List of references for lecture about interactive art for AHO Interaction Design.

• Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art
• Mork / Pendry / Stenslie / Watz: Sense:less (1996)
• Edward Ihnatowicz: Senster (1970) (YouTube)
• Edward Ihnatowicz: SAM – Sound Activated Mobile (1970) (YouTube)
• Jeffrey Shaw: Legible City (1989)
• Daniel Rozin: Interactive mirrors (1998-)
• Ken Rinaldo: Autopoiesis (2000)
• Chaos Computer Club: Blinkenlights (2001)
• Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin: Listening Post (YouTube) (2002)
• Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman: Messa di Voce (2003)
• Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman: Manual Input Sessions (2004)
• Golan Levin: Scrapple (2006)
• Scott Snibbe: Blow Up (2005)
• UVA: Volume (2006)
• Zachary Lieberman: Drawn (2006)
• Grafitti Research Lab: Throwies (Instructable) (2006)
• GRL & Theo Watzon: Laser Tag (2007)
• Zachary Lieberman, FAT and Grafitti Research Lab: Eyewriter (2009)
• Chris O’Shea / rAndom International: Audience (2008)
• Espen Sommer Eide: Karusell (2008)
• YesYesNo: Night Lights (video) (2010)

KBGAnimD01EB 0008, still from new sound visualization

Ever since doing Stockspace project it seems I am getting asked to do data-related work. This despite the fact that my personal interests diverge from such masters of insightful infographics as Martin Wattenberg, David McCandless or Jonathan Harris.

Suffice to say that I am more concerned with exploring data structures as spaces than I am with providing new understandings of the information contained within them. Manuel Lima’s Information Visualization Manifesto calls for a seriousness on the topic of data treatments, while my projects remain comfortably frivolous.

Recently I’ve been working on a project that has required researching data sources and adapting them to illustrate a bigger idea, which has led to much Googling in the absence of good data from the client. Sometimes you find the right thing immediately, but sometimes data is hard to find in a format that is freely available and easily parsable. Since I have found some good sources I thought I’d share them here…

• PVWATSS calculator from Renewable Resource Data Center (RReDC) provides theoretical calculations of yields (hour-by-hour, 365 days/yr) from photovoltaic solar panels for most international locations.
• World airport codes with geo name data, helpfully spidered by Wiebe Cazemier so you don’t have to.
• Unattributed FTP depository of geo-related CSV files, including postal and ZIP codes, world city info etc.
• Historical weather data from Weather Underground, providing year-by-year hourly information for most cities in the world. (See also this list of weather APIs.)
• Yahoo Finance offers downloads of historical stock price data (CSV) for just about any stock symbol out there. Sadly I have yet to find an open intraday stock data source, due to the proprietary nature of that kind of information.
• The Guardian’s Datablog is a recent venture, and I have yet to use any of the data sets they provide. But I like their approach, which is clearly aimed at democratizing data with a view to public agenda.

I would be interested in hearing tips about any great data sets out there, particularly interesting time series data.

Miska Knapek recently sent me a link to a source of weather sensor data from Helsinki, including measurements of wind direction at the top of Helsinki’s Olympic Tower in 5-minute intervals. He has already made some wind visualization videos and some fabricated wind data sculptures based on this data.

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.

Code, Space, Form, February 3-7 at CMU, Pittsburgh

The eminent Golan Levin has just announced a symposium titled “Code, Space, Form”, featuring C.E.B. Reas, MOS Architects, Ben Pell and yours truly. Hosted by Carnegie-Mellon University, it’s a multi-day affair with lectures and workshops, culminating in an exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It should provide an interesting discussion of the implications of generative strategies in art and architecture.

