The Creators Project

Previously on LAYERS: Unpacking The Andrew Weathers Ensemble’s “Hard, Ain’t It Hard”

LAYERS: Peeking Inside Eluvium's "Envenom Mettle"

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:53:23 -0400

This week’s LAYERS brings us the lush and beautiful sounds of Portland, Oregon via ambient musician Eluvium. Eluvium, real name Matthew Cooper, has been a definitive figure in the Pacific Northwest’s instrumental music scene, releasing huge multi-facited orchestral compositions and touring across the country with the likes of Explosions In The Sky and Benoît Pioulard. He’s known to use electronic sample manipulation and experimental guitar work to create cinematic soundscapes that blend various minimal genres into stunningly reflexive and emotional ballads.

This May, Eluvium will release his sixth album, a sprawling double-disc release titled Nightmare Ending through Brooklyn label Temporary Residence. The album’s second single “Envenom Mettle” finds Cooper building a pulsing instrumental piece that grows with post-rock momentum and swirling piano melodies, taking the listener on a beautiful aural adventure.

Read below to find out how Eluvium achieved his signature genre-defying sound through layering classical instruments to orchestral enormity and enlisting the help of friend and Explosions In The Sky guitarist Mark Smith:

It was interesting to work on taking this song apart. For one, because it was actually 24 tracks total, which is definitely on the high end of number of tracks for me. Also, because the song was such a beast, it was fun to put it back together and see what happened. It sounds a little different than the final mix for the album, but
for the sake of keeping things realistic while also not giving up the entire ghost, I found it best to consolidate things into 6 sections, instead of the 24 separate tracks.

Scatter Organs:

First we have the organs, which I have seemingly called the “scatter organs.” The theory here was to create something rejoicing and majestic for the song as a backbone, but as time went by, I pulled it a little further back into the mix and decided it would be a good idea to give them a bumbling and jumpy feel.

I cut them up into pieces and layered them on top of each other in unique ways that created jumps in the chord progression and volume while also giving it a natural delay. They have an interesting effect by themselves.

Pianos:

Second we have the pianos. It took me a while to figure out the tone of these as they needed a lot of punch, but I didn’t want them sitting too far upfront. In the end, I decided to pitch down a percentage of the overall outgoing sound and soak them in some reverbs.

I think there are 4 or 5 layers here, though it doesn’t really sound like it. There’s at least one running late for a bit of slap back delay effect.

Reverse, Tape, Rhodes:

Here, titled “Reverse, Tape, Rhodes,” is basically just that. I think I played pianos and keyboards along with the entire song, and then mixed them together and they weren’t working very well. They seemed a little heavy handed, so I put them in reverse and added some reverbs and distortions. It created a nice constant to go along with the “scatter organs.” The other two things are a simple rhodes melody and a mashed up eaten tape sound mix of the rhodes with some other random artifacts in there.

Sounds like I used the sound of plugging in a quarter inch guitar cable here and there. Adding effects to a live cable plugging in or being unplugged from pedals or guitars can create some nice sounds. I think I did some of that on an older album of mine called ‘Talk Amongst The Trees’.

Percussion:

Here is the percussion. I honestly can’t remember the sound source for this but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is me just hitting the built in microphone on my laptop and then layering, EQ-ing , and possibly adding some manner of distortion.

I really enjoyed the static quality of them, just enough to give the song motion without it standing out too much. Though I can hear that I did some timing play on the first half and then left it straight forward on the second half, it’s pretty subtle.

Additional Sounds ft. Mark Smith:

For this song I also asked my friend Mark Smith if he wanted to add some things to it, he plays in a band called Explosions In The Sky. We’ve always gotten along well, and I’ve always enjoyed sharing things I’m working on with him, so I asked if he would be into doing this and he seemed pretty happy to try some various ideas.

He sent me a whole bunch of interesting stuff that totally blew me away. It was an outpouring of all sort of sounds. Some absolutely beautiful guitar lines along with other mixes he made from samples from various sources, and layers of noises that he had created. I took everything that he sent and layered it in all sorts of manners. Some of it stayed basically exactly as he sent it and other parts I chopped up and layered on top of each other, similar to what I did with the organs.

Additional Sounds ft. Mark Smith:

The guitar parts in particular are really lovely. I played around with multiple layers of them, doing different things so it almost sounds like classical style violins at times to me. But you probably hear something that started from something he sent at any given moment throughout the song. His parts really took the song in a whole new and exciting direction for me.

Ultimately I wanted the song to be sort of a rumbling mess of various emotions that sort of bursts, and he really helped me bring that concept to another level.

Put it all together and here’s what you get, “Envenom Mettle” by Eluvium:

@justinstaple

LAb[au]'s m0za1que Lets You Play Tetris With Tiles

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:59:41 -0400

m0za1que, a permanent installation at Maison Mécatronique in Annecy, France, is a play on flat surfaces and space. It is, after all, the brainchild of LAb[au], the architecture and design firm behind Signal to Noise—a piece that examines the kinetic properties of sound through 512 mechanical split-flaps.

In both cases LAb[au] relies on a fusion of art, technology, and science to reconstruct static space. m0za1que, for instance, immediately evokes the tiles of a bathroom wall and motorizes them, using LED fixtures to exaggerate the movement. “The artwork relates motion with color through the phenomena of light; while it’s mechanic and electronic system is exemplary for the very function of the building.” the group says.

To find out more about the collective, watch our short documentary below…

All images courtesy of LAb[au].

@tfbnght

5 Reasons You Should Get On Board With F.A.T. Lab [NYC EVENT]

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:08:51 -0400

“Celebrating more than five years of thug life, pop culture, and R&D,” F.A.T. (Free Art and Technology) Lab will be holding their exhibition “F.A.T. Gold” at Eyebeam tonight, originally scheduled for last fall but postponed due to Hurricane Sandy. If you haven’t been convinced that this is the best thing you could possibly do on this Monday evening, here are five reasons that you must be at Eyebeam tonight from 7 to 9.

1. They Exterminated Justin Bieber From The Internet.

If you aren’t a 16 year-old girl with Bieber-fever, you probably find his omnipresence in search engines and gossip sites—where you spend time researching only the really important topics such as how fat Kim K. has gotten—annoying. F.A.T. Labhas forever solved this problem with their “Shaved Bieber” add-on for Firefox. Download this plug-in, and censor Bieber from your newsfeed/Google searches/D-Listed research stints forever.

2. Because you want to support Little Brother watching Big Brother (watching Little Brother).

Although Google maintains a positive brand image with their clean web design, their cutesy, themed homepages that change based on (sometimes obscure) holidays, and their status as the ultimate answer-provider to just about any question fathomable, they have been known to monitor your web-browsing habits, making them a well-dressed version of the always prying, corporate Man. However, F.A.T. has created an alarm system so that you can know when Google is prying into your personal usage for their own money-making interests.

3. Because Anonymous is our generation’s version of James Dean.

Anti-establishment bad boys have always been hot. From James Dean, to Elvis Presley, to Sid Vicious (no? not a thing?), the bad boy rockstars have secured their spot at the most-wanted list among their female counterparts. And who embodies our generation’s rebellious spirit more than hackers? F.A.T. Lab even developed an app that let you Occupy the space where you spend most of your waking hours: the internet. In the age of internet activism, F.A.T.’s dissent make them one of the symbolic bad boys of our generation.

4. Because they helped you get into bars before you turned 21.

F.A.T. member Tobias Leingruber created Social Media ID Cards for everyone who attended his opening in Berlin after border patrol asked him what his Facebook name was when entering the US. Certainly there is a bar in New York City where the Facebook ID would be accepted as a reputable form of identification.

5. Because it is free, and you live in New York City.

Remember when you moved to the Big Apple, and you had dreams of being a cultured New Yorker who had a wardrobe that looked like Carrie Bradshaw’s, and were starting a clothing line like the guys from How to Make it In America, but yours was totally going to be successful, and you would have drinks at the bar with Barney Stinson and would spend all your spare moments going to Broadway plays and art openings? While I can put a large sum of money on the fact that you now spend more time on the ungarnished mattress which you kindly call a “bed” than doing any of the above listed things, tonight is the night it can all change. Going to Eyebeam and seeing an art show will bring you one step closer to the fantasy New Yorker you’ve always dreamed of being. If, like many others, you have to pour beer or cook food tonight to pay your rent, the exhibit will be up until April 20th. Eyebeam is open Tuesday—Saturday from 12 to 6.

Different Ways To Infinity Is A Window Onto The Beyond

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:22:19 -0400

“You’ve never heard of chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors?" It’s been several years since Ian Malcolm, the charismatic mathematician in Jurassic Park, tried to roughly explain the ins and outs of chaos theory—the concept that certain events, as small as they are, cause echoes in time which can lead to adverse effects. Each micro-variation in the present is considered to bring a tangible difference to the state of a system. The condition of the system is therefore defined as unstable and makes it impossible to predict future events.  

Spanish artist Félix Luque Sanchez developed his installation, Different Ways to Infinity, from his interest in chaos theory. This, his most recent work, is a hybrid reflection surrounding notions of complexity, infinity, and chaos which will be presented for the very first time this week during the French festival EXIT.

So, how do you reach infinity? Rather than answer the question directly his piece gives us hints and clues, many of them reminiscent of 80s sci-fi literature. To help understand th  e sophisticated approach behind Different Ways to Infinity we spoke with Sanchez so that he could clarify certain technical points for us.    At first glance, the installation appears in the form of a laboratory displaying a series of scientific records. The uniqueness of this system is enhanced by the diversity of the medium used.

The synth and dynamic animations.

“DWI is a science fiction artwork that recreates a series of experiments around processes that tend to infinity.” Sanchez notes. “The works are divided into two groups: ‘Modular’ which is a modular system to generate forms and approaches infinity by its geometrical potential to fill completely the tridimensional space, and ‘Chaos’ which is an ensemble of works inspired by chaos theory and approaches infinity through complexity.”

Modular 
The first component is a sculpture composed of complex geometrical shapes with very specific properties. Sanchez explains: "This is a modular system that generates combinations or forms using rhombic dodecahedron, a space filling polyhedra. It uses magnetic connectors to assemble together, physically and electronically, the dodecahedrons (like the Apple MagSafe). The edges of the dodecahedrons have LEDs that interact with people around the object. "

Different Ways to Infinity—modular component.

Chaos (Synth) 
The second component is a synthesizer which uses features from Chua’s circuits and is connected to oscilloscopes that reinterpret the data.“The synth uses an Arduino microprocessor to control motorized potentiometers, which modulate the signal in and out of chaos in an infinite loop.” says Sanchez. “This signal can be seen through oscilloscopes and heard through speakers. When chaos has been reached, the sound approaches white noise.”

Chaotic events are then represented by fractal shapes, scientifically labelled “Lorentz attractors”.

Different Ways to Infinity—chaotic component.

Chaos (Fluid Dynamics)
Finally, the last components of the installation are large prints and 3D animations which are the results of scientific experiments, as Sanchez explains. “A set of 3D animations and large prints uses fluid dynamic and particle software (like Krakatoa and Realflow) to simulate different behaviors in the propagation and explosion of smoke and particles. They are done in collaboration with Spanish artist Iñigo Bilbao”.

Through this research process the computational fluid mechanics of the smoke and particles are highlighted upfront (see below).

For all those who wish to discover this imaginary laboratory and reevaluate the limits of infinity, Different Ways to Infinity will be presented at the EXIT festival in Créteil, France from 4th to 14th April.

Photos Credits : Félix Luque Sanchez

@princebenoit

Fashion Line Blooms With Images Of Digitally Screen-Printed Greenery

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:30:58 -0400

As of late, fashion designers everywhere seem to be joining the herd of artists that are moving towards an increasing interconnectivity of different media and a greater use of the latest technology in their design process. The digital and virtual realms have become almost essential in the production of garments of a particular aesthetic.

Take, for example, New York City-based fashion label RICHARDS—a brain child of designer Sarah Leslie Richards, and more specifically the label’s S/S 2013 line and Fall preview. These specific collections mirror a lot of what’s going on in fashion right now: print heavy, borderline clashy concepts. But RICHARDS takes this to a whole new level using truly drool-inducing, eye-popping screen prints of digital imagery which the designer prints herself in her Brooklyn studio. Richards goes beyond the finite world of fibers and dyes, expanding her vision to include a digital cornucopia of pixelated greenery. These prints have the ability to turn any old white button-down into a massively covetable item that I may very well lose sleep over until I find.

But RICHARDS’ exploitation of digital technology doesn’t stop there. In collaboration with art director Grace Glass-Lucas Lefler, aka gg – II, RICHARDS has created a fun stop motion animation video to promote the Spring/ Summer collection. In the short video, clothing dances and hypnotizes in the absence of models to the appropriately bongo-heavy jungle rhythms of Emiliana Torrini.

Of course if you must have your gorgeous models with flowing hair bounding in fields and basking in equal parts canopy glow and late afternoon sunshine, RICHARDS gives you this as well in a second look book video.

If you didn’t get my drift before, the new collection is really unique in terms of the quality of Richard’s prints which are vaguely photographic, but not overly realistic. Oversized cropped button-downs overflow with incredibly vibrant greenage. Men’s white button-downs are coated with painterly digital landscapes of putrid chartreuse and verdant emerald that makes for a vague nod to camo, which I’m pretty sure is “back.” RICHARDS excels at the mixing of prints by layering leaves from a variety of plant species. The new collection also features prints layered directly on top of each other that makes for a static-like jumbling of the senses. Just take a look below and see for yourself what RICHARDS has accomplished.

Also, chemtrails.

Here’s a quick preview of the up-and-coming Fall collection that features the same print-conscious aesthetic, which you can see more of over at the RICHARDS site.

[via trendland]

A UK Bowstring Bridge Transforms Into A Dazzling Infinity Sign By Night

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:50:43 -0400

The Infinity Bridge in Stockton-on-Tees in Northeastern England was opened back in 2009, but continues to dazzle, reaping architectural admirers throughout the world with its incredibly unique design and accompanying light display. The structure’s namesake is drawn from the pedestrian bridge’s nighttime appearance—the blue and white LED lights spanning the bridge reflect off the surface of the River Tees, and together with the curvature of the bridge, create an awe-inspiring infinity sign.

Expedition Engineering and architecture firm Spence Associates collaborated and won the design competition that challenged UK structural artists to come up with a cutting-edge design for a pedestrian bridge as part of the area’s revival project. Light designers Speirs and Major were given the task of creating an LED light display to accompany the design.

