Spiegel Online has just published a feature on generative art: Kunst aus dem Computer: Malen nach Zahlen (in German). It features work by myself, Neil Banas (who was blogged on Generator.x a while back) and San Base.
The opening paragraph strangely proclaims that “Marius Watz is always afraid.” (Marius Watz hat ständig Angst.) That seems to be a slighthly overenthusiastic interpretation of a comment I made about the importance of backup and having access to data while travelling. It also states that I’ve exhibited in Los Angeles, which I haven’t.
The rest of the article seems ok, if a tad superficial. In particular, I think the issue of whether or not generative art can be sold is a bit more resolved than it comes across in the article. The answer is yes, of course it can. The main challenges here are reaching collectors and museums, as well as to make sure the work is collected in a form that can be maintained for posterity.
See the following two articles at Artinfo for some pointers on the subject of selling and collecting media art:
Thanks to Christina Vassallo for providing me with these links in the first place.
13:50 | September 4th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
By accident I happened to notice a new detail on my Flickr account page last night, a sentence just below the top title: “Your account has been reviewed as safe by Flickr staff.” A link to a Flickr FAQ provides more information (more on FlickrBlog.) It turns out the reviewing is related to the NIPSA system and the system of “Safesearch” and content filtering Flickr has implemented to replace it. The stated intention of this system is to make sure images on Flickr are “suitable for a global, public audience”.
Now, being “reviewed as safe” sounds like good a good thing, so I thought I’d go one step further and mark all my non-photographic images as such. Flickr calls this “moderating your photostream”. One of the side effects seems to be that all my non-photographic images are no longer available in public searches. You can observe it by searching for the title "Randbox". It won’t show any results, meaning that my RandBox images are now NIPSA’ed. They can still be found via my photostream, but not through searching. Any non-photo images that were in Flickr's Explore are no longer there.
For artists and designers using Flickr to document and share their work, this development means that their non-photographic images are now second-class citizens. If Flickr goes any further in censoring non-photographic images, it would make Flickr unattractive for sharing anything beyond holiday snaps. I honestly don’t understand what they are hoping to gain by this strategy, as non-photographic images don’t present any problems unless there is a copyright violation. Nor do I understand why screenshots or CGI images would be unsuitable for a public audience.
If you have a Flickr account, you can see your review status for yourself. Individual users can set their “SafeSearch” setting to include non-photographic images, but by default it is set to exclude them. The setting is so obscure that I doubt any non-experts will ever see it.
19:47 | June 4th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I just created a new Flickr group called Digital fabrication. It’s intended for images and discussion related to digital fabrication techniques (rapid prototyping, stereolithography, laser cutting etc). There are already about 50 pictures, so far Sascha Pohflepp has added some interesting examples from the Royal College of Art, Timo Arnall has added some RP-produced characters and Realfakewatches have some interesting uses of laser cutting.
Feel free to join and add your own!
17:45 | May 1st, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
[For workshop at Merz Akademie]
Remember Philip Galanter’s definition of generative art:
Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. "What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory"
See also Generative art on Wikipedia.
Types of generative systems
Generative systems can be broken down in basic types. In reality, most works combine several types.
Randomized composition
- Joshua Davis: Kimono sketch
- Erik Natzke: Experiments
- Michael Meredith: Ivy
- William Burroughs: Cut-up technique (see also this page)
Kinetic systems
- Casey Reas: Process 9
- Marius Watz: Illuminations A
Formal grammars
- 12-tone composition
- Shape grammars
- Chris Coyne: Context free design grammar
Biological models
- Genetic algorithms
- Karl Sims: Evolved Virtual Creatures (see movie)
- Cellular Automata: Conway's Game of Life
- L-systems
- Algorithmic Botany
Analytical / data-based
- Ben Fry: Anemone
- Martin Wattenberg: Shape of Song
Game strategies
- Alison Mealey: Unreal Art
Performance systems:
- Golan Levin: AVES
- Generator.x concert tour: Lia, Frank Bretschneider, Marius Watz
10:13 | April 18th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Notes for workshop about projection and installation in public space at Westerdals School of Communication .
