a manifest by Russolo, called The Art of Noise, where he goes on about how he wants to use noise to make music rather than just traditional instruments.  “This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered. ”

You could discuss the political implications of this - Italian, futurist, just before WW1:  but personally I just love the simplicity of the design of these boxes, and this great image with Russolo and his companion Ugo Piatti (with the impeccable bow tie). Noise artists everywhere clearly owe something to Luigi Russolo.

• The Art of Noise manifesto at Thereminvox.com
• Intonarumori at Thereminvox.com

If you are reading the full entry, there is a  paragraph of fake latin above. It was generated using my Lorem Ipsum Generator. You are welcome to grab and use the javascript here: loremipsum.js.

If you peek at the code of this post, the updatePage stuff is just for Wordpress, you don’t need that. To include the loremipsum.js on your own webpage, just copy the loremipsum.js to your server, link it in with <script src=”loremipsum.js”></script>, and then do<script>loremIpsumParagraph(100);</script>on the page. The number is the number of words you want in the paragraph. See the comments in the file for more details. It is designed to be simple to add more dictionaries to use your own languages. It has no grammar as such, it is just a random jumble of words.

Update: Note that you do need to close the script element separately, even if you only include a script. You have to do <script src=”whatever”></script>, trying to compress it to <script src=”whatever” /> will not work (on most browsers, at least). If you want to be well-behaved you should also include what sort of script you are running: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”loremipsum.js”></script> — any year now major browser will be supporting other languages.

Since you read this far, you might as well see a Swedish paragraph too. The Latin words are from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the (rather arcane) Swedish is from August Strindberg’s Röda Rummet.

This is another of those “scratch your own itch” things. I am not sure anybody else needs this, but I find it useful myself - it’s nice to have a tool like this to fill your templates with text when you are doing web development. Oh, and if you’re seeing the RSS feed this may or may not work as intended. Probably not.

Wallin built a model of a home, in the scale of rats. For five weeks they were living in the model, constantly monitored by video cameras. The video was streamed in real time and shown at the modern museum in Stockholm.

There is some more information and a video of the piece at Ilona Huss Wallins site.

Since release 0.06 (the current release) OpenFrameworks is built on top of Poco, a general-purpose class library for C++ that is really nifty - it’s almost like being back in a decent programming language. In Poco one of the fundamental classes is Poco::Util::Application - the base class for building applications. It is not used by OpenFrameworks, instead OpenFrameworks has their own ofBaseApp.

What I did was to combine the two into something that is both a Poco Application and an OpenFrameworks App.

If anybody want to use it, just grab it at http://bridell.com/files/PocoApp.003.zip and play away. This version should run out the box in OF 0.06 on Code::Blocks on Windows, but if you just copy the code over to an “EmptyExample” copy on your setup you shoule be good to go on other platforms as well, I think.

If you have linker problems, so did I, but things got better. See this thread on the OF forum. The trick seems to be the -liphlpapi linker option and sometimes shuffling the order in which the Poco libs are linked in. Hey, it’s C++.

Here’s my CSS color name to hex chart with css-style comments.

I have no issues, so sure, I typed it in. On a serious note, I do realize this is (probably!) just a freak random captcha string.

Anyway, Ning.com is a service that provides a bunch of tools to build a social network. Anybody can sign up and “create a social network”. You just drag and drop different tools on a basic three-column layout. The available tools include: forum, blog, photos, videos, audio (these three allow users to upload and share media), events (with a calendar), member list, groups (for special interest groups within the network), RSS (feeding in), activity (lists activity in the network), badges (for promoting the network), notes (which is more like , chat, birthdays (not exactly what I need). There’s also a “text box” where you can post custom html or widgets. (You can create several).

You can customize the look and feel, from selecting themes to editing your own CSS. Still - I’m not sure it has all the features I want. Such as: can you have members opt in for a periodic newsletter? (maybe: there is something called “broadcast messages” that gets sent to all members. Members can opt out.) Can you feed out the RSS from the blog? (yes, you can). You can also add tabs where you can add any info you want, so if you are prepared to put in some effort you could do a lot of stuff.

Oh, and I just created mediakonst.ning.com - intended to be a platform for new media art practitioners (and others) in (or outside) Sweden. Stay tuned for more about this.

Polycranium Crisp is my own Wordpress theme that I use on this site.