Construction began in January of 2007 and took about a year and a half to complete. In keeping with its organic design, the bridge was built using almost entirely locally sourced components—the materials and workers were all from the surrounding area, and much of the structural components were built on site.

The light design itself is unique in that it actually responds to the movements of people as they cross the bridge, making for an interactive bridge trotting experience like you’ve probably never had. White LED lights leave a glowing trail behind the pedestrian as they journey across. This super creative lighting concept, along with the unique bowstring bend of the bridge, won the architects and engineers of the project several awards, including the highly prestigious Supreme Award for Structural Engineering Excellence.

If you can’t make it to Northeastern England any time soon, check out the video below to experience what it’s like for pedestrians to cross the bridge at night, and be sure to pay attention to the lights.

If you’re in San Francisco, make sure to check out The Bay Lights project!

Images and video courtesy of e-architect, Expedition Engineering and This Is Stockton

[via Collabcubed]

@MlleDisser

In Everybody Wants To Kill Bruce Willis A Whole City Wants Him Dead

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:23:53 -0400

It must be tough being Bruce Willis. Constantly having to save the world, having to walk across glass in bare feet, all those dirty vests you’ve got to wash. Plus, everyone’s trying to kill you all the time. But that’s what happens when you’re an action hero, Bruce.

Pierre-Alexandre Chauvat is someone who knows this only too well and in his mashup of 39 different movies, Everybody Wants To Kill Bruce Willis, he presents a story of Bruce Willis being hunted by an entire city. Even Al Pacino and Kurt Russell are out to get him—and you would’ve thought they were all buddies who hung out at Planet Hollywood sharing a plate of texas tostados.

But Bruce being Bruce, he’s not going to take it lying down. He’s going to take it sitting down—with some firepower, some car chasing, and some explosions. Because that’s what happens when you’re the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Super Mario World Turned Into A Glitched-Out Spacetime Organ

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:14:35 -0400

Most of us know Super Mario Bros. as a seminal video game, but such is its celebrity that it’s been used in all manner of reinventions. In the video above, Super Mario Spacetime Organ, Chris Novello hacks Nintendo’s most famous game to turn it into what he calls a “strange instrument”.

By using a multitouch device called Soundplane hooked up to his custom designed Illucia hardware he’s able to turn the Mushroom Kingdom into a looped world of glitched out weirdness. “Conceptually, it is like Super Mario meets Groundhog Day.” he says. Controlling Mario with the touch pad, using his hands and xylophone mallets, he sends “alien data” into Mario’s world to turn the familiar 8-bit graphics into a broken audiovisual stream.

Novello says he wants to show people that there are more unconventional ways to interact with this iconic world. “By showing that there are other ways one could interact with this well-known cultural artifact, hopefully I can inspire others to consider: Who decides how and what we see in a computer program? What is hidden? What sorts of strange other things lurk beneath the surface of our trained expectations?”

Daniels Direct A Dizzying New Video For Passion Pit's "Cry Like A Ghost"

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:11:20 -0400

Indie pop sensation and dance-party-inducing band Passion Pit
have just released a new video for their song “Cry Like a Ghost,” off their second studio album Gossamer. The video tells us the dizzying and heart-wrenching tale of lost soul Sylvia and features the work of directorial duo extraordinaire, Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Daniels’ direction totally carries the video, which clearly required a lot of on-point coordination and planning to execute.

In the beginning we find Sylvia, the subject of the song’s heartache, dancing alone in the woods, seemingly possessed. Just when it looks as though she’s about to take a tumble, a guy catches her. But it quickly becomes clear Sylvia is tossing herself from relationship to relationship. Through fast-forward and slow motion, rewinding and repeating, we get the feeling Sylvia’s been on quite the boozy bender—tossing herself into relationship hot potato. The visual effects are appropriately dizzying. She dances from guy to guy, drunken night to hazy morning. Her life has become “some blurry little quest,” Passion Pit sings. She alternates between wearing an expression of ultra-doom and ecstasy—clearly this lifestyle is taking a toll on her.

Daniels creatively combines elements of dance, narrative, and time-lapse effects to convey a sense of the expansion and contraction of time typical of a bender like Sylvia’s. The video is right on in communicating the story behind Passion Pit’s song. You can learn more about Daniels’ process in their making-of video. There’s also an extended cut of “Cry Like a Ghost” which offers a greater narrative backbone to Sylvia’s story.

The name-sharing filmmaking duo have made a plethora of other music videos that are at once visually stunning and narrative-oriented for artists like Chromeo and The Shins. They also directed math rock band Battles in their Creators Project-produced music video for “My Machines” from their album Glass Drop. You should probably, definitely check out that video below because it’s equally as rad.

A Tale Of Oil Addiction Told Using Animated Digital Maps

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:54:35 -0400

Back in 2010 animator Patrick Jean wowed the internet with his short film Pixels, featuring pixels invading New York. Donkey Kong clambered up the Empire State Building and space invaders shot up Manhattan as the city succumbed to the power of 8-bit. The video was clever, fun, and skilfully executed. He was also involved with the video for Boys Noize’s “ICH R U,” an impressive stop-motion film made using computer keyboard keys.

His latest video is Motorville, a collaboration with sound designer David Kamp, and it’s another innovative piece. This time he uses the virtual maps of OpenStreetMaps to tell a story about our dependence on oil and its environmental consequences.

By creating a being made from maps to relate the story, the message is told in an engaging and fun way that never feels preachy. So we get a well-crafted, concise, and conscientious allegorical tale that highlights our collective addiction to this black gold.

[via " target="_blank">Vimeo Staff Picks]

What Is Seam Carving? An Explanation And Tutorial [VIDEO]

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:15:18 -0400

When resizing images, you’re normally faced with a choice: stretch, scale, or crop. But what if you could alter an image’s proportions in a way that respected its content, altering the least noticeable parts of the image rather than cropping from the edges or stretching the whole thing? This is exactly the capacity provided by a technique called Seam Carving.

Seam Carving was originally published in a 2007 paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. Here’s Avidan and Shamir’s video explaining the technique and demonstrating some of its applications:

In this tutorial, I’ll explain how Seam Carving works and introduce you to a Processing library that will let you use Seam Carving in your own projects.

How Does Seam Carving Work?

As you’ve seen in Avidan and Shamir’s video, Seam Carving can be used for multiple applications: shrinking images, expanding them, eliminating content, etc. In this tutorial we’re going to focus on the first and most straightforward of these: shrinking images.

Using Seam Carving to shrink an image is a three step process:

1. Define the important parts of the image that we want to preserve.

2. Use Dynamic Programming to calculate the costs of every potential path through the image.

3. Follow the cheapest path to remove one pixel from each row or column to resize the image.

Following these steps will shrink the image by one pixel in our chosen dimension (depending on whether we’re making the image shorter or skinnier). We can repeat the process as many times as we want to resize the image as much as necessary. And, at the end of this post, I’ll point you towards examples of how we can pre-calculate these seams in order to enable interactive content-aware resizing or even to apply it to video.

1. Defining the Important Parts of an Image

What are the most important parts of an image? Which parts of a given image should we eliminate first when resizing and which should we hold onto the longest? There are many ways to answer this question. In the original paper, Avidan and Shamir explore a variety of them including eye tracking to detect which parts of the image people actually look at and an interactive mode that lets creators paint in the areas they want to preserve (about which more later).

However, the simplest and frequently most-effective answer is the gradient of the image. An image gradient highlights the parts of the original image that are changing the most. It’s calculated by looking at how similar each pixel is to its neighbors. Large uniform areas of the image will have a low gradient value and the more interesting areas—edges of objects, places with a lot of detail, etc.—will have a high value.

For example, given this original image:

the gradient image will look like this (where brighter pixels represent higher value areas):

The solid green areas of the curtain and the purple floor under the chairs are clearly low value. Whereas the edges of each figure’s head are the most valuable.

This is just right for content-aware resizing.

(Additionally, as mentioned above, you could alter this cost image manually to achieve various effects. For example in his Short People video, Scott Garner altered the weight image to protect the head and shoulders of figures so that Seam Carving would distort their height to hilarious results.)

2. Calculating the Cost Grid: Dynamic Programming

Now that we’ve calculated the value of each pixel, we’re ready to start trying to remove pixels from the image to shrink it down. This time, we’ll be resizing the image horizontally so we need to remove one pixel from each row of the image. And we like the pixels that we remove to be arranged into a single connected row. This will prevent any disjunctions in the image: areas where a whole piece of the image seems to have been moved over by multiple pixels, something that definitely catches the eye.

Put another way, our goal is to find a path of connected pixels from the bottom of the image to the top. By “connected," I mean that we’ll never jump more than one pixel left or right as we move up the image from row to row.

And we’re looking for a very specific path: the one who’s pixels have the lowest total value. In other words, we want to find the path of connected pixels from the bottom to the top of the image that touches the darkest pixels in our gradient image.

One way to do this would be to simply calculate the costs of each possible path through the image one-by-one. Start with a single pixel in the bottom row, navigate every path from there to the top of the image, keep track of the cost of each path as you go.

However, there are a lot of paths from each pixel to the top of the image. Take a look at this diagram:

The arrows represent each possible move from one row to the next. From just that one pixel there are hundreds of paths through just those three rows. If you played this out for every pixel on the bottom row all the way through the image you’d end up with an enormous number of paths, an amount that would take us far too long to actually compute. Calculating the cost of each possible path one at a time is totally impractical.

To avoid this conundrum, we’ll use a technique called Dynamic Programming. Dynamic Programming lets us touch each pixel in the image only once, aggregating the total cost as we go, in order to calculate the final cost of an individual path.

Instead of starting at the bottom of the image and working up recursively through each possible path, we start at the top and work our way down, adding the cost of the cheapest above neighbor to each pixel. This way, we accumulate cost as we go: setting the value of each pixel not just to its own cost, but to the full cost of the cheapest path from there to the top of the image.

This effect is easy to see if you visualize these costs as an image:

Notice how the spots where the gradient image was brightest are now the roots of inverted triangles of brightness as the cost of those pixels propagate into all of the pixels within the range of the widest possible paths upwards.

When we arrive at the bottom row, the lowest-valued pixel will necessarily be the root of the cheapest path through the image. Now we’re ready to start removing seams.

3. Removing Seams

Due to the power of Dynamic Programming, the process of actually removing seams is quite easy. All we have to do to calculate the cheapest seam is to start with the darkest pixel in the bottom row and work our way up from there, selecting the cheapest of the three adjacent pixels in the above row. Dynamic Programming guarantees that the pixel with the lowest value will be the root of the cheapest connected path up from there.

Once we’ve selected which pixels we want to remove, all that we have to do is go through and copy the remaining pixels on each side into a new image that’s one pixel narrower than our original. And voila, we’ve carved a seam.

Seam Carving in Processing

As part of Makematics, a class I teach at NYU ITP in converting computer science research into creative tools, I built a Dynamic Programming library for Processing. This library includes an implementation of Seam Carving that makes the technique really easy to work with in Processing.

You can download the library: HERE.

One of the examples included with the library demonstrates Seam Carving (I’ve also included the source for that example, which includes comments explaining the details at the bottom of this post).

I’ve also posted the sketch I created during the New Cinema hackathon that adds a cache to the Seam Carving results so that you can resize an image interactively in real time.

Greg Borenstein is an artist and technologist in New York. He’s currently a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and recently the author of Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino and Makerbot from O’Reilly.

@atduskgreg

Nostalgia—Well, There's An App For That Too

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:23:07 -0400

Everyone loves the feeling of happening upon a long forgotten photo, but this experience has unfortunately become increasingly rare. Those awesome pangs of nostalgia are hard to come by with the uber-accessibility of our photos online. But a genius new iPhone app has found a way to recapture that feeling. Throwback, developed by Pang Labs, allows you to capture images with your iPhone. But instead of storing them on your device, or uploading them to a digital album where everyone including you can access them whenever, the pictures disappear only to reappear at a later date.The app actually returns your images to you anywhere from one week to five years down the line. You can either choose exactly when the image is returned, broaden the scope to a date range, or select “surprise” and there’s no telling when the photo will appear.

Sorry bro, not in this economy.

The possibilities are endless for the emotions the app can induce. Imagine cringing as an image of you and your ex pops up three years after you’ve broken up. A booze-soaked night from five weeks ago appears and suddenly illuminates your brown out, helping you to recall how that traffic cone ended up in your living room. And yes maybe it was just you who ate that entire gallon of Superman ice cream. Perhaps your favorite yin-yang-printed shortalls will appear not so cool in four years and two months.

So choose your own adventure, snap a pic, and send that boomerang of an image off into oblivion with Throwback. Just hopefully the photo isn’t too embarrassing.

Images via Throwback and ubergizmo.com

MAD Architects' Honeycomb Skyscraper

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:21:32 -0400

Honeycomb structures are usually associated with bees, not high rise buildings in China’s ever-growing cities. But MAD Architects are adding an iconic-looking honeycomb building—the Sinosteel International Plaza which is currently under construction and due to be completed this year—to the urban megapolis that is Tianjin.

The hexagonal façade not only looks good, but it also plays a structural role creating an exoskeleton so no internal columns are needed beyond the building’s core. The organic-looking patterns evolve across the exterior, giving a nod to China’s cultural heritage and the hexagonal Chinese Pavilions that can be found in parks, gardens, and temples across the land. It also gives the building an animated look and alters its appearance from different perspectives.

The aim was to give the two towers—one an 358 meter office tower and the other a 95 meter high hotel—a softer look than the usual skyscraper. “From a very simple concept, yet deeply rooted in ancient Chinese architecture, a subtle and sensitive building arises. Sinosteel International Plaza will establish a different urban landscape and soften the hard edge of the concrete jungle we live in, our modern city.” MAD Architects say.

Find out more about MAD Architects in our documentary below…

Images courtesy of MAD Architects

[via evolo]

TRANSFER Gallery Attempts To Crack The Digital Art Dilemma

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:18:56 -0400

Digital art, and in particular Net Art, has long had a chip on its shoulder. There’s simply no market for this kind of immaterial, internet-based work. Like most media online—be it music, film, books, or pricey software packages—nobody wants to pay for it. Countless artists, curators, and galleries have experimented with the salability of digital work — some have been successful, others less so. But on the whole, the problem still persists, plaguing the community of artists making and sharing their work on the web.

Transfer, a new gallery that opened in East Williamsburg last weekend, aims to create a space for artists working online to experiment with making and selling physical work. In doing so, co-owners Kelani Nichole and Jereme Mongeon, are encouraging a young group of artists who primarily work online to re-connect with their roots in drawing, painting, sculpture or photography and giving them four blank walls within which they can literally “transfer” their artistic practice back into a physical context.

