Alexander Rishaug and I just completed a mini-tour of Norway, playing gigs in Oslo (The Villa), Bergen (EKKO Festival), Trondheim (The Black Cube at Verkstedhallen) and finally the Insomnia festival in Tromsø this weekend. Thanks to everybody who turned up! In Oslo we were fortunate to have Andreas Paleologos in the audience with a HD camera, resulting in the video above (possibly the nicest documentation of our set to date!)

The Rishaug vs. Watz project is now over two years old, having debuted at Lovebytes 2007 in Sheffield. It continues to be a very satisfying experiment in exploring sound and visuals as a continuous narrative space. I look forward to seeing what possible new iterations it can take, not least of which will be the upcoming release of Alexander’s album and possible extensions of the project into installation form.

Exploder, wall drawing (made with 1 cm black tape)

It’s always a pleasure to do new types of work when an exhibition calls for it. This time the occasion is “system:system”, an exhibition of 30+ artists opening this Friday in the defunct St.Cecilia’s nun’s convent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. According to curator duo Adam Henry and Christina Vassallo (aka Super Square), system:system is…

…a three-day event that reflects on the nature of associations between parts of a whole. The title is a play on the term “complex systems,” which are characterized by their connections and tendencies toward unpredictable behavior. The organizing of this event evokes these qualities and embraces the small world phenomenon of strangers being linked through minimal degrees of separation to form a dynamic structure.

The list of artists is full of friends and family, including Peter Kirn, Yeni Mao, Derick Melander, SoftLAB, Studio Mode, Lee Wells, and many others. See the full list here. Random Number has some very promising photos from the installing.

Left: Original Exploder image / Right: Projection with distortion

Given the nature of the building, which is filled with tiny rooms that previously served as bedrooms for the nuns, I wanted to do a physical installation rather than using projectors or screens. I’ve been wanting to try to do a wall drawing for quite a while, using artist tape to trace vector outlines from a projected image.

After doing a few sketches I chose to base the walll drawing on Exploder, an “exploding sphere” form I have done variations on in the past (see Architek209 and GasWorks). Rendering it as a wireframe meant that it is technically feasible to trace while maintaining an implication of movement in space. The number of polygons had to be reduced to control the number of lines in need of tracing, but the form proved to take the scaling down well. Rather than worry about the inevitable distortion caused by the projector I decided to incorporate it, making sure the form could stretch to cover the entire wall while taking on an exaggerated perspective.

I’m quite pleased with the result and will definitely be expanding on this strategy in the future. Come along to the opening this Friday to see it in person!

• Opening reception: Friday, Oct 23, 7pm – 10pm
• Performances by: Matamoros and New Idea Society
• Address: St. Cecilia’s Convent, 21 Monitor Street, Brooklyn, NY
• Facebook: system:system event

I’ve uploaded some HD videos from the Stockspace series I did a while back. You can see the whole set on my Flickr: Stockspace set. There you can also see them in proper HD resolution, which helps preserve finer details of the geometry.

These were originally created for use as TV spots for Knight Capital Group. Most of the time they get aired on financial networks very early in the morning, since traders love preparing for the opening of the market by obsessively watching news.

They were also shown on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square once, on an occasion where the Knight CEO rang the morning bell to open the NY Stock Exchange that day. As a recent immigrant to New York that certainly felt gratifying.

Beautiful Connections: Mobile artwork for Nokia E71 (see nokia.co.uk/e71)

I recently had the privilege of being commissioned by Wieden + Kennedy to creating an artwork for Nokia’s new smartphone E71. It’s a new model featuring a full QWERTY keyboard, and is intended to function as a complete communication platform for people on the move. As a response to this purpose, W+K’s campaign focused on the idea of “Beautiful Connections”.

My contribution was a mobile app that allows the user to type in a short SMS-style message, which is then used as the basis for a generative animation that results in a visual compositions of curling forms. The final image can then be sent to other users as a MMS or saved to the phone memory for use as a wallpaper.

Technically it was a challenge to get all the different functions to come together in a single coherent application. The project was developed as a pure J2ME app based loosely on an old version of Mobile Processing. To get a smooth rendering style I chose to use the JSR-226 API for Scalable Vector Graphics, which allowed for properly anti-aliased drawings at the cost of a lower frame rate (approx 7 FPS). Standard J2ME graphics would have given 20 FPS, but the final result would have been less attractive.

