» Cultural democracy or mediocrity? PressPausePlay Full Movie Online

In February I posted this:

"PressPausePlay, a film about fear, hope and digital culture". The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature or is true talent instead flooded and drowned in the vast digital ocean of mass culture? Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with influential creators of the digital era. To name a few interviewees, Ted Schilowitz, founder, Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, Scott Belsky, CEO & founder, Behance. The film was shot globally between August 2009 – January 2011, covering more than 150 hours of interview footage with international creatives and thinkers - representing the state of digitized culture today.

Now it's out, you can download it from their website, full HD.

» James Alliban, Konstruct, Augmented Reality App

James Alliban is an augmented reality specialist and media artist. His work is regularly featured or mentioned in design magazines. He is the founder of the company knowned as Augmatic.

His projects include installations, mobile art apps and online tools that employ a variety of computer vision and image processing techniques. His main tool of choice is the open source arts based programming toolkit openFrameworks.

This iphone app is a sound reactive "AR" experience that allows the user to create a virtual sculpture by speaking, whistling or blowing into the device’s microphone. A variety of 3D shapes, colour palettes and settings can be combined to build an endless collection of structures. Compositions can be saved to the device’s image gallery.

Konstruct is a free app available on iPhone 3GS and 4 running iOS 4+. A version for the iPad 2 is planned in the coming months.

» Visiophone, Kinect dancing with swarming particles

Visiophone is Rodrigo Carvalho, a portuguese graphic designer and new media artist born in Porto. He studied design at University of Aveiro and he is now based in Barcelona where he studies a masters degree in digital arts at Pompeu Fabra University. 

This video is a demo of "Dancing With Swarming Particles", an interactive installation and performance that intends to explore the relationship between a physical user and an “avatar” which has the physical characteristics of morphing flocking particles.

It was made in Unity3d, using Kinect and Osceleton.

» Norman Fairbanks, Kraftwerk geo location based music generator app

Norman Fairbanks is a conceptual audio artist.  He says his mission is to freely alienate, process and melt artefacts from the panopticon of American mass media with found noise, selected field recordings and specifically generated electro-acoustic elements. His purpose is to investigate new tonalities in sound and create a context free, unbiased, neo-expressionist audio witness and reflection of contemporary American culture. While all this, he developed an interactive 24hrs music generator as an iphone app for Kraftwerk. It’s a system that creates music and sound based on realtime data depending on your geo location, the Kling Klang Machine No 1 differences from other generative music apps because most of them use preprogrammed algorithms and in this particular app they are continuously feeding. He says that for now the functionality is still basic but the original concept will be more and more implemented in future updates and releases. You can watch a demo here.

» NOVA documentary, 75min online premiere

A documentary film on new art and the young artists behind it. Directed by Isaac Niemand, and produced by Rojo, an independent creative organization, founded in 2001 by David Quiles Guilló, in collaboration with BossaNovaFilms, it was all filmed at Nova Contemporary Culture which happened in July and August 2010, in MIS-Museum of Image and Sound, and SESC Pompeia, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Starring: Yoshi Sodeoka, Rebecca Ward, Tofer Chin, KRINK, Base V, Yochai Matos, Max Hattler, Lucy McRae, Kit Webster, Jimmy Joe Roche, Flavio Samelo, Matt W Moore, Zeitguised, Mulheres Barbadas, Gustavo Gagliardo aka Defi, Filippo Minelli, Quayola, Javier Longobardo, Renaud Hallée, Mark Jenkins, Ljudbilden & Piloten, Sosaku Miyazaki, Anna Taratiel aka Ovni, Robert Seidel, B. Fleischmann, Koen Delaere, Taras Hrabowsky, Cristopher Cichocki, Yusk Imai, to name a few.

Music by: Bradien, Roll The Dice, Fuck Buttons, to name some.

» Solaris, Low-Rez Stories by Manuel Schamlstieg

This work is part of the project Low-Rez Stories by Manuel Schmalstieg, it´s a semi-narrative video installation based on the use of remote webcam feeds which are tracked by spider-bots, captured and combined into a self-generating cinematic video landscape. Solaris is an exercise of dynamic camera motion in google street view, inspired by a sequence of the motion picture Solaris (Tarkovsky 1972), you can watch the sequence here. Manuel Schmalstieg studied in Geneva and Krakow. In 2001 he was nominated as artistic co-director of N3krozoft Ltd, an international art and technology research group.

Check out the video installation here.

» Light Painting WiFi

Immaterials: light painting WiFi film by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen.This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre long measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

» Shape Shift

ShapeShift is an experiment in future possibilities of architectural materialization. This project explores the potential application of electro-active polymer (EAP) at an architectural scale. It is an ultra-lightweight, flexible material with the ability to change shape without the need for mechanical actuators. ShapeShift bridges gaps between advanced techniques in architectural design/fabrication and material science as well as pushing academic research towards real world applications. The project is being developed by Computer Aided Architectural Design (ETHZ) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA). I´ve seen different projects with the same principle and purpose but this one is ahead of every one of them. See the team behind this project here.

» Replica, by Jeff Howard and Alex Vessels

Replica was created by Jeff Howard and Alex Vessels for the class Big Screens at ITP. The project was presented at the IAC building’s 120 foot video wall in Chelsea, December, 2010. Replica is a performance using live image processing, it was developed in Processing using the Most Pixels Ever library. Video was pulled from a Canon 5D Mark II camera using Canon’s EOS utility and CamTwist to communicate with Processing. The project was performed by Claire Westby with the song “Lost in the World” by Kanye West.