Their first show, “Truisms”, a solo show from new media artist Alexandra Gorczynski, sees a return to Gorczynski’s painterly past. Its main centerpiece is a mural of a Mac desktop background and stacked with “files” of her images. The prints themselves are collage-based works riddled with computer iconography and the painterly gesture of Photoshop. Also accompanying the show is a limited edition artist book that was sold ahead of the show’s opening to raise money for its production costs, getting the community to support the exhibition much like it would on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.

Gorczynski painting her Mac desktop mural at Transfer.

The finished mural.

The opportunity for this kind of experimentation may prove a crucial one—not only for the creative, aesthetic, and conceptual development of the artists involved, but also in terms of cracking the question of how best to support and sustain this creative practice. At the end of the day, the fact still holds that people are far more willing to pay for tangible objects than they are for jpeg files. The ability to package immaterial or ephemeral work into salable components is a crucial question for digital art to crack—we need only to look at performance art to see this notion reinforced.

It’s still early days for Transfer, but the gallery shows promise. We spoke with Kelani Nichole, the gallery’s co-founder and curator, about her vision and goals for the space.

The Creators Project: Why did you decide to start Transfer?
Kelani Nichole: Transfer was born out of a desire to continue a line of inquiry that developed over the course of my independent curatorial career in Philadelphia. Specifically: I began to investigate the ways in which certain bodies of ‘New Media’ work are crossing the boundaries of physical and digital space.

Having recently relocated to NYC, I didn’t yet have access to a local space to realize curatorial projects. My experience with little berlin in Philadelphia gave me a solid foundation for what it takes to maintain a space. So as I started to look around and found I could acquire maybe 600 or 700 square feet within a budget my partnership and day job can support, well, that was a pleasant surprise.

But the real driving factor to take the plunge and acquire some walls for a year was a desire to work more intimately with artists one-on-one, through a series of solo shows. I wanted to explore how access to an exhibition space without the constraints of a typical institutional model might help deepen and extend a body of work consisting primarily of computer-based practices.

A diptych from “Truisms.”

How did you arrive at your particular curatorial focus?
The focus of our exhibition calendar in this first year at Transfer is definitely an evolution of >get >put which was my most recent independent curatorial project. That show was the culmination of a year and a half of research, collaboration, and synthesis among a group of six artists.

My current focus is to invest in and engage with the community of artists working with rich computer-based practices—artists who are exploring the friction between digital practice and its physical instantiation—by developing solo and duo shows within our walls. Previous collaborators seemed a natural place to start with Transfer, specifically A Bill Miller and Alexandra Gorczynski, as I have watched their work evolve and have an established a close working relationship with them both.

On being a “so-called net.art gallery”: there are various labels loosely attached to this networked group of artists who exhibit actively online and participate in creative exchange on the Internet – Net.art, New Aesthetic, New Media, Glitch, etc. Transfer feels limited by any one of these labels but its clear that in the sum total of these practitioners lies some significant momentum.

One of Gorczynski’s ‘Wacom Tablet Paintings.’

What is it about taking art from the digital to the physical space that appeals to you? Is there an implicit challenge in that “transfer” that excites you?
Through the feedback I received from ‘>get >put’ it became apparent that space is one of the most essential needs that practicing artists are seeking—this has always been the case to be sure, but somehow the urgency to create a physical space for artists working with digital practices was too much to ignore. The inaccessibility of physical space is something that often drives a body of work further into digital space where audience and storage space is vast and negligible in cost.

The hope with Transfer is that when backed by a platform of support these artists can find a broader, “away from keyboard” audience, engage further with the more physical (or if you prefer, “traditional”) side of their practices, and expand and explore the relationship between their digital and physical work in new ways.

Why do you think it’s important for digital artists to have a space to experiment with making physical work?
Audience and encounter are some of the most essential experiences that help develop an artist’s body of work. With the vast connectivity and access of the internet, practices have adapted to be consumable within the browser, to be an integral part of the stream and feed of the network. These practices are often rooted in more traditional training, yet because of demand and access, artists invest in digital, distributed mediums as opposed to engaging physically with their painterly or drawing or sculptural or performative backgrounds. If you have eight shows online in a year and not a single one is in a physical gallery space, why would you invest in material work?

I’m of the opinion that a body of work transcends its physical manifestation. I’m interested in artists who want to explore what happens as they position their computer-based practices in a physical encounter with the audience—in a way that isn’t prescribed upon by the institution or the network. This physical engagement is what I think is essential in the idea of our exhibition space.

The limited edition artist book that Transfer sold to raise money for “Truisms.”

You’ve developed a unique monetary model with Transfer. Why do you think a mixture of community supported pre-sales and traditional gallery sales is proving an effective approach?
Its not proven yet! But the success of platforms such as Kickstarter to fund the arts is undeniable. Much of this is due to the scale of that platform’s audience, but when it comes down to it, people will support work they believe in if the price is affordable and the transaction is easy.

A few of the artists we’re working with have done personal fundraising for their work, and even dabbled with sales online. We want to help further and formalize those efforts in relationship to our space, and the hope my partner and I have is that with our professional skillset to back the platform we can find new footing for moving the funding model to the front of the transactional funnel—a more evolved patronage model if you will, where acquisition of smaller collection items enables larger exploration within the gallery walls. We hope it gives artists a means to deepen their practice, and new audiences a way to broaden (or start) their personal collections.

Are you willing to reveal how successful sales have been? Even in abstract terms?
So far, we’ve covered the production costs of our first show, and there’s enough coming in for the artist to get a place here in NYC. But aside from the financial gain for the artist, the opportunity to produce a solo exhibition and the new connections and exposure her practice is receiving are the most important measures of success in our eyes. This is work we believe in and want to see it grow and develop.

What’s been the most surprising thing about the reaction to this first show?
The opening night was surreal. I didn’t take a single picture because every time I looked around the room I was just overwhelmed with joy at the energy, enthusiasm, and support of the community of people invested in new media practice here in NYC. There were art stars, internet figures extraordinaire, writers, critics, people working in the arts as their second job (like us), old and young new media practitioners, collectors, co-workers, arts tech community members and collaborators… everyone seemed to have a mutual stake in furthering this conversation. The most surprising part of it all is that this thing I felt urgency to create is aligning to meet a real need that exists in the artworld right now.

Go Behind The Scenes Of Leo Villareal's Monumental Light Sculpture The Bay Lights

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:09:54 -0400

On the March 5, 2013 San Francisco’s Bay Bridge lit up with 25,000 LEDs courtesy of Leo Villareal’s installation The Bay Lights. The huge light sculpture will be illuminating the bridge for the next two years as locals get to see a magnificent display on a nightly basis.

Courtesy of The Bay Lights. Photography by Lucas Saugen

In the video above light sculptor Villareal discusses how this project ties in with his previous work, where the idea is to create a communal space. For The Bay Lights Villareal worked with the dynamics of the bridge—traffic, water, light, air, wildlife—to guide the sequencing of the patterns. Patterns created using a process known as “emergent behavior”, which means each sequence is unique and unpredictable every time the bridge lights up.

Courtesy of The Bay Lights. Photography by Lucas Saugen

For such a large scale work it’s no surprise that it’s become a focal point for the local community, a place for them to come and marvel and appreciate their city. “For me the most successful art changes the way you see things, you can’t see things the same way once you’ve seen a great piece of art,” Villareal notes.

In the two years that it will be installed, it’s estimated that over 50 million people will directly see the piece—to get an idea of how the public have taken the piece to their hearts so far, take a look at some of the reactions from Twitter and Instagram below.

The lighting of the bay bridge shows how art can transform a city and ina moment. #baylights #sanfrancisco twitter.com/RogerLBarnett/…
— Roger Barnett (@RogerLBarnett) March 6, 2013

I’ll never get tired of the SF Bay Lights on the Bay Bridge. Could b all night watching this! Memories of Burning Man. twitter.com/fonziewonzie/s…
— Afonso Salcedo (@fonziewonzie) March 23, 2013

#SF #BayBridge lit up tonight. Eat your heart out, Golden Gate Bridge! Photo by Glenn W. twitter.com/TheGraceKeh/st…
— Grace Keh (@TheGraceKeh) March 6, 2013

via

Check out these GIFs of the sculpture too, courtesy of Mr. GIF

Turn Your Favorite Website Into A Playable 3D Maze With World Wide Maze

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:24:19 -0400

A rad new game from Google Chrome Experiments synchs up your computer’s Chrome browser with your smartphone to create a multi-platform coordinated 3D maze. The game, called World Wide Maze, turns any website into a playable game where you navigate a ball around a series of courses.

So how does it work? Visit the game’s site on any computer and connect with your smartphone. There are three different ways to achieve this, the simplest appears to be plugging in the URL “g.co/maze” to your phone and typing in a code. Once you’ve done this, plug in the URL of any website on your computer’s Chrome browser—the more visually stimulating, the better.

Suddenly a multi-layered maze will pop up on your computer screen, and your phone will transform into a handheld controller. The website of your choice morphs into a colorful 3D maze.

You can play by guiding the ball that appears on your computer screen through the maze via your smartphone. Tilt and jump your way along the trail of glowing blue spheres that wind through a cavernous 3D version of your favorite website.

[via db-db.com]

Squirrel Ninja Battles Morphing Girl In This Pleasantly Surreal Music Video

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:49:25 -0400

When it comes to visualizing music, often the form the visuals take is quite abstract, with various shapes and patterns representing certain components of the song. But Polish illustrator and animator Renata Gąsiorowska‘s music video for Alphabets Heaven’s “Birthday” uses audio cues to shape a character-driven plot around, with movements and gestures illustrating the beats and bleeps of the music.

A Sketch of one of the characters

The track’s minimalist style and laid back beats translate perfectly well to the simple hand drawn style of the animation, which has a charming, child-like vibe to it. Created using TVPaint Animation Gąsiorowska cites anime Tekkonkinkreet as inspiration as well as ‘some Japanese martial arts classes I took last year for a while (as a total noob and weakling, but still it was fun), Adventure Time I watch with my roommate each time we are having dinner, platform games I played a lot as a kid. I also love animations by Priit Pärn, Sally Cruikshank, Julia Pott, David OReilly, Atsushi Wada, and Piotr Kamler. Even if they are not obvious inspirations for this one. But mostly, I am a 90s kid with a brain infected by games, Cartoon Network and trashy cartoons and anime from Polsat and RTL 7.’

The software program

The narrative concerns a girl, who morphs into a blobby cat-type creature, fighting a shape-shifting squirrel boy before they finally end up getting along and dancing, in a pleasantly surreal tale that has a comic book aesthetic (Gąsiorowska creates comics too) that fits perfectly with the song’s blissful tones. ‘When I first heard “Birthday” I quickly got addicted and after couple days of listening to it i had this film in my head’, Gąsiorowska explains. ‘Animating all of this was very fun and the music has a very sharp rhythm and accents so it was perfect for me to fit fight and dance scenes to it.’

Images courtesy of Renata Gąsiorowska

Real Events Shot On An iPhone Become Fictional Short Film

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:32:12 -0400

Versus (2013) is a short film by Zach NeSmith shot using his iPhone 4S that revives the truthfulness and stylistic techniques of cinéma vérité, blurring the line between fiction and documentary. Footage recorded over two years was edited into a story about a lonely artist and a hard-partying student. “The goal was to create a fictional narrative out of actual footage from my life.” the filmmaker says.

For the past few years people have been creating short—and even feature—films using their smartphones. There’s the iPhone Film Festival and the iPhone Cinema Vimeo channel, both popular platforms for artists and iPhone users to showcase their originality using the shiny touchscreen sitting in your pocket.

But in Versus NeSmith does something different by turning an assortment of real footage from his life into a fictitious story which examines the psychology of Zach, an introverted art student, and highlights the generational reality of college partying. “Working this way presented many creative challenges, difficulties and long-awaited solutions.” says NeSmith. “Using my iPhone 4S to film most of the movie, I was able to shoot easily at any time in any place and had culminated days of footage by the time editing and plot development began.”

Unlike the parodying, fake situations of mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap (1984,) or I’m Still Here (2010,) NeSmith leaves the unaltered reality to his iPhone camera, and the fiction to his editing skills. By gathering candid footage he was able to collage home videos and clips of his life to build characters and narratives around the formal qualities of his shots and the opinions and reactions of his friends.

In his look at our society, NeSmith uses the beautiful qualities and improvisational techniques of the cinéma vérité style to tell a story of his own that goes hand-in-hand with our collective reality, and could perhaps signify a new documentary style where imagination has no boundaries.

@Adrianopoliz

Gamer's Paradise: Kentucky Route Zero Explores A Fictional Kentucky Labyrinth

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:12:48 -0400

In this recurring column, Leigh Alexander visits exciting new creative frontiers in the video game space, which is seeing a period of incredible growth and diversification, attracting new talent, and demonstrating intriguing innovation. Here she’ll cover emerging artists, trends, and so much more.

Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero is among the darlings of this year’s Independent Games Festival with a stunning four nominations—one for Excellence in Narrative, one for Excellence in Audio, one Excellence in Visual Design and one in the Seumas McNally grand prize tier.

It’s an adventure game about a truck driver, whom we know only as Conway, trying to deliver antiques to an address in Kentucky. He gets lost along the way, and seeking help from the people he meets seems to urge him toward a highway called the Zero, which may not even exist.

It’s a beautiful, rich painting that romanticizes the byways and backroads of the American south; lanky Conway and his equally-lanky old hound are silhouetted against massive sunsets alongside gas lights and farm houses, and the sonic landscape—the atmospheric buzz of incandescent light or the chorus of crickets, and occasionally the oddly-melancholy swell of bluegrass music—makes the entire experience absolutely transporting.

The signposts and markers of what we know “adventure games” to be are absent, though. The player guides Conway on his journey of purpose and alienation just by clicking on where he ought to walk, and he interacts with other players through conversation choices to progress the story, and that’s really all. Aside from the ostensible goal of finding the Zero and making Conway’s delivery, goals are obscured—there are no “puzzles.” Characters appear and disappear without literal explanation, allowing the experience to feel more like an avant-garde play, restrained and postmodern. It’s even being released in five “acts.”

In all his interviews about the game, Jake Elliot (his development partner in Cardboard Computer is Tamas Kemenczy) has cited his own southern road explorations as an inspiration—as well as another iconic title of exploration in Kentucky.

