Sketches made with Wblut’s Hemesh library

This blog has been quiet for a while, due not to laziness but rather lack of time. Some random notes to let you know what I’ve been up to:

• I just set up a Tumblr blog to post more theory-related thoughts that don’t fit this blog so well. First post: Things I’ve learned from disagreeing about (Media) Art on the Internet
• I’m working on some new objects for 3D printing, experimenting with interfacing Modelbuilder to Wblut’s Hemesh library. I have some promising results so far, but actual print tests remain. I will try to post more about this later, specifically providing a class that acts as a bridge between my UGeometry objects and the HE_Mesh data structure. Interchange of mesh data is the biggest issue for 3D libraries right now, hopefully the upcoming PShape3D structure will facilitate this.
• The Modelbuilder lib is due for an upgrade, I’ll do this when Processing 2.0 is out for good.
• I had a great time doing a solo show in San Francisco this summer, as part of the SF Film Society’s Kinotek series, see documentation on Flickr: SFFS Kinotek – Automatic Writing. Thanks to Sean Uyehara and the others at SFFS, as well as the excellent people I met during my stay.
• The SF show featured the biggest collection of Makerbot objects to date – about 25 pieces: Form studies (Makerbot). As always my thanks go to the Makerbot clan for excellent support, at the craziest I had 6 Makerbots printing at once.

Form studies (Makerbot) at the Automatic Writing show

So I just woke my wife up at 4am because I thought the Flux Factory WordPress site had been seriously hacked and content deleted. Every page I visited had randomly generated Viagra drivel all over it, looking bleak indeed. I was imagining that some hacker might be in the admin role at that very moment, corrupting the SQL database that is the lifeblood of any blog, and which frankly rarely gets backed up. It’s an easy way to lose months of work.

Thus Christina had to get out of bed and provide me with passwords, with a view to do an emergency blog database backup. But then I checked the pages again and the Viagra spam was magically gone. A test on two other computers revealed the site to alive and well. Which leaves only one conclusion: My work laptop is infected, interestingly enough with a virus that is inserting its own toxic HTML into valid HTTP requests. I can only imagine what it might do to my entered passwords.

Ugh. I’m currently scanning disks with AVG Rescue on a USB stick and anticipating changing a lot of passwords, fair punishment for being too lax about security and maybe downloading the occasional file of ill repute.

Remember, kids: Scan and backup, duck and cover!

Update: Turns out the problem is on the Flux server after all. There is a nasty WordPress infection known as WordPress Pharma that will inject Viagra spam into web pages, but oddly enough only as they are presented to search engines. So the database etc. is untouched but I need to hunt down those rogue PHP files and exterminate them.

Visualization sketch built with Processing

I will be teaching an intermediate Processing workshop at Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn in a couple of weeks. Devotion is dedicated to showing work at the intersection of art, design and technology. In addition to exhibition activities they are now busy setting up Devotion Learn to offer workshops in related topics.

My Processing workshop will be divided into 4 days x 4 hours, Monday-Tuesday Oct 18-19 and Oct 25-26. See below for details.

• Dates: Mon Oct 18th – Tues Oct 26th
• When: This course meets 4 times on Monday and Tuesday from 6 pm – 10 pm.
• Where: 54 Maujer, Brooklyn, NY 11206
• Level: Intermediate
• Prerequisite: Computer literate with some coding experience.

Tuition: $350 for Professionals / $250 for Students (School ID required for discount)
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m working on a new series of three drawings titled “Arc Drawings”, made using a plotter technique that I’ve never tried before. The machine is not technically a plotter, it’s actually Studio Mode’s CNC cutting machine which they typically use for completely different purposes. But it can be fitted with a pen instead of a knife, and so doing some plotter drawings seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up.

I’m excited by the chance to continue exploring machine-assisted line drawing, which for me started with the Grid Distortion series. Just as the laser comes with its own material effects, the CNC cutter add some nice qualities to the drawn lines. In order to produce smooth motion the machine accelerates and decelerates at the start and end of every path, which causes a slight ink pooling at the extremes of the line. The drawings will be made on styrene sheets rather than paper, so the ink does not diffuse into the drawing surface.

My thanks to Studio Mode for letting me play with their machine and helping with fabrication. We’re planning to team up and do a workshop together later this year, as part of the great series of ModeLab workshops they’ve been doing dealing with issues in digital fabrication. I look forward to working with them and maybe hook Processing up to Rhino and Grasshopper for some parametric mayhem.

The NODE crew from Frankfurt has announced the followup to their successful NODE08 festival. I will be co-curating the NODE10 exhibition with Eno Henze, a collaboration I think will have some interesting results.

November 15-20, 2010
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany

The purpose of the inter-media forum is to facilitate a cross-border exchange between interactive media, digital art and generative design. The ‘NODE – Forum for digital Arts’ emerged in 2008 from an initiative of developers and users of the programming language vvvv, which is mostly used to create artistic and creative software projects. But NODE is more than just a large-scale vvvv user meeting, the NODE – Forum for Digital Arts gathers people working across the disciplines of applied and artistic media in a week-long event.

The focus of this years NODE10 is the investigation of cultural consequences of a post-industrialised, technological society. The exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt’ thus deepens the discourse surrounding technology and society. Participants look into the subjects through workshops and talks combined with subsequent symposiums and live performances.

