» 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.

» Orelha Negra - M.I.R.I.A.M. X Vhils aka Alexandre Farto

A couple of days ago I posted about Alexandre Farto and his portraits. He recently upload this music video for Orelha Negra.

» 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.

» Heatherwick Studio

Heatherwick Studio was established by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, it is recognized for its work in: architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, furniture design and strategic thinking. Their team members come from disciplinary backgrounds that include architecture, product design, model-making, fabrication, landscape design, fine art and curation. Heatherwick Studio’s Associate Directors include Fred Manson, the former environment director of London Borough of Southwark who commissioned Tate Modern, Peckham Library and the Millennium Bridge, and the structural engineer Ron Packman. Heatherwick Studio operates from premises in Kings Cross, central London. This photos are from their UK pavilion at the Shangai's 2010 Expo. The event is the largest Expo ever with two hundred countries taking part and over 70 million visitors. The theme of the Expo was “Better City, Better Life”. For those that didn't had the chance or opportunity to go, here is the rest of this interesting project, watch the video and check out their other projects.

» 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.

» Cultural democracy or mediocrity? PressPausePlay Trailer

"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.

» 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.

» Alexandre Farto

Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, is a Portuguese street artist based in London. Using decayed plaster and old walls as his canvas he makes large detailed portraits by carving them with hammers and chisels. He has given a new life to aged buildings and facades across European cities and New York city. He has many works in different materials and disciplines, from graffiti to motion graphics. There is a great video of him working here.

» Ernesto Alva

Ernesto Alva (1982) is a mexican visual artist focused on graphics, drawing, engraving and printmaking, he studied Plastic Arts at "La Esmeralda" in Mexico city (2002-2007) and has been part of several workshops and the creation of "La Trampa", a production workshop of contemporary graphics. With a energetic production of his work, he has conceived a certain precision and detail in his facture and technic, he explores the forms of lines, the creation of ideas and textures within abstract landscapes conceived almost randomly, his works on pvc foam boards are playful installations of light and shadows within high-bas reliefs that takes different interpretations and textures depending on the light source. It's a mutable work directly affected by it's environment, a bridge between macro and micro. It would be great to take out his work from a museal context and be able to rotate it, lift it, re position it, and relight it to fully comprehend and appreciate it's forms and tones. I recently watch his work in a collective exhibition at Mexico City's Modern Art Museum, and I was kind of refreshed of seeing a young proposal in such place, If I could take a piece to keep from that show I would definitely choose one of him. He's an artist to watch in the upcoming years. You can watch his work here, under "obra".  

» Street Art View

There's been a lot of talk about a new google's project that allows you to virtually visit famous museums around the world, the Google's Art Project, this project has been reinterpreted by Loducca, a brazilian publicity company, Redbull, and Google Maps, together they created a google map's street view based application that allows users to tag and share street art around the world, the "Red Bull Street Art View" website. This website has been online for a few days and it already has over 200 tags all over the world, you can watch pieces by Os Gemeos, Keith Haring, Space Invader and Bansky to name a few.

» 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.

» Robert Seidel

Robert Seidel (1977) began studying biology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and finished his media design diploma at the Bauhaus University. His films have been shown in a museal context, as well as over 250 festivals, galleries, magazines, books and TV programmes worldwide. In his films Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of organic beauty and their emotional perception with visual and scientific technology. By layering different structural, spatial and temporal concepts organically he creates a slowly evolving complexity. Watch Futures, _grau, E3, and all his vimeo page if you have the time. Recently he began to expand his experimental films to an architectural canvas. As one example he turned a natural history museum (Phyletic Museum, Jena, Germany) into a “breathing creature” with a combination film projection, synched light choreography and a dramatic soundtrack he created a gigantic virtual sculpture (100x125x80 meters) for the Art Center Nabi (Seoul, South Korea). Besides his personal art he works as a director, curator and journalist. For his Zero 7 music video he was chosen as one of "30 directors to watch" by Canada's leading commercial production magazine "boards".

» Shyscapes

Misha Shyukin created this shortfilm as his graduation project at FH Aachen University (Germany). He asks to watch his "short-art-movie-video-thingy" with your eyes half closed. The great soundtrack is "Tristana" by Nils Frahm.

» 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.

» Nuit Blanche

"Nuit Blanche" (January of 2010) it's an award winning short film directed by Arev Manoukian and produced by Spyfilms. The first time I watched it, a year ago, I was amazed by how they displayed the connection between two strangers, this hyper real poetic fantasy has no dialogue and the soundtrack itself is a critical and ever-present character on its own. The task of setting sound to this film was accomplished by cellist and composer Samuel Bisson. The great vfx work was done by Marc-Andre Gray, there is a making of in his website and vimeo. I just remember this great piece and decided to post it in case someone missed it.

» Sound of Noise, animated segment

Animated segment for the award winning feature film "Sound of Noise", directed by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson. This piece was animated by Kristofer Ström and Martin Ottosson. This Swedish musical comedy portrays musicians as the ultimate outlaws, it's light on story but heavy on ingenuity. Despite its constant slapstick demeanor, it offers a fairly reasonable snapshot of the punkish anger that often drives experimental music. Very funny and fresh movie.

» Alex Roman or ThirdSeventh or Jorge Seva

Even though this piece is from 2009 I just wanted to share it with those who have not met this artist yet. 

He was born in Alicante, Spain under the name of Jorge Seva, he uses "Alex Roman" as an artistic alias, and some people say he is the best CG artist in the world. After being trained in traditional painting at a few academies he discovered the CG world and moved to Madrid to work at a visual effects company. That did not last long due to the lack of demand of visual effects in Spain at the time. It was then, when he switched to the VIZ business. Currently, He works as a senior leading artist in a company based in Madrid. After considering there was a lack of respect for architecture he decided to start a personal journey: to experiment with a more cinematographic and/or photographic oriented point of view of some of his favorites architect's masterpieces. He did this great unprecedented short film called "The third & the seventh". He did everything himself, he even sequenced, orchestrated and mixed the audio based on some original scores. He used 3d Max, Vray and OnyxTree. He recently made a comercial work for Silestone, check it out in his Vimeo page. There is also a great interview in Autodesk's Area, with wireframe images and more info on the rendering. You can also give him a visit on his website thirdseventh.

» The external world of David OReilly

David OReilly has become very popular with his work, 2009’s “Please Say Something”, 2008’s "Octocat", and “WOFL2106”, which was the one that made me want to know more about him. Now he returns with this twisted, kind of dark, psychotic piece: “The External World”.After being premiered at the 67th Venice Film Festival, it’s now online. It's really intelligent, full of ideas and it just made me feel the necessity of creating stuff that says something, even in a weird way.

» 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.

» Stefan Nadelman, 2.5d mastery among other things

Stefan Nadelman studied fine arts at Iowa State University in 1994, he began working in New York City as a print graphic designer, he transitioned to web design and then to web animation. In 2000, Stefan's first film, "Latin Alive" was included on the Best of Resfest DVD volume 1. By 2003, Stefan left the world of web-based animation for that of film and television. Shortly after, his next film, "Terminal Bar", won the Jury Prize for short film at the Sundance Film Festival. Among a variety of personal, collaborative, and commercial work, he has directed and animated shorts with Robert Smigel for Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse, a music video for Menomena's Evil Bee, and the viral mini-epic short film about war called Food Fight. "I Say Fever" is the first video from the Ramona Falls debut album Intuit, under Barsuk Records. It was made beautifully by this talented artist, it has a fever-ish dreamy look and story.