The game commonly known as the “grandfather” of all adventures was 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game about underground exploration. Its author, Will Crowther, liked to explore Kentucky‘s Mammoth Cave system, and amid divorce he made the game as a way to share his hobby with his daughters.

The game’s origin story didn’t become widely known until those for whom it was a formative early experience of interactive entertainment could connect and gather via the internet. Mostly, Colossal Cave Adventure earned its enduring place in history because it was no ordinary cave exploration, but an unsympathetically minimalist and occasionally frustrating little game that often detoured into the surreal, with magic and treasures abundant.

Colossal Cave is beloved by history, but nowadays one might argue its disinclination to communicate with the player, the illogic of how its places bolt together with objectives and destinations unclear, don‘t gel with assumed best practices of game design or conventions of “storytelling,” (if there is even any). In the years since then, story has become the primary mandate of the adventure genre—that and puzzle design, where players generally stuff their virtual pockets with any object that isn’t bolted down, and combine them within the environment to escape predicaments, salve strange characters or otherwise solve barriers to progress.

Like its inspiration, Kentucky Route Zero rejects the idea that story logic ought to be transparent, or that a game needs challenges or puzzles to take players on a meaningful adventure. It is never frustrating—in fact, it’d be meaningfully accessible even to someone with little to no “video gaming” vocabulary. The primary point of engagement in games is identifying who Conway is and what he’s feeling through subtle choices in dialog—like whether to admit something hurts, or whether he has named his dog.

But it is provocative and touching, and continually prompts players to examine their relationship to it—as Conway’s journey unfolds, does he reveal himself to be someone who shares himself with others, or not? Does he take an interest in the lives of the people around him or insist on pursuing the Zero?

Kentucky Route Zero seems at every turn to be gently questioning the player’s own attitude to goals, and perhaps to technology and play, too. Early in the game, a group of people are too engaged in a nerdy board game to acknowledge Conway; he borrows a computer to help him find his way, and repairing and watching a TV forms a key plot point. In context the game seems to be asking us about the nature of engagement with ourselves and the people around us.

Increasingly, the games that most excite fans and the people who make them are less concerned with the “rules” that have previously defined how they ought to be made, or what qualifies something as a game if it doesn’t have “challenges.” Colossal Cave’s similar obliviousness to those practices helped make it iconic—although the rules were yet to be defined in the time it was made.

Kentucky Route Zero, meanwhile, practices a very conscientious rejection of those parameters, and its broad celebration in the IGF feels like an important milestone for the games community’s ongoing introspection about what it can be and do. It could be viewed as a study in its own choices, but it never stops feeling like an intimate, personal question about how we get our sense of value and fulfillment through interaction. It never feels overwhelming, but alongside the game’s violet twilight and the purring of a truck engine, you can get lost in it. Or find yourself.

Previously: The Bleak, Toilsome World Of Cart Life

@leighalexander

David OReilly Makes Modern Cartoons That Punch You In The Gut

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:34:00 -0400

David OReilly’s 2011 short, The External World (above) is an utterly dark blend of 1920s animation tropes, anime cuteness and retro video-game aesthetics. The piece has been OReilly’s crowning film in a series of short works that are tied together by his artfully lo-fi, perversely hilarious point of view. The External World undoubtedly helped OReilly widen his fanbase, as it has deservedly racked up an impressive amount of honors and awards.

The filmmaker announced over Twitter that he was releasing all 65 characters rigs from The External World as a free download from his site. This isn’t the first time he’s given away assets for free, but it certainly is the biggest and most personal gift to his audience to date. Though he’s not about to start making tutorials on how the rigs work, he’s giving his files away with few strings attached.

On his site he writes, “You can use and modify them in any way you like as long as it’s for a non-commercial purpose. Showreels, short films, indie games, all that stuff is cool – just give credit. If it’s web based – include a link to my site.” Animators have already started experimenting and posting their External World remixes.

We caught up with OReilly to ask him about his decision to give away the rigs, fan art, and the future of short films on the web.

The Creators Project:What was your intent in sharing the rigs? Do you have any secret hopes as to what people might use your characters for?
David OReily:I initially fought to have copyright over the film and all the assets we created, and I had a choice to either protect them or share them with the community. I chose the latter because I feel they are now more use to others than myself. 3D has the huge advantage of having assets that can be reused infinitely by anyone, but the independent scene is tiny and very few individuals own their work or are willing to share it. There’s also a huge demand for well-designed, lightweight characters that people can animate with. The few free rigs that are available tend to be Pixar-Dreamworks hybrids that are harder to learn from because they’re so complex. I also generally feel that Creative Commons is a force for good in the world. Copyright law is useful but only up to a degree. I’ve said this before but I would not be doing what I do if I wasn’t able to pirate films and software liberally when I started out.

You said the rigs cost upwards of $18k to produce—mind lending us any insight into how they were made?
Our production budget on the film was small but a lot of it went into these characters. I designed and modeled each one myself over a period of three months. The rigging setup was done by Amy Hay who I collaborated with via Skype. When we went into production it was back and forth, as inevitably there are new features and fixes needed for animation.

I see you repost and encourage fan art. Any favorite pieces? Anything you’ve gained from other people reflecting your work back to you?
What’s amazing is what people choose to get behind. The biggest response with fan art so far has been of the character Octocat, there’s over 1000 drawings of him—mainly bizarre variations of him coming out of Russia. It all mostly happened a few years ago, since then Github gave their version of the character a big marketing push and mine has died off somewhat. Another interesting thing happened with a 3D model of Walt Disney’s head I modeled and released on Creative Commons. I didn’t expect anyone to use it but it’s ended up being a standard test model for 3D printers and other things.

There’s been renewed talk over whether or not short films could become more financially viable given new services like Vimeo Tip Jar and VHX—and whether festivals are really worth it given the restrictions they may place on releasing a film. What’s your take on the future of the short?
I was selling DRM-Free copies of my work years ago using file-transfer sites and it was a nightmare, so I’m really glad these services are starting to exist, but there’s an inherent problem nobody seems to be discussing: there is no market for short films. Again: there is no market for short films. Unfortunately, the majority of people do not distinguish between a finely crafted animated short and a cartoon they get for free on TV. The fact there is no market is also the great advantage of short films: because they are not tasked with making money, they are not beholden to genre or audience expectation. I believe short films are the most progressive form of filmmaking on earth, but they do not function well as a commodity because they are more of an unknown quantity to the viewer. Despite this, short films will always exist because people have stories to tell and ideas to express, and they’ll find ways of doing it no matter what, so I don’t feel the medium will ever be in danger. Whether they get the respect they deserve on a wider scale is yet to be seen.

NB: You’ll need a copy of Maya to open and play around with the models.

h/t Cartoon Brew

@gorociao

Lasers Beams And The Sounds Of A Distorted Piano Make For A Captivating Installation

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:14:51 -0400

A 30 meter wide wall displaying brooding rhythms of light is at the center of Robert Henke’s sound and laser installation Fragile Territories, that looks like some kind of futuristic computer interface out of Ghost in the Shell. The crackling, electrified atmosphere and intricate, fluctuating patterns are created by four laser beams that draw the visuals, while the altered sound of a piano provides the audio. This audiovisual concoction is generated in real-time from “statistic and stochastic algorithms”.

Adding to the sci-fi aesthetic is a shadow that looms across the installation every 4.2 seconds from left to right like “a giant blade of a windmill, a negative object that contrasts the bright projection by muting it where it appears. It is not only obscuring the image but also dampening the sounds at its current position and emitting a low frequency noise itself. A dark strong force that puts the rest in an infinitely distant background.” The artwork was featured in an exhibition at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France.

Looking at it in the video above you can see how you might get lost in its fizzing, electro allure—and the program that creates it ensures that no shape or form is ever repeated, each one unique as it engulfs visitors in its gloomy and engrossing presence.

Kinect-Based Art System Improves Disabled Children's Motor Skills

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:47:50 -0400

Remember when dial-up was so slow, you’d forgo the internet and spend hours after school playing Minesweeper or doodling on Microsoft Paint? The digital paintings above and below might harken back to the art you made during those afternoons in your parents’ basement, but they weren’t made with a click of a mouse. Instead they’re the result of a wave of the hand, and were made by disabled children using a Kinect-based virtual art system written with C++.

All artwork made by disabled children using a Kinect program during a clinical trial.

Kinect’s motion sensing capabilities have sparked a range of digital painting programs in recent years, from stylized high-profile interactive museum installations like Paik Times Five and Cloud Pink, to simplistic applications like Kinect Paint and Point 2 Paint designed to give a mess-free finger-painting experience. Just a few weeks ago Corel unveiled Painter Freestyle, a program using the Kinect-like Leap Motion Controller that brings air painting to lap and desktops. But the particular program that the images in this post were made with is unique in its aim to provide therapeutic recreation to children with disabilities.

The Kinect Virtual Art Program was designed as part of a clinical trial for disabled children aged five to ten years, conducted by Flinders University in Australia and Holland Bloorview Rehabilitation Hospital in Canada. The researchers wanted to use the Kinect’s motion technology to advance art therapy techniques, believing that artistic expression is a valuable social and emotional outlet that can develop communication skills and creativity, as well as provide physical benefits like improved motor control. Over the course of the study, 80 percent of participants experienced increased movement and enjoyment.

The Kinect removes a barrier to engagement that kids with a range of disabilities seem to take to. Parents of disabled children have noted that games marketed at the general public, like the workout game Your Shape, are being used by this special interest demographic. The study demonstrates there’s a demand for Kinect-based software designed for therapeutic use, but currently there are no commercial products like this available.

The Kinect Virtual Art Program was designed just for the purposes of the trial and you can see from the artwork, the results are quite simplistic. But the simplistic design is what gives the artwork an aesthetic that recalls an earlier computer age. And it’s one that internet artists are often trying to capture in their ironically faux-naive digital paintings. But as much as these artists might try to capture the magic of that first interaction, the vibrant artworks from the clinical trial show that there’s nothing quite like the real thing.

Electrosmog Montreal Reveals The Electromagnetic Soundscape That Underlies The City

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:28:28 -0400

Smog, it’s not a very attractive thing, even its name sounds unappealing. But as well as this air pollution that encompasses our cities, hidden from our visual spectrum is vast amounts of “electrosmog”.

This electrosmog is the result of the radio frequency field that our telecommunication infrastructure uses so we can all talk (virtually or otherwise) and text with one another. In an ongoing series that’s incorporated cities across the world, artist Jean-Pierre Aubé has been giving visual form to this electromagnetic field that lurks beneath our networked world. In the video above he highlights the electrosmog of Montréal. How does he find it? Well, with cunning, wit, plus a radio, antenna, and “instrument of his own creation”.

This allows him to create a sound mosaic by taking a snapshot of the reading every ten seconds which he then marries with pics of Montreal “digitally altered by these same measurements” to creats what’s referred to as a “documentary in sound”—which flickers in and out of consciousness, going from static buzz to snippets of snatched conversations.

Smile-Bot Wants You To Turn That Frown Upside Down

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:43:36 -0400

There’s a skit from one of comedian Bill Hicks’ standup routines that goes, “People come up to me and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.’ ‘Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?’” Which basically sums up how annoying it can be when you’re forced to have fun or smile.

But we could all do with cheering up every now and then. The stresses of the modern world and all that—my default facial expression in any city is pretty much a permanent scowl. So step up We Are Matik’s Smile-Bot which, they say, was built “to instill a sense of happiness in those around it.” And, being a giant wooden structure with holes in its belly it acts like a pied piper for kids, beckoning them to put their faces in the holes (as they would do a railing) to “encounter a glimpse into the home planet of the Smile-Bot.”

Smile-Bot

And the enchanted land that lies within

By looking into the world inside and smiling people can trigger different reactions from the installation. From changing the colors of the wooden robot’s face to making sounds. And like a gamer unlocking easter eggs, if four people show their happy faces “Ultra-Smile Mode” is activated with lights, sounds, and a rainbow. You can’t get happier than a rainbow now, can you?

As the group explain: “Quirky sound-effects and interactive features (a mini-smile screen), as well as the natural occurrence of looking at other people’s faces from within the bot add a quirky, awkwardness that create an environment where participants can’t help but smile.” Maybe they should install these as mandatory at train and subway stations for commuters across the world. Or maybe they’d just get vandalized and destroyed by rage.

And there’s also a certain cat that might benefit from having this installed in its home…

These Paper Chandeliers Look Just As Impressive As The Crystal Kind

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:58:33 -0400

Chandeliers don’t just have to be made from sparkling crystals to have an impact. Take this paper chandelier installation, a collaboration between Cristina Parreño Alonso and MIT which was presented at the VIP area at the ARCOMadrid art fair in Spain in February.

The design features varied length cardboard tubes that hang from a wire mesh so they create a wave effect. To further enhance the stalactite-like clusters lights were attached behind the tubes to enhance the formation. Using simple materials and minimal technology they’ve managed to create an entirely effective and unique installation.

Photos: Luis Asin

[via Dezeen]

Kinetica Art Fair 2013: Exploring Light As An Artistic Medium

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:17:36 -0400

In the second of our two videos (see the first here) from the Kinetica Art Fair 2013, we look at how different artists use light in their work. The selection of artists’ work ranges from Titia Ex‘s large spherical sculpture The Walk that contains 5,000 pixels created from 35,000 LED lamps, and displays an ever-changing mosaic of patterns and forms so it looks like a giant rotating orb, to Amy “Rainbow” Winter’s Picasso-inspired sound-reactive dress.

Titia Ex’s The Walk. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Rainbow Winters’ Picasso Explosion Sound Reactive Dress. Photo by Axel Pietschker.

Also included is David Ogle‘s 018015 which uses illuminated fishing line to create an otherworldly experience of glowing linear forms that look like they’re bouncing off the walls of a room, and (AA) DLAB’s Fallen Star—a projection-mapped architectural sculpture that uses algorithmic and natural systems to generate patterns.

David Ogle’s 018015. Photo courtesy of the artist.

(AA) DLAB’s Fallen Star. Photo by Valerie Bennett.

All the artworks are very different in their conception and style, but all use light to augment and shape how the audience experience the piece. The artists discuss how light can alter our perception and experience of a space, how it can change a work depending on our proximity to it, and how artificial light can affect our mood, as it radiates and bathes the viewer in an ethereal glow.

Onirical Reflections Projects Colorful Patterns Onto People's Faces

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:15:45 -0400

Almost 50 years after French director Henri-Georges Clouzot pioneered optical effect experimentations, São Paulo-based artist Anaísa Franco re-explores the face as a canvas for image projection in her latest project Onirical Reflections.