Here is the info from Golan’s blog, hope to see you there if you’re anywhere within range of Pittsburgh:

I am delighted to announce “Code, Form, Space”, a mini-symposium about generative form and digital fabrication, which will be held at Carnegie Mellon University during the week of February 3-7. Nearly all of the events are completely free and open to the public – and include lecture presentations by such distinguished computational artist/designers as C.E.B. Reas, Marius Watz, Ben Pell, and Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS Architects. I’m co-directing this event in collaboration with Jeremy Ficca (Professor of Architecture and Director of the CMU Digital Fabrication Lab), the CMU School of Art Lecture Series, and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

• Code, Form, Space poster and brochure (PDF)
• CMU School of Art: “Code, Form, Space”

Burak Arikan: Twitter Networks / Jeff Clark: TwitArcs

In general, I’m a fan of social software, believing that it has great potential to be useful in the overlapping spheres between the personal and the professional. Nevertheless, I’m somewhat of a late comer to the Twitter revolution. Despite early enthusiasm from smart people like Tom Carden, I initially saw it mostly as a pseudo-chat medium and a potential timewaster. I signed up, then never came back.

However, a recent conversation with Burak Arikan about Twitter and collective thinking made me revisit the Twitter network. And guess what? I like it. Sure, there’s plenty of noise in the Twittersphere. But by wisely choosing whose streams to follow, Twitter becomes much like a collective conversation, providing in-progress snapshots of thoughts and ideas from some people I have come to know and admire.

At its best, Twitter is like a Hive Mind, echoing with ideas and spontaneous viewpoints.
By using a tool like Twhirl or Twitterfox, Twitter becomes an ambient information feed that you can tune in and out of at leisure. Its immediacy means that you’ll never experience the blog reader’s guilt of having 500 unread items in your feed reader. But by following the twitters of interesting people you’ll quickly find links to useful resources and learn about their creative processes.

Twitter tools & visualizations

The following are some recent Twitter-related resources that give an idea of the bigger Twitter picture, including network visualizations and Twitter hacks a little outside the mainstream. Feel free to post comments with links to interesting Twitter tools and hacks.

• Burak Arikan: Growth of a Twitter Graph
• Jeff Clark: TwitArcs / Twitter Spectrum / Twitter StreamGraphs
• explore.twitter.com – Index of Twitter tools, including the Twitter Blocks visualization (created by a Stamen team including the aforementioned Tom Carden)
• Twitterfeed.com – Tool for syndicating a RSS feed as a Twitter stream)
• Twistori – Visualization of twitters relating to emotional states
• Twittervision – Geographical visualization of public twitters

My own Twitter stream can be found at http://twitter.com/mariuswatz/. I try to keep my Twitters somewhat topical, but occasional digressions will occur. After all, that’s the beauty of Twitter.

Boris Müller / Satoru Sugihara / Eno Henze

The Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen workshop and exhibition kicks off in Berlin this Thursday. In addition to the workshop there will be two evenings of presentations open to the general public, intended to bring the topics of the workshop to a larger audience.

The presentations will take place at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, which is also the venue for the workshop. If you’re in Berlin I hope to see you there!

Generator.x 2.0: Presentations #1 – Thu 24 Jan, 19:00 – 21:00

• Keynote: Marius Watz [NO]
• Boris Müller [DE]
• Satoru Sugihara – Morphosis [JP/US]
• Eno Henze [DE]

Generator.x 2.0: Presentations #2 – Mon 28 Jan, 19:00 – 21:00

• Aram Bartholl [DE]
• David Dessens [FR/DE]
• Tim Schork – MESNE [DE/AUS]
• Skylar Tibbits – Theverymany [US]

See the Club Transmediale site for a full list of Generator.x 2.0 events. Documentation of the event will be posted on the Generator.x blog and Flickr group as it becomes available.

Since Flickr is just about my favorite web service and I use it a lot, it should come as no surprise that I also like to complain about it. Well, not so much about the service itself, just the lack of a few features and some of the more inexplicable things they’ve done. Some of my previous gripes (like black thumbnails) have actually been fixed. Others, like the stupefyingly bad SafeSearch feature are alive and well.