All interface elements (menus, text input fields and contact information menu) were built from scratch to avoid the lo-tech feel of the default J2ME UI elements. This required quite a bit of work, but it would have been silly to break the organic feel of the application by using the native phone UI. Instead, the decision was made to make the app feel like a completely upgraded experience. This goal was finally achieved through liberal use of transparent PNGs and old school pixel font trickery.

Visit nokia.co.uk/e71 to see the campaign and download the application (it’s free!) Make sure to also check out the four excellent videos produced by Carl Burgess, Universal Everything, Field and SHFT. To complete the Beautiful Connections concept the web site also features an interactive message generator built in Flash that allows you to create images using live sound and web cam input.

My thanks to the Wieden + Kennedy crew for inviting me to do this project, in particular to Sermad Buni and Louis-Philippe Tremblay for their excellent support. My thanks also to Nokia for having the vision of wanting artworks on their phones. Now, if only Apple would create a category for art on their App Store…

Marius Watz: Conical (prints released on Cronica Electronica)

I just completed a new series called Conical, which was initiated as an artwork for the Cimatics festival but never used. So when Miguel Carvalhais from the Cronica Electronica label asked if I would do a cover for Morten Riis’ Digital Sound Drawings, I was happy to have a chance to bring the project to a good conclusion.

In addition to the cover artwork for the album (released as a downloadable rather than as a physical CD), we are releasing a series of 10 limited Conical prints as part of the Cronica Limited series:

Conical is an investigation of a 3D form composed of lines that trace out segments of multiple cones. Seen at a distance, the form becomes a spatial volume. Zooming in, the sense of volume disappears and the form becomes a 2D surface. The image resolves into a complex pattern of optical interference, without any depth cues to indicate its 3D nature.

The 10 prints are 40×40 cm archival inkjet prints, released as uniques and signed by the artist. The price is a modest €125 per print. You can see all 10 images here.

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”

Layout with Packing 1b + 3b for Portuguese magazine EASI.

Horror Vacui: Fear of void, fear of empty space. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Is there really emptiness between the atoms? It is hard to imagine. Who can take comfort in the uncertain world of quantum mechanics? Better to consider strategies for filling vacuum, covering the blank surface with form and structure, and thus conquering it. It might seem extreme. Claustrophobic, even. But there is safety in numbers.

Two-page layout for EASI, a magazine from Porto, Portugal. See the image in high res to see the smaller details.

I’m still not quite done with the Packing series, even though packing algorithms have become a bit of a generative clichee recently. It becomes an issue of whether you’re able to give the image qualities beyond the default result of the algorithm. For now, I still believe that my take on it succeeds in doing so.

ElectroPlastiques: Object #1 / Grid distortion

I have a new exhibition coming up in Akron, Ohio as part of an artist in residence stay at the Myers School of Art. Titled "ElectroPlastiques", it is my first ever solo show. Interesting that it would take a show in the US for that to happen, although not really so surprising given that the European media art scene is geared towards festivals. The exceptions are the few European media artists who have found gallery representation, a process that seems to be going even slower in Europe than in the US.

I’m using this show to highlight some of the existing topics of my work with realtime animation, as well as a new direction dealing with physical output. I will screen a series of my generative animations, such as Neon Organic, ElectroPlastique #1 & #2 and Illuminations A. These pieces explore the plastic qualities of parametric software processes, where a single set of rules gives rise to an infinite sequence of possible configurations. The title of the show is intended to refer to the plasticity of digital media.

As a counter-point, I will be showing manifestations of my work in physical formats, where animation gives way to other qualities. My rapid prototyping pieces Object #1 - #3 and new work like the Grid distortion laser cuts explore the tactile possibilities of digital fabrication, while prints like the Packing series go beyond the limited resolution of the screen to explore issues of graphic detail.

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SinSurf, CNC-milled Corian panel, produced from STL files generated with Processing.

I just got an email with images from Lenny at HyperWerk, turns out my first foray into the world of CNC milling is done. And it looks better than I had ever expected, which is great news for me since I can now use it for my upcoming ElectroPlastiques solo show in Akron, Ohio next week.

The radial milling paths really make the piece come alive, of course it doesn’t hurt that Corian is such a beautiful material to begin with. I’ll definitely have to explore CNC more as a possible output medium, it provides some of the fine detail of rapid prototyping while allowing for much larger pieces. And the organic quality provided by the milling paths is very appealing, especially considering the digital origin of the form.

See my Flickr stream for more images. My thanks to Andreas and Lenny for their help with milling and photos!