“Inside our brain is contained all the images that we [use to] process the outside world and ourselves. My interest is in the distortion of the reality that is built inside us, bringing the architectures of dreams out,” says Anaísa Franco in her artist’s statement. With the help of a concave mirror 1.2 meters in diameter, she developed an interactive sculpture which projects and maps animations on the face of the user.

A camera captures and sends facial expressions in real-time to some custom-developed software which is able to recognize the points located on the nose, mouth and eyes to use them as distinct projection areas. Thus, a viewer’s face becomes a playground for colorful, radiating patterns which, at the same time as they distort reality, invite the participant to reconsider their narcissistic reflection.

If for the time being the installation doesn’t seem to interact with the user’s facial expression (the demo video only shows neutral blinky faces), a possible upgraded version with projections synchronized to zygomatic mood could be an interesting future development.

Learn more about Anaísa Franco work in the video below…

@CreatorsProject

Gregory Barsamian Turns Dream Reality Into Eerie Animated Sculptures

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:18:25 -0400

The gap between what the mind perceives and what’s actually taking place in reality is exploited by New York artist Gregory Barsamian, in his uncanny animated sculptures that use strobe lights to take the surreal images from our dreams and bring them to life in eerie, jerky movements.

In his piece Die Falle (The Trap), dreaming disembodied heads release shapeless blobs that turn into human forms, and give you the illusion that they’re gliding up a spinning steel armature, turning into cogs and then back to humans before being snapped up by mouse trap beds. Watching it mutate and transform before your eyes is transfixing and disturbing. Barsamian takes his inspiration from the unconscious, as he explained to us at London’s Kinetica Art Fair (above).

In particular, he’s intrigued by the ideas in the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, which he brings to sculptural life using the idea of persistence of vision and a zoetrope-type technique. This accounts for the illusionary quality and motion of Die Falle—the half-real, waking dream effect that it conjures in the viewer’s mind. It has the same unnerving, but hypnotic sensation of the supernatural stop-motion effects of early cinema, like the monster in King Kong (1933)—another exploration of Jungian archetypes and ideas.

Images courtesy of Gregory Barsamian.

Awesome Video Game Mashup Performed On Hacked Video Game Controllers

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:18:14 -0400

Mario emerging from a pipe, Ryu taking down Blanka with a hadouken, Doctor Who, Tetris, GoldenEye 007, the iconic NES controller, and David Bowie. These things and more feature in a 19 track live performance played out on repurposed game controllers in Game Theory from UK-based sound studio Ithaca Audio.

The mashup weaves together video game snippets and pop music in what the company describe as “a look back at 35 years of video game music (Space Invaders, released in 1978 was the first game to have a continuous soundtrack)”.

Replying to a YouTube commenter the company describe how they created instruments out of the hacked controllers: “[We] re-wired to convert them into HID compliant USB controllers, then we programmed a small application to convert the HID signals into MIDI to control the performance software.” So that’s how that works.

[via Vimeo Staff Picks]

Double-Helix Skyscraper Aims To Give Residents An Eco-Friendly Lifestyle

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:50:55 -0400

The double-helix structure of DNA is one of the most famous molecular structures in science. It also makes for an impressive looking skyscraper too, as the concept images of these intertwined towers being built in Taipei City show. Mainland China’s building boom is well noted and in amongst the architectural throng are some gems.

This one, called Agora Garden, is designed by Vincent Callebaut Architecte and features contorting towers that hug each other as they rise above the streets below. Inspired by both two hands clasping each other and the famed shape of DNA, their design means that your experience of the structure alters depending on where you’re standing.

The residential towers are reaching for green credentials too with the use of suspended vertical gardens that they hope will provide residents with the space to grow fruit and vegetables, along with tanks for collecting rain water, nests for the birds to reside in, and facilities so they can turn waste into fertilizer. They’ll also be mature trees in a “mineral and aquatic glade” that will surround the base of the towers to shelter the residents from the noise of the city that surrounds them.

It all sounds idyllic and in 2016 when it’s completed, we’ll get to see whether it lives up to the claim to be as eco-friendly as it sounds.

images courtesy of Vincent Callebaut Architecte

[via Gizmag]

Beautiful Long-Exposure Photography Creates Collective Graffiti Of Tokyo's Urban Landscape

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:15:10 -0400

Take the altered, glistening lights of Gaspar Noé’s warped, fluorescent view of Tokyo in his 2009 film Enter the Void and blend it with a cyberpunk version of Jackson Pollock. The result is a series of beautiful, long-exposure photographs that capture the collective movement of the city of Tokyo in gestural brushes of artificial lights.

Sinichi Higashi‘s series Graffiti of Speed/Mirror Symmetry takes street art to the next level as he symmetrically mirrors long exposure photographs to capture a rapturous, spaced-out view of Tokyo’s urban cityscape. His view is a fast-paced, futuristic world where ghostly flashes of bright lights form translucent, abstract lines and shapes that hover through the hard concrete and metal of the city’s engineering and urban plan.

Higashi unconventionally merges various facets of collective, yet immersive art practices. His photographs look back at Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama’s magical, infinite environments of artificial lights and mirrors that explore obsession and repetition. Simultaneously, Higashi with the use of the slow shutter manages to hold the collective artistic expression of Tokyo’s high-speed culture, rendering an abstract, gestural expression of society.

The series, in its complexities and details, finds the unique, hidden beauty of urban landscapes. Higashi connects the living with the fabricated and manufactured. The union of the two is a naturally occurring spectacle that through Higashi’s lens reaches its ultimate appeal.

All images courtesy of Sinichi Higashi.

[via Fubiz]

Robotic Lego Band Jam Together For First Time

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:23:39 -0400

It’s an established fact that the internet loves Lego and the internet also loves robot bands, so it’s no surprise that someone’s combined the two to form a robotic Lego band. Sound designer and producer Giuseppe Acito constructed the Toa Mata Band using the Lego Bionicle range and programmed them to play a selection of different instruments, from synthesizers to drum machines, xylophones, handheld video games, and more.

Each member is controlled by an Arduino Uno which is hooked up to an iPad running the MIDI sequencer app Nord Beat. Acito either gets them to play a pre-programmed song or they can do a live show with Acito controlling the MIDI sequencer in real-time.

You can check them out in the video above, but there’s no news yet on whether they’ll be touring.

Previously on LAYERS: Digging Deep Into Rare Times’ “No One’s Looking Out”

LAYERS: Unpacking The Andrew Weathers Ensemble's "Hard, Ain't It Hard"

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:02:29 -0400

This week, we take a step way outside the usual LAYERS fare and delve into the folky vibes of Oakland’s Andrew Weathers and his ensemble. “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” by Oakland, California’s The Andrew Weathers Ensemble. Originally from North Carolina, the composer and instrumentalist recently released What Happens When We Stop on Full Spectrum Records. The album paints a rural picture of touring across the US with the lyrics comprised of reworked folk classics and instrumentals drawing inspiration from everything from sound collage to The Dream.

“Hard, Ain’t It Hard” is Weathers rendition of the Woody Guthrie classic, soaked in travel-weary wear and tear. Here, the booming vocals serve as the backbone while the ensemble’s improvisations subtly surround and build the track into something beautiful. Weathers and his crew combined a surprising amount of digital manipulation to achieve the unique sound, read below to hear him break it down:

What Happens When We Stop is made up of loosely-composed guitar pieces that I had the band improvise with. It’s a record about the players just as much as the technology. All of the lyrics, with the exception of one tune, come from American folk and blues songs – the text structures and shapes the improvisation.

The Ensemble is spread all over the country but I wanted to try my best to have everyone on this record. We did the first sessions at Michael O’Shea’s studio in Asheville, NC in order to get the east coast players in, now that I’m living in the Bay Area. We tracked everything live and built a majority of the album from those sessions. The rest was recorded around Oakland, at my small home studio and Mills College’s CCM, friends houses and coffee shops. I produce everything myself using Reaper, but most of my sound design is in AudioMulch, MaxMSP, and Reaktor. I make a point to not get locked into specific programs to avoid the tropes that software forces one into. Locking yourself into one piece of equipment is like locking yourself into a particular key – you can do a lot but the work turns homogenous once you look at it from a wider vantage point.

Guitar And Voice:

“Hard, Ain’t It Hard” is a reworking of a Woody Guthrie tune of the same name. The harmony of the song is more structured than my usual source material, so I left my guitar part open to improvisation more than I’m used to. I recorded the guitar and original vocal in the CCM’s studio late one night. I still play the first guitar I ever bought when I was about 15 or 16; it rattles and sometimes it’s a battle to keep it in tune. I recorded the tune with an extra verse at the end, but I felt like it was a little long-winded that way. I had one mic on the vocal, one at the 12th fret, one pointed at the body of the guitar just below the sound hole and one pointed at me from about six feet away. All four mics are faded in and out in the mix.

Processed Harmony Vocals:

I wanted the background vocal harmonies to sit somewhere between early country and The-Dream’s upbeat moments. There is autotune and pitch shifting on all of the vocals, and a little bit of reverb on the main vocal. I tend to use huge room sounds in very small amounts. I’m just using Reaper’s built in plug-ins for all of this. My friend Mel also sings in the chorus – I stopped by her apartment one day and she nailed several songs she had never heard before. I think you can hear her husband Aaron, who plays accordion on this track, making coffee at some point.

Second Guitar, Tenor Sax, Harp:

Next I added a second guitar, tenor sax and harp. Jacob added guitar that fits within the nooks and crannies of my playing. He is much better at guitar than me. All of the breathy sounds are Josh playing tenor sax – what I really loved about his take is that he blends with the later electronics in such a way that they become almost indistinguishable. Most of the edits are fairly simple, just done with volume automation and occasional cut and paste for riffs that I particularly liked.

Electronics, Accordion, ‘Famous Wedding’ Sample:

Erik Schoster plays most of the electronics that you hear on this record – he’s developed his own software called Pippi specifically for laptop improvisation. He played with us for a good portion of our tour this summer and fit in perfectly. He sent me audio of him improvising without hearing the tunes and I edited his work into the pieces. At the very end of the track you can hear a sample derived from an a capella version of a folk tune called ‘The Famous Wedding’, I made it mostly with granulation and filters in AudioMulch. The granulator there is pretty incredible, probably my favorite feature in the program. Also here are Aaron Oppenheim on accordion, Evelyn Davis on piano and Scott Siler on vibraphone. Their parts filled out the texture, basically covering the role that electronics take in my past work. That’s really the thing I love about moving between electronic and acoustic worlds.

Put them all together and here’s what you get. The premiere of “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” by The Andrew Weathers Ensemble:

@justinstaple

What If Salvador Dalí Had Access To A Kinect?

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:50:58 -0400

The latest promo for Italian jewelry designer Delfina Delettrez’s S/S 2013 collection, directed by Daniel Sannwald, presents a futuristic vision of fashion, desolate of runway models and over-Photoshopped celebrities.

Fitting with the aesthetics of both the designer and the director, this video is a surrealist trip through a virtually-simulated desert, what I imagine Salvador Dalí may have created had he had access to Kinect 3D scanning.

With a haunting music score by Alejandro Ghersi this trip through the desolate, jewel-encrusted Dalí -reminiscent landscape is a beautiful promo piece for the artistic visions of both Delettrez, a fourth generation Fendi family designer, and Sannwald, one of fashion photography/videography’s forward-thinking voices.

The Making Of Descender: Andrew Wyatt On Creativity, Violin Repair Stores, And Discontent Orchestras

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:49:48 -0400

Is one month enough time to record your first solo album? Especially when the orchestra you’re meant to be collaborating with have doubts about being able to perform the score you’ve written? Andrew Wyatt, from Miike Snow, thought so and so begins the documentary shot by filmmaker Sebastian Mlynarski that peeks behind the curtain at the creative process and globe-trotting-against-the-clock that went into recording Descender.

In the documentary, Wyatt makes for an amiable and honest host. Quoting Roddy Piper lines from They Live, he’s a man battling his own self-imposed deadline, along with the hardships of working with the 75-piece Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, to come up with the goods and make an ambitious album that deviates from his previous work with Miike Snow, displaying a more personal and melodic approach.

The creative process never runs smoothly, and in this doc we get an insight into the methods and intuitions that can inform an artwork, from its conception as an idea in your head to the act of setting the recording process in motion and actualizing the finished song. For instance, Wyatt talks about how the genesis of the album’s first single “And Septimus…” came from the simple act of looking in a violin repair store window. Wyatt’s unassuming, relaxed, and matter-of-fact approach to creating the album gives a different representation of the creative process, one free of any prima donna-style antics, and full of self-mockery, reflection, and humor.

A lively melancholy peppers the chords and recordings heard in the documentary, much like it does Wyatt’s sincere observations on everything from the changing climate of music culture to inspiration and creative expression. “Music for me is an instinctual thing, it’s not a contrivance, it’s a love thing.” Wyatt says. “A love thing that’s connected to my senses combined with a need, and I can’t actually control what that looks like.”

As well these candid insights the film also showcases Wyatt’s deadpan style and presents the creative conflicts and cul-de-sacs that arise when you’re trying to make an album that’s intimate and personal to you. It’s an honest look at the artistic tussle that takes place when creating an artwork while also giving us a glimpse of what we can expect from Descender when it’s released on INGRID/Downtown Records on April 16th.

To find out a bit more about the experience (and the new album) we sent Wyatt and Mlynarski a few questions.

First up Andrew Wyatt…

The Creators Project: Why did you give yourself only one month to record this new album?
Andrew Wyatt: It was all I had time for between MS tours.

What’s it like recording with a 75-piece orchestra compared to a band? Intimidating?
It’s like turning a huge ship, it doesn’t bear last-minute decisions, everything must be anticipated far in advance. Very different from a rock band, which is infinitely more improvisational, maneuverable. Because of my underestimating of this we nearly had a couple of Costa Concordias along the way.

Prague Philharmonic Orchestra

Hero Fisher recording with the orchestra

There’s a part in the documentary where you call the album “the ruins of my grand ideas.” The album sounds like quite a personal project—was there a cathartic reason for doing it?
My life and my career have turned out quite different from what I’d planned, also from what looked like was going to happen when I was, say, 21. In some way it has been far better, I think I am a far more compassionate person than I was. In some ways though my career in “rock” music was scuttled because I took almost 10 years off from music when I was in my 20s to deal with some personal issues. So yes, I wanted to redeem myself a bit… who doesn’t??