» Little Magic Stories, Chris O'shea

Chris O'shea is a British artist and designer. He is focused on human behavior and engagement through interaction design and the visual arts. His works and collaborations have been commissioned by the BBC, FACT, Design Museum London and Science Gallery Dublin, and shown by British Council Japan and Kinetica Art Fair. He is on the executive committee of charity Action for Children’s Arts, which campaigns for the right of all children in the UK to have high quality arts experiences as an integral part of their childhood. His vision is to give these experiences not just to visitors of museums & galleries, but also to the hard to reach, through hospitals, sensory rooms, schools, play centres and public spaces.

Little Magic Stories is his latest project, with aim to encourage children to use their creativity to bring stories to life. The installation allows them to create a performance from within their imagination, on stage, in front of an audience of family and friends. Chris says: "I am planning to use this project in workshops with groups of children to get them excited about storytelling. They will be able to use the system to create their own narratives, as well as drawing the content by hand, before performing to their friends. The system will have improved physics, dynamic animation of objects and scene animated sounds." Chris used the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system for this project, allowing the graphics to appear to be alongside the performers. This uses a technique called Pepper’s ghost, and you can see the technical set-up here. An Xbox Kinect camera was also used to track the performers on stage. The software was custom written in C++ and used openFrameworks, openCV and Box2D. On Flickr: Making Of & Performance Shots.

» Kinetica Art Fair

The Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum and is the first of its kind in the UK. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology. The fair provides an international platform for museums, collectors, curators and the public to view and buy artworks in this thriving and advancing field. This time, for 2011 a Kinetica feature exhibition and events programme explored the evolution of the human body, brain, mind and consciousness, it took place from the 3rd to 6th of February. It would have been great to attend, looks like this people from the 2010 exhibition were having a good time.

» 360 music video, "Are We" by Craig Wedren, directed by Tim Nackashi

Former "Shudder to Think" frontman Craig Wedren has released a new solo album, "Wand", which doubles as an 360 interactive film directed by Tim Nackashi. This is not the first 360 music video ever made, the Black Eyed Peas released an Iphone and Ipad app to watch it but you had to pay for it (I guess they just don't have enough money yet). Nackashi says that he wanted to do something more multifaceted than the typical music visual experience, he wanted to conjure the surreal qualities of the 70s rock films with the technological amenities we have today, so he shot this 360 degrees video that allows viewers/listeners to choose their own perspective of each scene. He says he used his dslr to do some tests first, he stitched 15 frames per second all around (we techy geek visual guys call that spherical projections) and got a clue how he must do it, I guess the entire video is shot with dsrl's but he didn't specify on the article I just read. He has on his website a video with a planar projection of the 360 stitch in case you're interested. I think 3d stereoscopic images are now on it's "boom", but 360 degree video is relatively a new frontier, some guys at MIT media lab are doing some interesting stuff with different concepts. According to Wedren this video shows a hero on his journey through mundane life and cotidianity. Watch this interesting film/music video/augmented reality here.

» Quayola

Davide Quagliola aka Quayola is an italian artist based in London, there is no much info out there about where he studied, or how does he became an artist. I've been watching his work for a long time and I've seen him grow as an artist taking giant steps forward over the years, he is been in several festivals and expositions all over the world, and he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects, focusing on multiple disciplines, video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print, he has created a great collection of diverse pieces. This excerpt, of the works named "Topologies", has an iconic painting from the Prado Museum’s collection, "L’ Immacolata Concezione" of Tiepolo as subject. Following the rules behind their visual composition and colors, the painting has been transformed into digital fabrications through the use of custom software. Some photos of the installation at BFI gallery in London here.

» Surface Detail, Tom Beddard

Tom Beddard was born in London in 1976, he currently lives in Edinburgh working at 55degrees, a company specialized in interactive museum exhibits, video production and enterprise level systems integrations. This genius has a PhD on laser physics and a fascination with aesthetics of detail and complexity result of simple mathematical or algorithmic processes. He says his creative process is writing his own software and scripts to explore the resulting output in an interactive manner. He wrote a couple of Adobe Pixel Bender plugins to work with After effects and Photoshop to do this kind of 3d fractals, he has released 3d Mandelbulb Ray Tracer in his website, he says Mandelbulbs are a new class of 3d Mandelbrot fractals, "Unlike many other 3d fractals, the Mandelbulb continue to reveals finer details the closer you look." This Mandelbulb plugin is not compared with the quality and aesthetics you see in this piece, but his blog news says he is going to release this new plug soon! He also composed the soundtrack of this video and it's up for his fans here.
March 8, 2011 UPDATE: New Fractal Lab Web App, watch introduction video here.

» The Sonic Wire Sculptor

The Sonic Wire Sculptor is one of several works that the musician Amit Pitaru made around 2003 to explore basic connections between sound and visuals. The "SWS" is a musical instrument which has been shown in museums and galleries world wide. A later version was created as a public installation where the SWS would be placed in the center of a room and connected to an 8-channel surround system. In every stop, the audience recorded their works into what has now become a library of thousands of sonic sculptors. In 2010 an iPhone version was created by Zach Gage with Amit's support. "The app is easily graspable and intuitive, allowing someone with no musical or drawing background to launch it and start exploring. At the same time SWS goes deep and encourages musicians and artists alike to explore new ideas in their craft". Check it out here http://sws.cc/index.html. Amit Pitaru has also developed a 3d drawing tool called Rhonda Forever, I think that if this software gets on the right hands or gets funds, it could be used as a platform to build more and change the future of 3d modeling and sculpting.