The theme is using images from Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com randomly rotating in the top banner. I will probably add more images later on.

I haven’t released it on the Wordpress Themes site - I think it is still a bit sketchy - but if you want to grab a copy here it is: polycraniumcrisp01beta.zip

Polycranium Crisp by Fredrik Bridell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Sweden License.

Polycranium Techne is the Wordpress Theme I made for the Interactive Institute Art & Technology department, where I work. Technically it’s based on my own Polycranium Sleet theme, which is also the ancestor of the theme I am using for this blog: Polycranium Crisp. The visual design of Polycranium Techne was largely made by Lars Nordqvist.

It is still in development (as of today it is not even online yet), and I haven’t published the theme, but if you want it, you can have it. Just e-mail me and ask for it.

This kinetic scuplture consists of 714 balls (in, I believe, a 15 x 42 grid) that drop down on wires from the ceiling. During a 7-minute run they form various forms; at first just a random cloud, but soon the start forming outlines of cars.

There’s a video of the piece on YouTube:

>> More info on ART+COM’s site

Light installation  (?) by Anthony McCall (1973)

A 16mm projector is projecting a movie on the wall. At first, the movie seems to be just a white point on a black background. Very slowly, it starts expanding, first to an arc, and after 30 minutes, a circle. The magic happens not on the screen (or wall), but in mid-air. Shown either in a naturally dusty area, or with the help of a haze machine, the line from the projector to the dot becomes a cone, visible in air.

Anthony McCall made this piece in 1973, well before the digital revolution, and it was made using 16mm film. In the Tate paper he discusses how 16mm film differs from digital media - both have their peculiarities; analog film has dust and scratches, digital is pixel-based (eloquently but obscure: “digital planes of light carry longitudinal striations which radiate from lens to wall”).

Below are two very readable articles about McCall and his work.

>> Anthony McCall talks about his “solid light” films. (Jeffrey Kastner, in ArtForum 2004, at findarticles.com)

>> Anthony McCall’s Line Describing A Cone (Tate Papers 2007)

Khronos Projector looks like a backprojected image on a wall. But the projection surface is very flexible, and you can push it in with your hands. When you do that, the parts of the image that you push in change appearance. Specifically, you shift parts of the video in time. You don’t just play, stop, rewind and fast forward the entire video, but different parts of the screen can be at different positions in the video — at  the same time.

If you view the video data as a spatio-temporal volume (with x, y coordinates making up the screen coordinates and the individual frames aligned along the z axis), a normal form of viewing is like showing the intersection with a plane sliding along the z axis. Khronos Projector allows you to shape that intersection from a plane to a curved surface.

There are (many) other pieces examining this form of slicing up video volumes, using traditional slit scan techniques or (more commonly these days) software to do it. Golan Levin has assembled a really impressive Informal Catalogue of Slit-scan Video Artworks and Research [http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/]

There’s a lot more about Khronos Projector at http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/alvaro/Khronos/

They have has been showing this piece with different videos and with slightly different setups, sometimes including live video. I think that is because it lands somewhere in between new media art and innovative interface design. Indeed, Cassinelli is both a researcher and an artist.

Here’s a thought:

Anything an artist does tends to be interpreted as art. Therefore, if an artists shows a piece like this but with different video material, this is likely to can be construed as a hint that the artist is working with the conceptual aspects of the piece, not the material ones. Consider the case of Joseph Kosuth, showing his “One and Three Chairs”, consisting of a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a text from a dictionary about what a chair is — using different chairs, photographs and texts in different shows. This is not because he couldn’t decide on a particular chair, but to highlight that the particular chair was not important. Similarly, anything an engineering-type guy does tends to be viewed as engineering. In this case, the “lack of content” is (I believe) more likely to be viewed as an example of how engineers don’t understand the conceptual aspects, but only work with “the interface”. OK, maybe that bit about the Kosuth piece is just confusing, because clearly that is a conceptual piece. Perhaps Damien Hirst placing various medium-sized animals in formaldehyde is a better example. With a little effort, the Khronos Projector can also be seen more as a conceptual piece, and that this is, perhaps, why they’ve shown it with different video “content” - not because they don’t care, but because the piece is not about that particular shot of a cityscape, or any of the other pieces, but about the more abstract idea of how time changes everything, or perhaps that time does not change things, only your perspective on it, yada yada.

