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.
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.
Recently we’ve been working on several digital art projects using Field as a development and presentation platform but with Clojure running the core, domain-specific algorithmic code. This choice is, admittedly, partly because Clojure is new and shiny, but we also like the Emacs- and Leiningen-based development environment (complete with continuous integration testing), and Clojure’s clean functional semantics lends itself to realtime, evolutionary artworks. Since Field works at the level of Python-on-Java (via Jython), and Clojure runs in the JVM, the Python and Clojure worlds inevitably collide.
This short video shows Plenum projected onto St. Oswald’s church as part of the Lumiere Durham festival. This was the third outing for the piece this year, the first two being at Skyway (Toruń, Poland) and Valgus (Tallinn, Estonia), associated with Lux Scientia.
We are about to depart to Poland to install the computer platforms for Plenum, showing in Toruń from August 9th. This work by Simeon Nelson is part of the Lux Scientica festival series; the piece moves on to Estonia in September and Durham in November.
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