NODE10 – Official site
NODE10 on Facebook
NODE10 on Twitter

Deadline: 31.08.2010

This year you are definitely invited to participate the NODE Forum for Digital Arts again. So don´t hesitate and send us your work, which could be from screen to wall to everything. Please send us your proposal including the following information:

- detailed contact information
- title of your work
- context of creation (personnal project, schoolwork, professional)
- description of your work
- duration, resolution, sizes, tech rider
- screenshots, photographs

only as pdf to: node@vvvv.org (subject: submission)

For all other materials please send your documents to:

NODE – Forum for Digital Arts
Niddastrasse 84hh, 60329 Frankfurt, Germany

I just came back from the premiere of my new piece Prime, a light installation for Fageråstunnelen on the Bybanen light rail system in Bergen. Above is a quick preview slideshow of photos shot in the tunnel, more detailed documentation along with video will follow.

Prime is based on a strict grid structure of light elements, with each element switching on and off according to an individual prime number. Due to the use of prime numbers this primitive switching logic gives rise to unpredictable patterns whose logic is not decipherable through observation alone.

The grid is realized in 3 configurations, each of which is repeated two times throughout the tunnel. The two largest installations (using 16 elements) are placed at the tunnel exits, and are clearly visible from outside. The 4 smaller pieces (using 7 and 4 elements respectively) are placed at regular intervals inside the tunnel. This way the work retains its presence throughout the 0.7 km long tunnel, glimpsed as the train moves past.

Unlike most of my other work Prime is not computer-based. Instead I chose to create a programmed logic using simple and stable electric relays. I also wanted to find physical technology that could match the scale and rough nature of the tunnel environment, opting for large LED elements rather than screens or projections. The piece was commissioned to last for a minimum of 5 years, and so technical stability is of the essence. The installations were fabricated by Focus Neon using LED technology normally used for commercial signage systems.

Prime is one of three public artworks installed for the opening of Bybanen, the other two being HC Gilje’s 400 meter light tube “soundwaves” and The White Rabbit by Anita Hillestad and Rachel Dagnall. The artworks were commissioned by Bergen Kommune, with Jørgen Larsson and Jørgen Blitzner as artistic consultants. Additional art for Bybanen will be commissioned through a public competition, the outcome of which will be announced later this year.

I will be teaching a one-week Processing Foundation workshop at Shakerag in Tennessee June 13-19. It should be a great excuse to visit Tennessee in the bloom of early summer and fraternize with other artists. See the registration page for details.

The workshop will give an introduction to Processing for artists, and focus on ways of integrating Processing into the participants’ art practice. The course description is as follows:

The rise of digital media tools for artists has led to an increasing understanding of software as a medium in its own right. Going beyond the confines of commercial software, artists are experimenting with code to create new forms of expression in areas like generative art, interactive installations, and information visualization.

This workshop will give an introduction to the idea of computational aesthetics, which understands form as a product of a computational process. We will use the popular Open Source tool Processing to start sketching with code, then move on to more advanced topics like video and vector output. Built on top of the Java language, Processing is simultaneously disarming in its simplicity and impressive in its ultimate potential. The last part of the week you will focus on individual work, during which we can look at how Processing can be applied to different forms of artistic practice.

The workshops take place on the campus of the St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School. Hope to see you there!

A collection of early sketches for a new piece, titled “Bridge Hypothesis”. It looks at the the bridge as a spatial stereotype, deconstructing it into formal expressions. This video was compiled from Quicktimes I saved as I iteratively experimented with and improved the code. I like that you can see the spontaneous evolution from a primitive wireframe representation, to increasingly stylized forms that reference the bridge as spatial stereotype but clearly have abandoned all regard for gravity.

I am making this piece for “Bright Nights”, an evening of projections on the anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO on October 7th. The event is part of a program of events in connection with the Centennial celebration of the bridge.

Bright Nights will feature the works of myself, Burak Arikan, Motomichi Nakamura and Lee Wells. The event is curated by Christina Vassallo. Practical details follow:

• October 7, 2009 / 7pm – 10pm
• Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, Front & Adams Street side in DUMBO, Brooklyn
• The event is free and open to public.

See the Random Number site for more details about the other artists.

The L key on my laptop keyboard is missing.

I dropped something heavy on it and destroyed the key socket. Life is difficult. The lack of L seriously interrupts my flow. To survive I have written a widget that copies the character L into memory whenever I click on it (that’s why I wrote the floating window hack.) I’m coping better every day. A few days ago I would simply wiggle the little stump that’s left of the key socket in the hope of producing a single character, or keep a spare L in the search field of my browser for easy copying. Now a single click will do, followed by the mental remapping of L to Ctrl-V. There are 33 L’s in this sad little story.

PS. #1. Yes, I know I can just buy an external keyboard. In fact, I’m sure I’ll cave in given a few more days. But I resent the fact that a decent keyboard is more than $100 in Norway, and I wonder how much money I’ve spent on computer mice and keyboards over the years. I seem to recall paying a preposterous amount of money for a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard at one point. It must have been back when I was still doing consulting work. That kind of thing ruins your sense of perspective, a good consultant can always make the unreasonable seem like a good idea.

PS. #2. Thanks to CopyPasteCharacter.com for inspiring me to write my missing letter widget. Here’s a cheer for all the really difficult characters in Unicode.

Screen capture of hacked front page for Code & Form.

It seems that this blog was hacked earlier today. Someone got access to write a new index.html, which took precedence over the index.php file. It doesn’t look like any data was deleted, I guess they just wanted to waste my time a little.

I don’t whether the site was hacked through FTP or via WordPress. I’ve changed all my passwords and backed up the database and all files related to the blog, hopefully that will help.