So here’s my current list of annoyances about my favorite web service:

• Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is a very buggy piece of software. In fact, it’s so bad it probably should never have been released. In particular, it should not have been released just before a big holiday when development teams would not be on hand to fix it. I’ve downgraded to Uploadr 2.5. It might be clunky, but at least it uploads your pictures.
• There is still no way to hide non-public images from yourself so that you could navigate the photostream the way other people see it. About 3000 pictures in my account are private, being either high-res backups or of a personal nature (not that personal, though…) Wading through them often becomes a chore, since I typically upload batches of 30-100 images for backup at a time. I’m almost considering opening a separate Flickr account just for backups, but that would become frustrating quite quickly.
• When you add photos to an existing set using the Organizr, the sets are listed in the order you’ve arranged them in for viewers. When you have 50 sets, it gets annoying to find one that might be number 20 on the list. The option to switch to alphabetical listing would have been very useful.
• The SafeSearch / NIPSA issue is still around, although Flickr seems less aggressive about enforcing it at the moment

On a more positive note, the new Flickr stats work just fine. I’ve been able to observe some interesting trends in how my photos are being viewed, including a better idea of what constitutes my “greatest hits” on Flickr. Great work indeed.

I don’t read many programming or tech blogs unless they are directly related to the fields of generative art or computational design. One of the few exceptions is Jeff Atwood’s blog Coding Horror, which I’ve found to be a consistently brilliant source of techy commentary and sound programming advice. Often it’s not really applicable to my own projects since I’m not building business apps of grand complexity, but it’s inspiring reading nonetheless.

It was therefore gratifying to see that Atwood just blogged about Processing in a post entitled Modern Logo. In reference to another blog post about rediscovering LOGO, Atwood suggests that while LOGO might have some depth to it, turtle-based drawing ultimately “sucks”. Instead, he points to Processing as an updated alternative with similar educational goals. Sweet.

Oh, and happy holidays, no matter how you’re spending the time between Dec 24-31…

Club Transmediale.08­ - Unpredictable
Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts

Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen
24 Jan -­ 2 Feb 2008, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse / [DAM] Berlin
Workshop / Exhibition / Performance

Leander Herzog: thePhysicalVertexBuffer

Generator.x in collaboration with Club Transmediale and [DAM] Berlin presents Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the screen, a workshop and exhibition about digital fabrication and generative systems.

Digital fabrication (also known as “fabbing”) represents the next step in the digital revolution. After years of virtualization, with machines and atoms being replaced by bits and software, we are coming full circle. Digital technologies like rapid prototyping, laser cutting and CNC milling now produce atoms from bits, eliminating many of the limitations of industrial production processes. Once prohibitively expensive, such technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, pointing to a future where mass customization and manufacturing-on-demand may be real alternatives to mass production.

For artists and designers working with generative systems, digital fabrication opens the door to a range of new expressions beyond the limits of virtual space. Parametric models apply computational strategies to the analysis and synthesis of space, producing structures and surfaces of great complexity. Through fabbing these forms may be rendered tangible, even tactile.

Jared Tarbell: Spheroids and cubes

Call for participants

We are looking for 15 artists, designers and architects who have an existing practice based on generative systems and custom software, and who are interested in investigating physical formats through digital fabrication. The workshop will be practical in nature, and will produce a selection of works that will be included in the exhibition at [DAM]. Participants will have access to an on-site laser cutter, and an introduction to this technology will be part of the workshop.

The workshop is free of charge, but we will not be able to provide support for travel or accomodation. Participants are expected to have experience with programming software that will allow them to produce work suitable for production, such as Processing, VVVV or any other system capable of producing vector output. Previous experience with laser cutting or digital fabrication technologies is a bonus, but not a requirement.

Applications must be in PDF format and should including a CV and a short statement of intent, describing why you want to participate in the workshop and how fabbing relates to your existing practice. You should include a maximum of 5 images of relevant work, with a total file size of 2 megabytes. Feel free to provide links to web sites containing documentation such as videos or downloadable software, but please don’t send such content by email.

Please submit applications by email to generatorx [at] clubtransmediale.de. The deadline for application is December 21, 2007, accepted participants will be notified at the beginning of January 2008.

Theverymany (Fornes / Tibbits): Tesselated panels

Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the screen is supported by The Office for Contemporary Art Norway. We also thank our partners: Institut HyperWerk HGK FHNW and Lasern. .

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18:30 | December 2nd, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback