New piece: abstract01js. Built with Processing.js

I finally had an excuse to take Processing.js for a spin. Aram Bartholl is doing one of his Speed Show exhibitions this Wednesday (SPEED SHOW vol.4:’Super Niche’). The Speed Show format is based on taking over an internet cafe and showing artworks that can run in regular browsers without any special software.

Since most of my pieces use OpenGL they’re not suitable for web I decided to try porting an old 2D sketch to Processing.js. Rendering Processing code in the browser by using the HTML5 Canvas and Javascript is a nice idea, but I was curious to see if it would work for my purposes.

As it turns out, the code for Abstract01 from 2003 (originally created for Abstraction Now) worked on the first attempt. After a few adjustments I now have one interactive and one “automatic” version running perfectly in Firefox and Chrome. I have to say I’m officially impressed with Processing.js, my hat off to John Resig and crew!

SPEED SHOW vol.4 takes place today Wednesday, Oct.27 at 90 Bowery in Manhattan, in the 90 Bowery Internet Cafe. Here is the list of participating artists:

Erik Andersson, Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Charles Broskoski, Jon Cates, Aleksandra Domanovic, Doubble Happiness, Constant Dullaart, JODI, JK Keller, Greg Leuch, Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, Duncan Malashock, Eva & Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Aaron Meyers, Mark Napier, Katja Novitskova, Paper Rad, Jon Rafman, Ariel Rebel, Ryder Ripps, Evan Roth, Brad Troemel, Marius Watz

It’s an honor to be showing in such excellent company…

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.

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”