Strategies
- Think space, not screen
- Qualities of projection: Fluid, temporary
- Image as furniture
- Consider interactivity
- Media facades: Image becomes architecture
- Information flow: Realtime infostreams
Urban space
- Evan Roth: GraffitiAnalysis
- Graffiti Research Lab: Projection bombing
- Gunnar Green / Richard The / Frederic Eyl: Parasite subway projection
- Lab[au]: Touch installation, Dexia Tower
- Art+Com: Vattenfall media facade
- Realities United: Media facades
- AG4: Media facades
- Element Labs: Sexy LED technology
Installation
- Artificel: Condemned_bulbes
- Mark Hansen / Ben Rubin: Listening post (YouTube)
- Art+Com: Floating Numbers
- UVA: Volume
Sound + image
- Lia: Flow
- Patric Schmidt / Benedikt Groß: Seelenlose Automaten
- Dein Lieblingsgestalter: Fabri Fibra visuals
Non-electronic
- Johan Löfgren: Market
- Dean Sameshima: Numbers
- Jen Stark: Paper sculpture
- Space Invader: RUBIKCUBISM
- Eno Henze: Metaphysischer Grenzverkehr I
- Alexandre Orion: Ossario
- Fred Eerdekens: Work with light and shadow
- John Powers: SciFi Wahabi #1
- Yayoi Kusama: Dots Obsession - New Century, 2000
23:52 | April 10th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I’ve been monkeying around with Flickr tools. I’ve even been getting my hands dirty with phpFlickr, a library that implements the API in classic friendly PHP style.
The API is powerful and well thought out, but can also be frustrating. Multiple HTTP requests are needed to get certain pieces of information. I’m sure there are good reasons, saving bandwidth being the main one. I do wish there was more statistics functionality. As it stands there are only views, favorite and comment counts, with no history of activity.
Getting the view count requires authentication, which is slightly tricky but doable. More annoyingly, Flickr only yields the view count when using flickr.photos.getInfo, which gives detailed info on single images one at the time. The more light-weight flickr.people.getPublicPhotos would have been more convenient. One might wonder if Flickr wants to discourage stats applications.
Some tools for an easy Flickr life:
- phpFlickr is a slick and transparent PHP implementation of the API. There’s little to simplify the basic API, but it lends itself easily to adding some Flickr magic to any web application.
- FlickrAide is interesting but experimental. It provides statistics, information about contacts and other details that can’t be seen so easily from Flickr. It’s a little unstable, and probably heavy-handed on its interactions with Flickr. But it gives an idea of what could be done with statistics etc. PC only.
- Portable Flicka is a good backup tool, particularly if you have more than 1000 images in your account. I tend to backup high-res images on Flickr for easy retrieval, this makes it even easier. PC only.
- Flickr Leech is a web interface for wallowing in Flickr’s “interestingness”. Not for people who are already showing signs of Flickr addiction, but good for avoiding flicking through sets page by page.
More can be found on The Great Flickr Tools Collection.
22:50 | March 19th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I’ve promised to post this to a few people over the last few months, but somehow never got around to it. But here it is: My blogroll.
I use Google Reader to follow about 80 feeds, which seems managable except for during very busy periods. The blogs I read cover design, art and architecture, as well as some technical subjects. Not surprisingly, the focus is towards computational work, but I also follow some more general interest design and art blogs.
This list was generated by exporting my feed subscriptions as an OPML file, then writing a quick Processing hack to output it as HTML. For those who want the actual OPML file for easy importing, here it is: mariuswatz_bloglist_070213.opml.
My complete blogroll
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13:38 | February 13th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I’m teaching a Computational Design workshop in Basel at Hyperwerk, using Processing. Code and files will be online here.
PDF with the slides from the introductory lecture (PDF, 4 MB).
Processing links
12:39 | December 11th, 2006 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I’m giving a short conceptual workshop at the Oslo School of Architecture today. These are some notes and links for the students.
Physical / virtual space
New social spaces
Computational design for public space
References & blogs:
09:00 | November 1st, 2006 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Creating PDFs in Processing and post-processing them in Adobe Illustrator, I frequently find myself wanting to do things like adjust global transparency levels, colors etc. So far that’s been frustrated by the rather poor color adjustment options built into Illustrator, but today I finally got impatient enough to look into a scripting solution.
Illustrator has had Javascript support since CS 1, exposing the document object model to anyone with a bit of scripting savvy. Adobe is good about publishing technical documents, perhaps a holdover from the days when they relied on PostScript to build their empire. So anyone can go to the online scripting documentation and download a complete PDF with a description of the Illustrator API.
As might be expected, coding Javascript is not without its troubles, and I found myself having dotcom flashbacks to the days when I would do client-side scripting. In particular, debugging is always been a pain with Javascript, especially when one is not intimate with the DOM and API. Fortunately, the ExtendScript Toolkit provided by Adobe functions both as a IDE and a debugger. Still, I find myself wanting a few nice details, like the possibility of displaying a progress bar when a script is executing.
To give you an idea of the oddities of coding for Illustrator, I am posting a script that allows the user to input a multiplier, which is then used to adjust the opacity of all path items in the active document. This covers for the lack of such a function in Illustrator proper. To be honest I was surprised at the speed with which I was able to accomplish my goal. I would seriously consider this as a way to do brute-force post-processing of vector files.
That said, I doubt it will ever be as fun and quirky as Scriptographer…
Source code - OpacityAdj.js
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21:15 | October 22nd, 2006 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