What sort of musical directions did you want to explore on this album that you couldn’t explore with the band?
I like to be oblique in a way that doesn’t really work in Miike Snow, or that we haven’t been able to figure out how to present beautifully. I think what brings us together in Miike Snow is our intense connection to pop music. What I’ve heard Grimes call “the pleasure center,” which I love, we love hooks and I think for Miike Snow to work it has to be about hooks-first kind of music. Nothing wrong with that at all—we are good at it, and we love that about each other. But there are also places where we don’t overlap and I needed to address that to not feel that my life had been a waste of time.

Sebastian Mlynarski talks about making the documentary…

The Creators Project: The documentary sounds quite offbeat and reflective. How did you approach making it? What did you initially want to achieve?
Sebastian Mlynarski: Andrew is genuinely this “cracked” artist, someone who is very difficult to pin down. From the onset, I knew that I couldn’t just go out with a traditional film crew and capture him working. It had to be a very intimate experience, just me with a couple of cameras and a sound recorder. I needed to just be there and erase the whole idea of filming from his mind. I didn’t want him to notice being recorded at all, I just wanted him to hang and let himself just be spontaneous and brilliant and I think that I achieved that. Andrew is like a machine gun, he keeps firing and as a filmmaker you always want to be the target.

And did this change at all as the documentary progressed?
As we spent more time together I begun to feel that something special was developing and that the film was ultimately going to be about the hardship of the creative process—the moments that are less than glorious. I wanted him to talk very openly about this and I decided to wire him for audio but not roll video when I asked a series of personal questions. I think that I got the answers that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Fisher and Wyatt in a hotel room

Sounds like you did quite a bit of traveling. Did this journeying around to different cities and cultures inform the style or tone?
The film was made during just over three days. I filmed for couple of hours in New York, two days in Prague with the orchestra, and one day while sightseeing outside of Prague. Maybe I slept for eight hours in total during this time. Kind of brutal. I recorded the audio interview with Andrew in the car going to Kutna Hora. This is why the quality of audio recording is pretty bad but the material I got was really good. The content is always much more important to me than the form. Andrew was very candid and able to just speak freely about what it means to him to be an artist. The entire narration of the film comes from that hour we spent together in the car.

Is there an anecdote from your time making the doc that you feel sums up the experience?
Because we all shared a suite in the hotel in Prague, the receptionist thought that we were swingers and she really wanted to “get down” with us. She still sends Andrew text messages asking when we are coming back…

And below Wyatt and Mlynarski discuss the upcoming music video for “And Septimus…”

The Creators Project: You’ve just been out filming the music video for “And Septimus…” in Buenos Aires. Can you tell us a little of what we can expect and how it relates to the song?
Andrew Wyatt: The song has to do with the way that status is no barrier to unhappiness, that a preoccupation with it can intact prompt mental unrest. There is an underlying message to that effect in Mrs. Dalloway, the Virginia Woolf novel from which the anecdote is partially taken. There are of course also experiences related from my own forays into mental illness.

Sebastian Mlynarski: In the treatment I wrote, Andrew turns into a character that is very much an exaggeration or maybe even a parody of a certain part of his personality. Andrew is an incredible performer and he really shines, while he takes on this persona. My interpretation of the song may have nothing to do with Andrew’s intentions but what I heard in the song is some kind of a struggle for the extraordinary—how we want the world to be just a bit better for us, but no matter how hard we try to lose ourselves in the abandon, we are always tethered, tied down to the earthly things like balloons filled with helium. While Andrew ventures into the world he is attached to a small speaker in his hotel room.

What made you want to shoot in Buenos Aires?
Wyatt: When Sebastian described the video to me it was just always there. Buenos Aires is the most surreal city I can think of and it fits the video perfectly for that reason.

Mlynarski: I always thought of Buenos Aires as a place where expats go to drop out. Where they go to invent new identities for themselves. It always seemed like the most perfect setting for this video. Andrew and I both visited there some years ago and we fell in love with the city and people there.

And how long before we get to see the result?
Wyatt: The video premieres the same day as Descender is released, April 16th.

Pre-order the album Descender out on Ingrid/Downtown Records April 16th on iTunes now and get the first single “And Septimus…” instantly.

Pre-order the 12" vinyl of Descender

Of Mice And Mozart: Experimental Art Created By Snails And Rodents

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:25:57 -0400

Despite that most artists would cite nature as source of inspiration, very few actually incorporate living forms into their work (with the exception of Mira Calix’s Nunu, of course. However, tech artists Quiet Ensemble use rodents and insects—pests that many a suburban house wife has tried desperately to extinguish from their garden—in their new pieces Orienta; è Qui Ora, Che Decido di Fermarm (Orientation, It is Here Now, That I Decide to Stop) and Orchestra Da Camera (Chamber Orchestra).

In our previous Q&A with Fabio di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli, the duo that make up Quiet Ensemble, they told us how they “focus on the greatness of small events, observing natural elements and mixing them with technology.” In both of these new pieces this mixture of technology and small, overlooked natural details creates two unique and compelling pieces.

In Orchestra Da Camera (above), mice create a symphony by running on the always-metaphorical hamster wheel. Although the mechanisms are programmed with lullabies by Brahms, Schubert, and Mozart the active role of the mice, who decide when to pluck the music-box instruments by running on their wheels, alters the songs which become unrecognizable, and thus a creation of the mice themselves.

Orienta; è Qui Ora, Che Decido di Fermarm (above and below) takes a more visual approach to documenting the lives of these creatures. In this piece we visually follow a day’s journey as taken by snails. Using light painting the trails are followed, turning “a day in the life” into abstract art.

Oscar Wilde once wrote in The Decay of Lying how things become beautiful only because artists and poets have taught people to believe they are beautiful. Saying that, for example, although London has always been a grey, foggy city “where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gaslamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?”

With Wilde’s life-imitating-art perspective in mind, perhaps the next time you see a snail you’ll notice the beauty of its haphazard, snotty trail.

Get Lost For A Few Moments In This Futuristic Anime Music Video

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:06:53 -0400

Music videos and anime go waaaay back—well at least to Daft Punk‘s 2001 album Discovery anyway, which had tracks from the album set to episodic animations that, with their powers combined, formed the film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Following in this fine tradition is Louis & McCourt’s video for Mat Zo and Porter Robinson’s “Easy.” Louis & McCourt are part of the animation collective The Line, who produced the vid.

Set in a futuristic Neo Tokyo world, it features a fashion model and her Pokémon-type flying pet. A model who’s a little fed up with the demands made on her, so blasts about on her bike before unleashing some kind of explosive device and nuking everything in sight. Which means she ends up in a colorful forest full of pink trees—as you do. The piece feels very Akira-ish but with a more whimsical edge to it.

Much like the Daft Punk series, electronic music and anime make for great bedfellows—if you had to imagine something in your head when hearing a trancey house number like this one, chances are it would involve futuristic anime.

[via Vimeo Staff Picks]

Darsha Hewitt's Electrostatic Bell Choir Turns Static Electricity Into A Mechanical Symphony

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:37:05 -0400

As a child, many of us have been fascinated by occasionally receiving electric shocks when removing our sweaters or by our hair standing on end when in contact with a balloon. Assuming we were attentive during science class, most of us are familiar with static electricity. This phenomenon, resulting from an accumulation of electric charges, affects everyday objects.

Some of them carry positive charges, others negative charges, and the effect of their opposing union can be unexpected.   It’s these properties, particularly those of physicist Andrew Gordon’s lightning bell, that nourish the thoughts of Canadian artist Darsha Hewitt especially her piece Electrostatic Bell Choir, one of her most notable works. This electromechanical sound installation is fed by static electricity emitted from cathode ray tube (CRT)-based television screens. The energy collected is used as a kinetic driving force, producing movements and sounds.

  During the 2013 edition of Montreal’s Elektra festival in May, Hewitt will present a new configuration of Electrostatic Bell Choir. To find out more about this latest iteration and how the project came about we contacted Hewitt and she revealed to us that she was on a mission to find old television sets. "I visit Montreal’s best dirty basements, dark garages, and shitty piles of garbage these days." she told us. These words motivated us to accompany her to one such place, which was covered in several inches of dust.

The Creators Project: Firstly, could you tell us where your interest in static electricity came from? What was the starting point for your artistic research?
Darsha Hewitt: This work grows out of a long and rigorous experimentation phase I carried out in my studio between 2010 to 2012. I wanted to wrap my head around radio propagation. I was quite fascinated by how energy from one machine could be carried invisibly by a wave through free space, bounced off of the ionosphere and then some other machine in some other part of the planet could tune itself to that wave, cast it away into the ground, and glean a communication signal from it.

I tinkered a lot with AM radios, galena crystals, and hand-wound coils much like early amateur radio enthusiasts would have done. However, I’ve never been interested in listening to human broadcasts. I’m much more intrigued by how radio can tap into the invisible dimensions that electronic technology inhabits (some might call it noise, interference, machine crosstalk, or electromagnetic radiation).

Electrostatic Bell Choir, 2012

I guess that’s the path that led you to working with TVs thereafter. Can you explain to us why you later became so particularly interested in television mechanisms?
My preliminary research into analogue TV demonstrated that CRTs are in fact particle accelerators. Inside the tube a hot cathode shoots electrons through a vacuum and sprays them onto the surface of the tube. The result of this collision magically gives us our TV picture! So I figured that maybe by collecting a herd of these mini particle accelerators and doing tests with them I might start to understand what the hell is going on at CERN with the Large Hadron Collider and just maybe the universe might start to make a bit more sense.

Okay, now that we understand the theoretical and experimental approaches that brought you to develop Electrostatic Bell Choir, could you describe the installation for us in detail?
The installation takes place in a dark room where approximately 22 CRT TVs are cycling on and off in alternating sequences—they are muted and tuned to empty ‘snowy’ channels. In front of each TV is a set of electrostatic bells. Though I hand fabricated these ones out of brass and fitted them with bells I scavenged from rotary telephones and grandfather clocks, electrostatic bells are scientific instruments that date back to the 1700s. They are electroscopes and were originally used to demonstrate the presence and magnitude of electric charges by converting it into mechanical energy.

When a cathode ray tube turns on it generates a bust of static electricity that builds up on the surface of the tube. So, as the TVs turn on, the static charges they emit agitate the pith balls suspended from these apparatuses and causes them to waiver and strike bells as they oscillate between positive and negatively charged poles. I use solid state relays and a big fancy Arduino Mega microcontroller in order to compose and manage the on/off sequencing of the TVs.

The televisions that we are helping you look for right now are for your installation at Elektra 2013. I’m concluding that whenever you present work, it’s unique. Since the beginnings of the choir, how much has the work evolved?
I’ve installed this artwork in some form or another and every time it’s different—it mainly changes based on the TVs that I’m able to source in the city I’m installing it in. I’m trying to be more ambitious with the sculptural elements of the work so there might be more stacking and TV pyramiding going on for the installation during Elektra.

When I initially started doing experiments with the work I wasn’t even using bells. I started by hanging my fur coonskin cap in front of the TV and tried to figure out where the hell to go with this idea next as I watched the tail move back and forth as it was affected by the static. Midway through my research I was fortunate to receive an international work stipend from Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst. Once I had money to put into the work I was able to spend all my time with it to turn it into something more interesting—it has come a long way since then.

Currently, what direction is your work going in? How will it evolve against technical constraints?
The work will definitely evolve in the future—mainly in ways that I am not really looking forward to. Having chosen to work with obsolete technology, I am constantly challenged with technical issues. As other tools I rely on get updated and no longer ‘speak the same language’ of the old stuff I have to do a lot of problem solving to make them work together. For instance the newer CRT TVs—which seem to creep up more and more as the artwork travels present frustrating challenges—they were manufactured with failsafe features that are annoying for me to work around. I have a feeling that I will either have to retire the work completely at some point or totally make over the circuitry. I really would rather not do that because it would mean switching to another system that I would likely find a lot less intuitive to work with.

Finally, can you tell us more about your upcoming projects? Daughters of Drone for example…
The Daughters of Drone only really exists in name but I’m pretty excited about what it will turn into. What I can tell you is that it will be a collaboration with one of my new favorite people: artist/electronic instrument inventor Peter Edwards of Casper Electronics and it will likely involve modular synthesis, kits, and kids maybe.

Thanks Darsha and see you at Elektra!

@princebenoit

All Photos: Darsha Hewitt

The Week In Links 3/15/13

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:58:14 -0400

On the blog this week we saw how you could explore Montreal by throwing balls in the air, got caught in the time-lapse abstractions of Kurtis Hough’s films. In LAYERS we dug deep into Rare Times’ “No One’s Looking Out”, we said farewell to Amon Tobin’s ISAM show, looked at the design studio behind Dita Von Teese’s 3D-printed dress, discovered the bleak, toilsome world of video game Cart Life, and explored modular design with Aranda\Lasch.

And the rest of the web had this to say:

· This iPhone app lets you wear someone else’s face.

· What would St. Patrick’s Day look like if you wore Google Glass? It would look like this.

· Check out the insane designs from the winners of eVolo’s skyscraper competition (above).

· And the latest PBS Off Book looks at the rise of the web comic.

"Smart" Headphones Determine Your Mood And Choose Your Music For You

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:15:29 -0400

With so many ways and such a variety of music to choose from, deciding what music to listen to is a first world problem of the highest order. You’re basically paralyzed with choice, plus we’ve all been in a situation where you put on a song only to realize it wasn’t really what you wanted, then had to skip through looking for something else. Life is hard.

Japanese company Neurowear—who came up with those wearable cat ears and cat tail that are controlled by your brain—have created a set of headphones that will determine your mood and find the right songs to fit it. They’re called Mico headphones and they use a brain sensor to determine whether you want to rock out to a bit of Motörhead or keep it real with some Justin Bieber.

The headphones work in collaboration with an app which calibrates your brainwave via an EEG sensor that’s attached to the headphones. By reading your brain patterns it can determine your mood and then a song is selected and played from the Neurowear database that the software thinks will compliment your mood. That way you can free up your brain to make more important decisions, like what to get for lunch.

You can check out the demo video above and the instruction video below.

[via Gizmag]

An Industrial Cityscape Abstracted Into A Moving Mosaic

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:37 -0400

In Trouble in Utopia (above), artist Joe Hamilton sets his kaleidoscopic gaze on an industrial cityscape. The result is a mosaic of moving parts—colors and angles shift as a straight line, mimicking the horizon, plunges into the image. It’s this movement, combined with the diegetic soundtrack, that recreates the experience of entering a landscape.

This is not the first time Hamilton’s work adresses issues of space and surroundings. In his 2011 digital art piece, Hyper Geography, Hamilton composes icebergs and mountains out of found objects. Visitors to the project’s Tumblr “find” these objects once again, only this time on a virtual platform.

In both cases, Hamilton’s digital creations are more overwhelming than their physical counterparts. His impulse is not to replicate the visuals of a multi-dimensional space, but the experience of exploring it.

@tfbnght

Could You Rob And Steal From Innocent Women And Children? The Castle Doctrine Thinks You Can

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:20:03 -0400

If you’ve ever sat forlornly at home staring at your Xbox and thinking “Now when is someone going to bring out a massively-multiplayer game about burglary and home defense?”—then today is your lucky day. Because that someone is Jason Rohrer, the leftfield video game designer who’s previously made games about the creative process, consciousness, and gardening.

His latest title called The Castle Doctrine is launched today and is set in the nineties with a plot that sounds like Assault on Precinct 13 but transposed to your home. “It’s 1991, and things are bad.” says the description. “You’re a guy with a wife, two kids, and a house. You’re nearly broke, but you know that they’ll be coming soon for what you’ve got left, hundreds of them.”

So it goes. As well as defending your house from oncoming invaders by laying traps and through cunning design you must also wander around your neighborhood and turn into a burglar yourself—prowling through vacant homes like the opportunist you might well become should the apocalypse one day come to destroy the world, in an attempt to rack up the dollars and get to the top of the leaderboard.

It’s not the sort of video game you can play just for mindless escapism, not without reflecting on the horrors you’ve committed to those poor, innocent pixels. In part one of his review Alec Meer, from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, says about the game’s setup of defend and steal: “It is cold, so cold.” Going on to say “And yet, wordlessly, I felt the pull to protect the three randomly-named, distinguishing feature-free family members (one wife, two children) I was assigned.” Part of that pull, he says, is the vulnerability of the little pixelated people that Rohrer presents to you. People that begin the game living in nothing but an empty grey box with just a vault, and it’s your job to design it into the Fort Knox of suburbia to stave off the marauding hordes.

Rather than just pitting you as the hero, out to protect the world from the thieving masses, the game mires you in moral ambiguity—you’re aren’t just a protector of your family, but a thief too. From another player’s perspective you’re to be feared, out to rob as much money as you can, killing other players’ families and destroying their property to get what you want which perpetuates a cycle of revenge. Meer calls it a horror game where the player is “both victim and monster” and it’s this duality that makes the game so subversive.

Images via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

VEGA ZAISHI WANG's S/S 2013 Collection Echoes The Intergalactic Vision Of Alpha Lyrae

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:40:49 -0400

VEGA ZAISHI WANG’s S/S 2013 collection, NGC 6312 consists of beautifully constructed garments featuring prints of constellations, reminding us of her special Alpha Lyrae collection she produced in collaboration with The Creators Project last year. Although this season’s collection doesn’t use electroluminescent fabrics, it still embodies Wang’s impeccable sense of style, and utilizes the ultimate symbol of technology and progress—space.

For more on Vega Zaishi Wang’s Alpha Lyrae collection, check out the videos below.

A Projected Sculpture That Bathes The Audience In A Pool Of Shadow

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:40:30 -0400

Robert Seidel‘s experimental animations are a curious hybrid of abstract shapes wrought from biological entities and scientific processes. Strange forms flit in and out of view, catching the corner of your eye. To look at the films you wouldn’t immediately notice the scientific connection, but once you know you can see that some of the shapes have an ancestry with the weird lifeforms that float around the ocean and live deep underwater.

His latest piece is a projected sculpture called Tearing Shadows currently showing at the 401contemporary gallery in Berlin, which looks like the living skeletal frame of some ancient lifeform. As visitors walk around it, they experience different audiovisual compositions—bathed in the shadows of the piece they also become part of the artwork as their shadows mingle with the sculpture’s and the two become inseperable.

To learn more about how Seidel created the piece, I emailed off some questions.

The Creators Project: Lots of your visuals are based on biological forms—is that the same with this piece?
Robert Seidel: For this installation I decided not to work in fully digital terms with regards the sculptural forms and the projection. For the latter I went back to some old “real world” painting experiments—like in my animations E3 and Futures—and explored the painterly qualities of everyday objects. So in that sense it is “biological”, or “physicochemical” even, since it deals with processes like thermodynamics and chemical kinetics.

Different vignettes of these natural but visually abstract processes were composed into an experimental film, which was then refitted to the sculpture to create different tableaux vivants for Tearing Shadows. The film essentially reshapes the object with the help of projected light (two synchronised beamers). Since the sculpture and the projection are developed organically I wouldn’t call it “projection mapping” but more “spontaneous mapping”. I love the idea that images and shapes come together and influence each other. To tie everything closer together there are a lot of “fake shadows”—some on the wall are real, others are projected. The projected ones are moving slowly to it seems the sculpture is constantly moving.

How does the audience become part of the artwork? Is it reactive to them?
The audience is allowed to walk within the installation, so people become projection surfaces or shadows themselves. Overall the structures are so light, that they move by even the slightest wind of the audience walking around. And the shapes are very open and staggered, from different viewpoints you see a radically different sculpture—so wandering becomes an integral part of the artwork. This is true for classic sculpture as well, but the changing audio and video helps motivate the exploration of the spatial dimension. The documentation video pushes this idea even further with lots of dolly shots reimagining the visitor’s trails.

The music in the trailer seems to have a slightly sinister tone to it. Is this the same as the audio in the piece? And what was the intention behind this?
The sound of the piece and the documentation are basically the same. They are based on different field recordings and compositional sketches I did occasionally over the last two years. It’s quite dense and changes mood abruptly over a period of 10 minutes. Since it’s not synched to the projection video of six minutes, it creates quite different constellations and blurs the dimension of the video loop.

I think my entire body of film and installation work shares a sinister or dramatic tone—for this work it might be more obvious since the musical mood skips like an old record. Also, the changing stereo placement is not for capturing the viewer in the black box of the cinema, but to explore a space and follow these audiovisual trails.

How did you go about creating the actual shape of the sculpture itself? What influenced its design?
First I did drawings to find general shapes, like I usually do for all my projects. Their influences are varied, but mostly from nature and travelling. Then they were sketched on and cut from plastic foil. This time I decided not to use laser cutting like in Black Mirror, but to cut the pieces by myself, which influences the visual vocabulary a lot.

The drawn lines on some of the shapes add another layer to the complexity of the pieces, which makes the installation a three dimensional drawing as well. Some of these pen traces are leftovers of the original sketches, others are created to change the compositional weighting of the forms. Most of the fragments were reshaped by heating or burning the foil—creating holes, bends, and shrinkage.

In the end I had a lot of single pieces created in my studio, which were then arranged and hung in the gallery space. So the final composition of the installation came to live there for the first time. Changing an installation based on the architectural and structural conditions of the place keeps the work fresh for me, making the setup part of the artistic process, not just a necessary evil.

Making The Mundane Cosmic: Meet Modular Designers Aranda\Lasch

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:46:02 -0400

Crystallography, molecular structures, cosmology—three things that aren’t usually associated with designing a chair or a house, but these scientific subjects are what architects and designers Aranda\Lasch mine to create their modular designs that emulate the infinite.

It’s an approach that favors systems over principles, building structures that can replicate in an endless amount of ways like a living system, growing into a variety of possibilities to create abstract forms that challenge our notions of what an object has to look like. Which is why they look to disciplines like crystallography for inspiration and guidance.

While crystallography might seem like it’s pretty far removed from how to design a chair or a building, it’s actually informing how designers look at the products we use every day—computer chips, cell phone batteries—and is, as Benjamin Aranda says “driving an invention in material culture.”These ideas might not be so familiar to the average person, but for designers they’re shaping how they think about the processes and structures that go into creating an object.

Christopher Lasch defines the companies design ethic as: “For us design is about putting in place a process from which you can guarantee surprises.” Surprises that are built using algorithms and formed from fractal anatomies, allowing the duo to find the endless in an object—whether that’s creating a bridge from octahedrons or a crystalline stage set for Yeasayer. As Benjamin Aranda explains: “Our understanding of modularity is something that’s not quite obvious or fixed, something that can be a tool for finding infinite variation.”

Check out some of their design work below…

The Morning Line by Matthew Ritchie with Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU

Modern Primitive House

20 Bridges for Central Park

Opera House

Color Shift

10-Mile Spiral

Grotto

BFFA3AE: 3 BFFs Are Making Some Rly Rad Meta Net Art

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:41:41 -0400

Internet art collective BFFA3AE (Best Friends Forever And 3ver And Ever) are surpassing their peers in what’s now a crowded virtual community by creating some seriously thought-provoking net art. The trio’s work is not just confined to the digital sphere, the group has created pieces that transcend the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds as well.

Through net art, the crew aims to examine the implications of the ever-multiplying ties between people and technology. In doing so they have created a kind of meta-net art which occupies the post-internet stratosphere. Their creative output consists of an examination of internet graphics and memes through net art itself. Using the same tropes found in obnoxious internet advertising and tween-curated Tumblrs, BFFA3AE have found an interesting way to force-feed the internet its very own banality. They offer us, as viewers, an outlet by which we can ruminate on the role the internet has played in transforming our very psyches.

The three friends, Daniel Chew, Matthew Gaffney, and Micaela Durand, met in film school and first collaborated in 2007 on a blog. Their artistic output over the years has expanded to include a variety of self-aware digital pieces. Like a great deal of net art, BFFA3AE products are informed by irony. The “crap” factor is turned way up in some pieces like uh duh yeah and the initiation of something. But their work goes beyond examination of the gaudiness of the internet and also showcases the ways in which our virtual existence has creeped into, and even subsumed, our everyday lives.

One of their really striking pieces is This and that thought, a minimalist, interactive website which employs the soft-spoken speech recognition cyborg lady from the good old days of floppy discs and beige-toned bubble monitors. Her familiar voice speaks in a paradoxically stress-inducing monotone and rambles on about TV, office parties, and even her internal agony about picking out a color for her new car. “The new iPods are out of stock,” she laments, “I want to kill myself.”

Turbulence, 2011.

The piece as a whole is a clever comment on digital-age induced alienation, but one that goes beyond the typical rhetoric. Shallowness and banality are unfortunately inherent in the human experience. Yet underneath the monotonous diary-like ruminations of this bore-of-a-cyborg, there are flashes of “true” emotion. Loneliness reigns even for this normy as she cooes, “this is the best part of my day because I know I won’t be bothered.”

The group has experimented with social media and connected outlets all over the internet. Through pieces like the time is now they’ve established a presence on YouTube, OkCupid, flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, GoogleDocs, Blingee, and beyond—effectively “winning the internet” with a single virtual installation created for the Klaus Gallery. But the crew is also pushing beyond the confines of the browser interface, and utilizing their curatorial capabilities, have created a book of their own. No doubt it had to be an e-book.

Ad Book is the product of their labors, published by Badlands Unlimited. The project features artists from around the world who were solicited by BFFA3AE to contribute an ad to the book—the contributors had to purchase the space, and in doing so, BFFA3AE created a project that in the very process of its conception was an exploration in advertising. And the output is something really quite awesome. Ad Book creates an e-book like no other, one that is different each time you look at it, and user-malleable on multiple levels. The book is currently available for purchase at the Apple iBookstore, and is at its best on an iPad.

The Creators Project spoke with BFFA3AE about their process and latest project. Read all about AD BOOK below, and the first five people to email us at editor@thecreatorsproject.com will win a free AD BOOK promo code! Make sure to put “BFFA3AE AD BOOK” in the subject line.

The Creators Project: You’ve been exploring the ways the internet affects culture since 2007 on your blog, but have since expanded to include film, performance, and installation art. What led you to diversify your endeavors?
Daniel: When we first started making art in 2007, we were interested in what was happening online with surf clubs. It was a way of having a conversation where each post, while seemingly obliquely cobbled together, somehow spoke to the post before and after it. The dialogue produced was a mix between an investment in Internet culture and an examination of it at the same time. We were interested in not only partaking in such a community, but also the way in which this community (and the sociality connected to it) affected our physical lives. Naturally, this lead us to explore these ideas beyond the limits of a browser interface. Also, the three of us met in film school, so we already had a practice that existed beyond the Internet and it was only a matter of time until we started to merge the two.

Can you describe your approach to net art? How has it evolved since 2007 when you guys first started out?
Mica:I’d like to answer this Q with these stamps I collected from deviantART while trying to solicit a cover artist for Badlands’ upcoming romance novel. I think the following do a good job of representing our hanging out since 2007. Some of these are just things we have to live with (ie. glasses) but has probably impacted our work more than you know.

Whatever we care about atm is what we’ve always made art about. That’s still true today except there’s different content we like to think about. Most recently our topic of interest was Selena Gomez’s online/offline relationship with Demi Lovato that we expressed through customized stickers at 247365 Gallery.

It’s almost difficult to separate net art from net-reality in some cases, is this the point? Do you feel like this is the point?
Matt: I guess a lot of our work has been based around bringing online aspects into a more physical/tangible form, or reality as you say. I think it’s interesting that AD BOOK is easily held. I don’t know if I’d call it the point but it’s definitely a point.

I take BFFA3AE’s art to be meta-net-art… do you agree?
Daniel: Yes.

How do you want your audience to interact with pieces like AD BOOK?
Mica: Definitely you should zoom (pretty nice retina display on iPad). Wait for the GIFs to load. Browse it, screencap it, hack it, any suggestions we are down for. The book is for anyone by anyone.

AD BOOK is totally genre-bending, do you consider it an installation? An exhibition in which BFFA3AE are the curators?
Matt: I usually refer to AD BOOK as a project as opposed to a show or exhibition. I think curators (or maybe organizers?) is still an appropriate label for us here, but there’s also a vagueness as to our role vs. the contributors’ role that I find interesting, like where does our part end and their part begin?
Mica: Purchase the book to find out!

Can you tell me more about the collaboration process that’s going into the making of AD BOOK— What’s been your criteria for the artists you’ve selected thus far? Is it just like the advertising system that dominates the internet in that it’s only based on the willingness of the advertiser to pay a fee?
Matt: We started with a pretty basic open call that proliferated through different networks, stemming from our own. We were not directly involved with the creation of any ad, but since the majority were made specifically for us/the book, I’d like to think the context we set up for each artist played some small part in their creation.

