There’s a little over a week to catch the installation work Echo by Mark Boulos at FACT in Liverpool. The work combines neuroscientific research with a variety of video effects, including the Hitchcock-style contrazoom and the 19th century stage effect Pepper’s Ghost. We designed and implemented the media control software for the piece, working with the production company Forma.
The Wayne McGregor | Random Dance exhibit Thinking with the Body opens at the Wellcome Collection this week. The selection of exhibits includes a running installation of Becoming.
Added, 2013-09-16: there’s a promotional video on YouTube:
We’ve been working with Wayne McGregor | Random Dance and OpenEndedGroup on Becoming, an algorithmic “virtual dancer” that grows and evolves in response to emulated mechanical constraints and to a database of film material. The “dancer” is partially controlled by a responsive web-based front end built on Backbone.js, Hiccup, Clojure and ClojureScript. (The front-end code is available on GitHub.)
Becoming is currently being used in the studio in the making of Atomos, which premieres in October. Becoming will also be shown as part of the exhibit Thinking with the Body at the Wellcome Collection, opening September 19th.
We’re about to do some remedial work on PEAL, our laser-controlled virtual English church bell tower. The work has just been listed as a Cycling ’74 Project. The main project page is on the Monomatic site, with videos on Vimeo.
Here are some shots of the piece in situ at Kinetica 2010:
We’ve been given a Catalyst Award to produce an installation piece for the Max-themed Code Control event at Phoenix in Leicester later this month. I’m keeping the details under wraps until the event launch on Friday the 22nd, but the screen-grab above shows some simple OpenGL graphics with which we’re testing the codebase. We’ll post more teasers over the next week or two.
We’ve revisited our 2012 revisitation of the work of John Whitney for Kinetica Art Fair 2013. This is a 30-minute rendering for the small(er) screen, and I’ve added a soundtrack derived from the work for Virtual Physical Bodies in Paris. Thanks to the Computer Arts Society for hosting this work.
Kinetica runs from February 27th to March 3rd.
An early set of photos of Plenum on King’s College Chapel.
This coming week sees the next outing of Plenum as part of the Cambridge Music Festival, for which we are being given King’s College Chapel, Cambridge to play with. Installation dates: November 15 and 16. There is of course a Facebook event.
Some pre-publicity:
The Wellcome Trust-funded installation piece Anarchy in the Organism by Simeon Nelson has just gone live at the UCLH Cancer Centre. We designed and built the animation and rendering system; Rob Godman composed the multichannel soundtrack.
As half of Monomatic, I contributed an algorithmic video piece to a set of works entitled Whitney Evolved, projected at the Kinetica Art Fair last month. (Other contributors included Lewis Sykes, Evan Raskob, Mick Grierson and Paul Prudence.) Each work was inspired by the early animation work of John Whitney Senior, much of which was done using mechanical equipment many years before computers became powerful enough to render his images in real time.
This particular piece takes Whitney’s basic “rose” pattern and duplicates it into translucent layers of discs, rotating at arithmetically related speeds so that the layers drift into and out of various patterns of alignment. The virtual camera performs a continuous slow pan around the structure from poles to equator, its distance varying as it orbits.
Technology: the Whitney algorithm is written in Clojure and hosted in Field, which takes care of the OpenGL display. Projection in the P3 Ambika space courtesy of a pair of the inevitable Barco FX-20s.