On the other hand, I’m an engineering-type guy myself, and I too think feel that the Khronos Projector is primarily an interesting interface design - but perhaps a conceptual interface design? Anyway, my posting about art pieces here does not generally mean I think they are particulary “good art”, or even art that I like, just that I think they are pieces worth knowing about.

Speaking of Damien Hirst, I came across this beautiful Lego rendering of Hirst’s classic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, made by the Little Artists aka John Cake and Darren Neave. (http://www.littleartist.co.uk/)

Two people put on these machines that let you swap your visual and auditory input with each other, so that you “can only see through the other person’s eyes”.

Photo: Kurokawa Mikio

>> artist’s home page

A statue of the Buddha is watching its own image on TV. Need I say more?

>> paikstudios.com

>> TV Buddha at medienkunstnetz

In his series of “illuminated averages”, artist Jim Campbell creates averages of video sequences. Of course (well, I assume)  he makes these using some sort of software, not by hand, but they also refer back to that point in time where artists - painters - started exploring the passage of time and capture it on a piece of canvas.

Giacomo Balla: Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

Some of Campbell’s images are even titled “dynamisms”, reappropriating the term used by artists like Luigo Russolo and Giacomo Balla, at the beginning of the 20th century. In this particular piece, Campbell created an image of the average of the entire Hitchcock movie Psycho, something that can hardly be anything than a wink to Douglas Gordon’s classic video work 24 Hour Psycho which shows the entire Psycho in slow motion so that it lasts 24 hours.

In terms of new media works, this piece is something that I would, by definition - my own definition - not call new media art, since the piece is a still image, shown on a lightbox. I would typically say that new media art is art that incorporates new media in the piece itself, so that they are somehow dynamic, autonomous, responsive, ergodic or full-out interactive at the time you experience the piece. It is not enough to use “new media” in the production of a piece. Something you make in photoshop does not normally constitute new media art. I could go on to argue that you have to do a media-specific analysis, and focus on the piece, not the experience; if you talk about an interactive piece, the interactivity lies in the piece, not in the experience.

Maybe I need to rethink my definitions, because I really like pretty much everything Jim Campbell does, and I would definitely say he’s a new media artist, and I don’t see that these pieces are all that different from his other works.

All that from a piece of blur on a lightbox.

>> jimcampbell.tv

Project Blinkenlights was a public installations that turned the façade of a building into a low-resolution display, using lights inside the windows. Members of the general public could upload their own animations to the building, using a special piece of software rom the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). You could also play a version of Pong on the building, using mobile phones.

These days there are lots and lots of these “media façades” installed over the world that make the black and white, pixeled display of Blinkenlights look rather primitive, but it deserves it place in media art history. The original Blinkenlights, first installed 11 sep 2001 (sic!) in the Haus der Lehrers at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, was one of the first - if not the first? - of this type of public installations. Also you should remember that this was not a permanent commercial project, but a temporary project created using DIY electronics in an empty office building. The people behind the original Blinkenlights also updated the project and shown it elsewhere, as in the Blinkenlights Arcade at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (2003) and Blinkenlights Stereoscope at Toronto’s City Hall (2008).

>> Blinkenlights.net

interactive game environment by Pierre Huyghe (1999)

Two people hold game controllers and play Pong using the lights in the ceiling as pixels.

Theo Jensen is one of those characters that you just have to love. On his CV he lists how he started studying physics in 1968, and then “stops studying physics and becomes a painter” in 1975, whereupon, in 1980, he “flies UFO across Delft”.

In 1990, he started the project now known as Strandbeest. He builds enormous, wind-powered, walking creatures out of PVC tubes, plastic bags and bottles, and other mundane products. What is so striking about these creatures, other than looking good, is the way they move. Far from some clunky robot style, they seem to move as naturally as a caterpillar or other legged insect or animal. He uses genetic algorithms to develop new legs and bodies in a virtual simulation, and then builds them for real. Or perhaps these days they just evolve by themselves.

The pictures are my own, taken at Ars Electronica in 2005. There’s a whole set on Flickr.

There are lots of pictures and movies if you search for it or go to strandbeest.com.

super-i presents itself as a pair of wearable goggles with a camera on front. There’s a little box containing some electronics that let you apply different filters to the image from the camera before feeding it back to the goggles, so that you can experience the world as seen through photoshop-style filters, or - and this is what makes it interesting - as ascii art!