How do you feel about online advertising, and advertising in general? Why do you feel it’s something worthy of consideration and artistic output?
Mica: Everyone does it, is how I feel about advertising. Apple is a pretty great advertiser. People are buying stuff at the Apple Store nonstop (so many software updates). Everytime I’m there I take a Photo Booth pic. I like to advertise in the advertisement. I try to output something daily (Instagram, Twitter, Vine) which is basically advertising stuff I like and like to think about. What is your art if it isn’t stuff you are advertising?

Why did you choose to use a reader platform?
Matt: We all have a history growing up with media in different forms to the extent that our frame of mind changes from medium to medium, and we wanted to tap into that subconscious context someone would be in while using a reader platform vs. something different.
Mica: We thought if we were going to make a book we wanted it to be a book we didn’t have to really make. It takes people years to make a book and ain’t nobody got time for that. The idea of AD BOOK felt enticing because it became about everybody else. Also e-books make reading more web-like. You don’t read it like a book. You browse. Open up to any page. Stay on the page that feels good. You read it as a creative act. It’s supposed to feel like how we see art today. And now it’s a published experience.

It’s great that the ad for AD BOOK submissions even fulfills some of the expectations of advertising found in the dark corners of the interweb, like that .zip file that’s instantly downloaded to my computer. In what other ways have you programmed AD BOOK to sort of assault you like other forms of internet advertising?
Mica: GIFs make assault very possible.

What are your thoughts on Justin Bieber?
Mica: I’m a bielieber.
Dan: I’m Team Selena.
Matt: ?idk i fl weird.

Gamer's Paradise: The Bleak, Toilsome World Of Cart Life

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:00:55 -0400

There are countless games about simulating careers. In a fascinating twist, simulating work—building, management, buying and selling—is among our favorite ways to play, when it comes to games. The distractionware era brought on by our idle-time second screens, Facebook and smartphone platforms have given rise to uncountable management sims: Build a town from scratch, run a restaurant, manage an apartment building, a hotel.

These tiny persistent universes often cost us real money, too—usually only pocket change, but we can elect to toss a little bit at our virtual empires to reduce the friction, to ease the rate of growth, or to customize and personalize.

On its face, multiple-category IGF nominee Cart Life is another life sim, where players take the role of a cart vendor who’s just started a hopeful new venture. As expected, you have to buy inventory, set the price, and manage your own expenses in the hope of growth, but that’s only the surface.

In the game’s bleak, coarse grayscale pixel world, you’re in charge of every action in the story of your character, and you do choose to play as a unique character, rather than some avatar that stands in for your own entrepreneurial ambitions. The basic version of the game lets you play as Andrus, a Ukranian immigrant who practices English by translating poetry and has a pet cat in tow, or Melanie, a divorced mom prone to headaches who’s fighting for custody of her daughter.

You’ll have to remember to pay rent, buy groceries, perhaps try to make friends in the community. If you have time. Time in Cart Life passes mercilessly, with no opportunity to correct for things you’ve missed. Skipping meals makes the characters despondent, even ill, and impedes their ability to function at work. If Andrus doesn’t buy cigarettes and smoke them regularly, he’s prone to sneezing fits that slow him up. And no matter what’s at stake during the workday, Melanie has to be there to pick her daughter up after school.

The mechanics of the game are extremely intimate, combining a keyboard and mouse. The daily task of sorting newspapers at Andrus’ newsstand, for example, involves a sequence of typing minigames and clicking, which abstracts, but reinforces the mundanity of cutting the plastic ties, folding them and setting them out.

It can’t help but feel like a conscious subversion of modern games that thrive on gentle training, immediate rewards, tangible learning curves—Cart Life doesn’t teach, assist, remind. There’s no magic goals list, just the general, intuitive task of survival.

For example, when you play as Melanie, the game doesn’t write down customer orders for you. As if you were a real coffee vendor, you simply have to use your memory. Failure gives you no opportunity to re-do; you can only press on, and try to do better next time. You learn, and you improve, and there’s no fanfare, no prize. Your only reward is that you learned and improved.

It’s not fun; in fact, it’s incredibly bleak. Most players will have to suffer gruelingly through plenty of the color-drained, arduous game days before they start to feel even a bit like they’re on top of anything. But Cart Life has wowed the community and earned so many nominations (Excellence in Narrative, the Nuovo award, and the coveted Seumas McNally Grand Prize) because of the incredibly touching humanity, even nobility it manages to find in the act of eking out a hard life, day after day.

The game’s the work of one man, Richard Hofmeier (he hired musicians for the game’s chippy soundtrack). He himself describes his own game as “weird, toilsome, boring,” and yet says it was important to him to make something “realistic,” a game that teaches what life is like.

Cart Life engenders incredible empathy for its characters, whose pixel-faces leave so much to the imagination. Every day we brush their teeth as they droop blearily before their bathroom mirror; we ache for the vulnerabilities of their burdened bodies as we see them in the shower.

When you just want to give Andrus a chance to chat at the grocery store, but he’s too tired to talk to anyone, you feel for the isolated immigrant trying to build a life. You can’t help but think about those who toil thanklessly at the smallest tasks and get by with whatever small pleasures they can—or reflect on times you may have had to do so yourself. Rather than an empowerment fantasy that takes you out of your day for a blissful minute, Cart Life has the odd power to throw your life into sharp relief.

Anything whatsoever you can build for the characters feels a little lonesome and hard-won, but somehow lovelier for that fact. It’s gutting and un-fun, but powerful in a wonderfully simple way. Games have been clamoring to give us more “over the top” power, more control, more ease of access and more “epic wins” with every passing year, but Cart Life feels like a reminder of how deeply games can communicate the value of small victories.

Screen grabs courtesy of Richard Hofmeier.

Previously: Exploring The Beautiful, Pitiless Super Hexagon.

@leighalexander

Jin-Yo Mok Uses Simplicity To Construct Awe-Inspiring Artworks

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:56:47 -0400

Last month a group of US museums shipped over 168 American artworks—from Native American art to Jackson Pollack—to the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, which will reciprocate by sending the museums some Korean art from the Chosun period next year. It’s a cultural exchange that will help both countries further understand each other’s artistic heritage, from the European influence on American art to how Korean art shifted from Confucianism ideals to more realistic representation.

Skip forward 100 odd years from the end of the Chosun period and you have a new crop of Korean artists who are making their mark in the world and living and working in America. One of these is New York-based Jin-Yo Mok who uses technology to engage his audience in a more direct and immediate way, so they’re free of the need to know an art history degree’s worth of info about the artist to appreciate the work. “For me the most important moment is when someone walks into somewhere like a gallery and meets an art piece. There and then, at that very moment, the value of the piece is determined, and the message is delivered,” he says in the video above.

Noble Mono

His works have included sound installations like Sonic Column, an LED column that lights up and plays music as you touch it, and E-MAN, an online entity that became an offline interactive sculpture. He’s also made large scale works—like Noble Mono (above) a layered 10,000 LED facade for a Seoul department store—that reflects his approach of engaging audiences through playful, simple ways, using technology as a facilitator. “The design aspects of artworks sometimes start from technology.” he explains. “And from new technologies new ideas blossom. From that, sometimes a new form appears also. The search for beauty within that then becomes art.”

Last year he made headlines with Hyper-Matrix, created by his new media art group Jonpasang. This “kinetic landscape” was made for the Hyundai Motor Group Exhibition Pavilion and used a huge grid of computerized pistons to animate a wall of Styrofoam blocks. It was a feat of precise engineering and jaw-dropping spectacle as the cubes shift into various patterns in a fluid, hypnotizing motion (just listen to the gasps of the crowds in the vids below).

“I want technology to become more simplified so we can understand better,” he says. “And I want to make more obvious art that doesn’t hold any secrets.”

Hyper-Matrix

Yang Yongliang's New Ancient Chinese Art

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:24:36 -0400

William Blake may have seen a world in a grain of sand, but Chinese artist Yang Yongliang shows us a city in a noodle bowl. Mountains jut out from the dinnerware, their majesty dwarfed by their situation, in the cityscapes of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, which Yongliang serves us in silvery hues through his photographic manipulations. A Bowl of Taipei is one of three collections featured in “Silent Valley,” Yongliang’s solo show that opens Thursday, March 14th in Paris at the Galerie Paris-Beijing.

A Bowl of Taipei, 2012

Yongliang has pioneered a method of adapting traditional Chinese art forms to new media techniques. From a young age, the Shanghai-based artist was classically trained in painting and calligraphy, studying under a great master. Worried that these ancient forms will become lost in China’s modernization, Yongliang set out to find a way to use new media to translate traditional landscape painting to the digital age. His mixture of photography, video, and animation highlights the collision of old and new both in his techniques and in his subject matter: China’s rapidly developing cities.

Silent Valley, the collection of black-and-white photos after which Yongliang’s Paris show is named, juxtapose a figure of ancient Chinese wisdom against scenes of destructive industrialization. A woman in white wanders through misty landscapes reminiscent of painters from the Song Dynasty‘s depictions of ancient China. But as you look closer you see evidence of China’s urbanization, a crane in the distance, a sign for a minefield. Because the landscapes are classically presented, these traces of industrialization are jarring and evocative.

From the Silent Valley series, 2012.

Although his subject matter is the same Yongliang’s approach is the polar opposite to another artist depicting China’s industrial growth: Edward Burtynsky, known for his manufactured landscapes of China where natural sights very rarely make their way into the frame. But while Burtynsky’s work is that of an outsider approaching China with a Western gaze, Yongliang represents the contemporary country and it’s the artist’s intimacy with the subject matter that makes the images so striking.

The third collection of photos that will featured in the Yongliang’s exhibition is titled Moonlight, and documents a cityscape through the phases of the moon’s waxing and waning. Although again the landscape is classically framed, the city’s lights remind us that this is current day China. Even during the full moon, the city’s lights are brighter than the moonlight.

From the Moonlight series, 2012.

Yongliang’s black-and-white photos are beautiful in the traditional sense of the word. It’s this beauty that becomes tragic when the subject matter is ugly, the destruction and devastation of the landscape. But although the show will undoubtedly make viewers think about the effects of uncontrolled expansion and industrialization on the environment, there is more love than judgement in Yongliang’s gaze. And it’s that love for China past and present that makes his photos hard to forget.

Find out more about Yang Yongliang’s work in our documentary below…

Yang Yongliang’s Silent Valley will run from March 14-April 27 at Galerie Paris-Beijing, 54 Rue du Vertbois-75003 Paris, France.

All images courtesy of Galerie Paris-Beijing.

@CreatorsProject

Amon Tobin's ISAM Live Show Comes To An End

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:14:21 -0400

Amon Tobin‘s a musician who’s well known for his experiments in the world of sound, but it’s the release of his ISAM album and the subsequent tour that paved the way for a new way of experiencing electronic music live. With ISAM Live, and its bigger incarnation ISAM Live 2.0, Tobin took on tour a shape-shifting, projection mapped sculpture that surrounded him and treated the audience to an immersive audiovisual mind-meld.

Tobin took field recordings of real life sounds and noises and wove them into intricately packed tracks for his “sound sculpture” album ISAM. The live shows took the sampled soundscape and used it to lift off on to another plane entirely, augmenting the album by having the visuals interact with the different songs.

It was an experience that took meticulous planning, was storyboarded like a film script and was the product of a 36 hour brainstorming session. The sci-fi psychedelia that resulted was projection mapped by V Squared Labs onto the giant cubic structure, which was conceived by Heather Shaw from Vita Motus Design.

The stunning sights have enraptured audiences and blown minds across the globe since 2011 and now, sadly, (for those who never got to see it), the ISAM live show is coming to an end with the last performance in Paris at the Grande halle de la Villette on 13th March.

“I had this idea of let’s make the thing into a sort of weird, abstract spaceship—or some adolescent fantasy of being in a spaceship.” Tobin notes in the video below when talking about the live show. “The whole thing was very carefully thought out in terms of the pacing of the show, the tracks themselves, what they would visually lend themselves to, but also how these things would all connect.”

Photo: Calder Wilson

It amounted to a gargantuan effort on the part of Tobin and the artists and technicians involved, and what they achieved is a benchmark for experiencing electronic music live. The show may be over, but it’ll serve as inspiration for some time. “I’ve seen some very interesting things happen” says the show’s production designer Alex Lazarus, “but this project takes it above and beyond to the next level of what multimedia projection will turn into in the future”.

Watch our videos on the ISAM and ISAM 2.0 show below

Meet The Design Studio Behind Dita Von Teese's 3D-Printed Dress

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:46:14 -0400

The internet has been abuzz over the past week about “the world’s first fully-articulated 3D printed gown” for burlesque star Dita Von Teese created in collaboration between Francis Bitonti Studio, Michael Schmidt Studios, and Shapeways.

When looking deeper into the collaborators, we were taken aback at the variety of work Brooklyn-based design studio Francis Bitoni Studio has under their belts—a semi-scandalous dress for Hollywood’s sexiest vixen is definitely not their only (or even most noteworthy) project. Check out five of our favorite Francis Bitoni Studio projects below…

1. OpenHouse

Originally created as a part of the Des-Cours event in New Orleans, this temporary installation functions as an interactive architectural design, using a courtyard in the French Quartier as a canvas. The ceiling raises when the space is empty, as if to provide a large, welcoming space, and collapses when their are less people present, providing a more intimate area for the small group. However when the room fills and the noise level heightens, the ceiling begins to shift dramatically, echoing the energy of the group below.

2. Buried Textiles

For Katie Gallagher’s F/W 2013 collection, she collaborated with Francis Bitoni Studio to design laser wool textiles that were created so that “the body’s silhouette would be dissolved into its surroundings.” Using a unique algorithm programed to cut this fabric, no two designs are alike.

3. Schistose Mirror

This mirror is made for everyone who has ever primped in a reflective window or car surface. In place of the traditional flat reflective surface, this mirror uses automotive paint to create the same reflective effect using non-traditional means of creation. The combination of the unconventional reflective surface and the 3D elements ad to the design, addressing the different forms which common objects can take.

4. Bristle Stool

The Bristle Stool is formed from a bunch of small branch-like pieces intertwined to create one solid object. Although it seems like this would require some serious assembly instructions, the chairs can be 3D printed on demand

5. My Secret [E] Garden

This app, designed for the Jardins Metis Garden Festival in Montréal, mixes the natural environment and augmented reality. Five AR devices are embedded in the garden, and users are encouraged to leave their mark for others to find, with the option to plant flowers and leave messages.

For more examples of Francis Bitoni Studio’s innovative designs, check out their portfolio.