This piece was featured on Slashdot as “realtime ASCII Goggles” and after that all over the place, but most of them failed to dig up what it’s called and who did it, presenting it as made by “some russian artists”. Shame!

The artists are Shulgin and Chebyshev, people. Find out more at www.critipop.com and easylife.org.

Shulgin is also one of the founders of runme.org, an archive of software art.

Example Pure Data patch

Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. You can download Pd for free from puredata.info. You can also find some tutorials and other info to get you started. Pd is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

Pd is one of those graphical programming environments where you make little boxes that you connect with lines - similar to Max/MSP, but Pd is free, and more focused on audio. Personally I tend to find these graphical programming environments rather hard to work with. The curious thing about them is that it is usually just a simple to do something complex as to do something (seemingly) simple - for example, in PD, it is just as simple to mix two audio signals as it is to add two integers. And how hard is it? Well, if you need to add two integers, any regular programming language is easier to use. But if you need to mix two channels of audio - or do any other kind of audio processing - Pd is really worth checking out.

If you’re wondering what the patch (Pd programs are referred to as “patches”) above does, here’s what: The “metro” is a metronome that sends a “bang” (that activates whatever comes next) every 1000 ms. The delay box delays its signal with 300 ms. The boxes with two numbers each (127 250, 0 250) are message boxes that send their messages to the “line” object, which delivers a “ramp” - a linear interpolation. That part taken together generates a signal that will rise every second. Below this the signal is scaled down by 127 before it hits the mysterious *~ box. As you might guess, * means multiply. Less obvious is the tilde, which indicates we’re multiplying signals, not numbers. Multiplying the signal like this means to change the volume. The signal is the signal that comes from the dac~ box, which is a digital-to-analog conversion box - meaning it picks up the microphone. It goes to the dac~ box, which means it gets sent to the speakers.

So… what does it do, exactly? Well, I used a more complex version of this in an exhibition were a microphone with an extra amplifier picked up ambient sounds from the exhibition room, and then played the sounds back to a speaker in the ceiling. Instead of just a simple pulse like in this patch it made “heartbeat” sounds, using the sounds from the room itself. (And yes, it had to be tweaked so it wouldn’t create a feedback loop). Instead of the metro is used a signal coming from an Arduino board to synchronize the sound with a sculpture of a beating heart in a glass jar, which I already wrote about here.

OpenFrameworks is a cross-platform, open-source C++ library for creative coding. It seems to be really catching on in the new media field, and a lot of artists and hackers are now using it. Watch the video I posted here, “Made with openFrameworks” for some examples of how it has and can be used, and some interviews with some people using it.

Basically what openFrameworks (”oF” for short) does is to allow you to easily use graphics, audio and video (generating as well as playing from files) and using stuff like video tracking (using OpenCV) and audio inputs. It is also easy to extend it further using other C++ libraries or using inputs from e.g. an Arduino board.

It is a C++ library which really means you’ll have to know (or learn!) C++ to use it. For me, openFrameworks is what finally made me force myself to learn C++.

openFrameworks is free, really free, and you can get it by signing up at openframeworks.cc. Actually, you don’t have to sign up either, you can just go straight to openframeworks.cc/about - but you really should sign up to the list.

You will need a C++ IDE. You can use Code::Blocks to build your applications, whether you’re on Windows, Mac or Linux. It is free, too! Or you can use XCode (free, on a Mac) or Visual C++ (on Windows, comes in a free version called “Express”) if you prefer.

openFrameworks vs Processing

• Processing is based on Java, openFrameworks is based on C++.
• Processing is friendlier and easier to use. OpenFrameworks applications are faster.
• Processing comes with its own IDE that you can code directly in, for openFrameworks you’ll need to install a separate C++ IDE. However, the Processing IDE is pretty crappy and you’re better off installing a proper Java IDE such as Eclipse if you want to do some real work.
• Processing builds to desktop applications and web applets, openFrameworks only to desktop applications.
• Both are cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux)
• Both are free.
• Both have an active community that share code and will help you on the forums.
• Both require coding skills.

Recommendations: if you are a total programming newbie and want to try some stuff or to learn to program, I recommend you to start with Processing. If you just want to do some graphic stuff that you want to put online, Processing will do just fine (or consider using Flash). If you already know C++, consider going for openFrameworks. If you want or need really fast applications, you should know that Processing is no way near as fast as openFrameworks.