Aggregation by Ulterior Projects is a series of “code generated geometry based on the principals of aggregation”.

Experimental Bookshelves by Ulterior Projects

About the project:

For this project, we take a step away from traditional bookshelf design and step towards functional art pieces.

Each design starts with a bit of custom code that incorporates growth functions found in nature. This step ensures that the shape of each piece is completely random and unique. The executed code generates a basic polygon mesh that is then hand shaped into the final form.

Stamen Design has just released a visualization tool that transforms web maps into works of art. It’s available in three styles and was made possible through funding by the Knight News Challenge. The News Challenge is part of Knight Foundation’s $100 million plus Media Innovation Initiative, which rewards “new ways to meet community information needs in the digital age”. 

Quayola and Memo Akten have collaborated to create a multiscreen digital artwork for the exhibition In the Blink of an Eye: Media and Movement, which is part of the Cultural Olympiad programme. Taking the raw data collected from athletes in motion, they have created beautiful and complex moving abstractions that seem to capture the very essence of their power and grace. This generative animation and interactive installation will display at the Museum from 9 March – 2 September.

About the project:

Forms is a series of studies on human motion, and its reverberations through space and time. It is inspired by the works of Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton, Étienne-Jules Marey as well as similarly inspired modernist cubist works such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No.2″. Rather than focusing on observable trajectories, it explores techniques of extrapolation to sculpt abstract forms, visualizing unseen relationships – power, balance, grace and conflict – between the body and its surroundings. The project investigates athletes; pushing their bodies to their extreme capabilities, their movements shaped by an evolutionary process targeting a winning performance. Traditionally a form of entertainment in todays society with an overpowering competitive edge, the disciplines are deconstructed and interrogated from an exclusively mechanical and aesthetic point of view; concentrating on the invisible forces generated by and influencing the movement. The source for the study is footage from the Commonwealth Games. The process of transformation from live footage to abstract forms is exposed as part of the interactive multi-screen artwork, to provide insight into the evolution of the specially crafted world in which the athletes were placed.

Since this is a project all about movement, it can’t really be fully appreciated until seen in motion:

Forms (Excerpt) from Nexus Productions on Vimeo.

Bartholomäus Traubeck’s Years is a record player that plays slices of wood instead of vinyl. 

About the work:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

You can hear a sample of the beautiful music that results in this video:

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

When Daniel Brown wanted to name his generative flower series, he chose On Growth and Form for good reason:

‘On Growth and Form’ is titled in homage to the book of the same name written by D’arcy Thompson in 1917. In it the scientist (the first bio-mathematician) uses mathematics and 3D modeling to investigate the theory of evolution and the relationships between different species.

“The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. ” -Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, from On Growth and Form.

Included above are images from a three-story high installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum that generated flowers out of pieces from their collection and a floral generator for MagneticNorth to create unique rewards for users.

Simon Heijdens wants to bring nature back into our lives in a very unconventional way.

His concept:

Nature is becoming rare in our daily life. The consequence of the way our world is generally built being, that many people pass the largest part of the day in artificial, perpetual spaces where conditioned climates and 24 hour lighting cover the differences between day or night, spring or autumn. 

His solution to this disappearance of nature in our lives is not to bring back more nature, but to recreate aspects of it that can fit within our artificial surroundings. Pictured above are his projects Tree, Branches and Lightweeds.

About Tree:

Ripples on a puddle of water, footsteps in the sand and slowly gathering grime. Natural processes are existent though becoming rare in our increasingly planned surrounding. While the trees on the streets are no longer nature but carefully controlled and managed, the wind that is moving its branches still is. An installation that traces and amplifies the leftovers of nature in the urban surrounding. White silhouettes of trees projected 8 meters high onto the facades of several buildings in a city. Its branches and leaves are moving either slightly or intense; directly to the measured wind that passes the facade of the building on which it is projected. Starting full of leaves at dawn, the tree looses one of its leaves each time someone passes it. When the leaf breaks of its branch, it drops down on the ground in an alley nearby. Because the leaves are made of light, they slowly brighten up the alley as they grow in amount over the course of the evening, and form a developping image that reveals the use of the city. The leaves roll out when someone walks through them.

About Branches:

A living digital organism growing on the ceiling of an indoor space, that rejoins the artificial, built world with an unplanned natural timeline. Branches is a site responsive software that generates a canopy of branches projected on the ceiling of a space. The branches grow, move and behave depending on external environmental conditions as choreographed by outdoor weather sensors, as well as on the use of the space. From the measurements gathered by movement sensors, the branches and leaves open to allow more light into the areas where there is a concentration of movement in the room. All technology of the installation is located in a specifically engineered ceramic canister, that can be placed anywhere in a room.

About Lightweeds:

As natural elements like a lifting breeze, a sudden shower and a setting sun are planned out of our surrounding, the timeline of the every day is lost. A living digital organism growing onto an indoor space, through which the space regains the natural timeline that it has walled out. Uniquely generated plant families that grow up, move and behave closely depending on actual sunshine, rainfall and wind as measured live outside. On passing human traffic they bend, loose their seeds and pollenate to other walls throughout the space, to make up a constantly evolving wallpaper that reveals the character of the space and its use.

Leo Villareal does amazing light sculptures that pulse and flash in hypnotic patterns. According to New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson “There should be benches. You just want to sit and gaze in blissful stupefaction at Volume” (pictured top).

There’s more to his work than just pretty flashing lights. He described his process to CNET News:

“My work is focused on stripping systems down to their essence to better understand the underlying structures and rules that govern how they work,” Villareal told CNET News. “I am interested in lowest common denominators such as pixels or the zeros and ones in binary code. Starting at the beginning, using the simplest forms, I begin to build elements within a framework. My work explores not only on the physical but adds the dimension of time combining both spatial and temporal resolution. My forms move, change, interact and ultimately grow into complex organisms.

‘Inspired by mathematician John Conway’s work with cellular automata and the Game of Life, I seek to create my own sets of rules,” he continued. “Central to my work is the element of chance. The goal is to create a rich environment in which emergent behavior can occur without a preconceived outcome. I am an active participant, serving as editor in the process through careful selection of compelling sequences.”

To really appreciate his work you need to see it in motion. Here are videos of the pieces pictured above:

Cylinder, 2011 from Leo Villareal on Vimeo.

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC HD from Leo Villareal on Vimeo.

Prettymaps is an interactive web project and print series by Aaron Straup Cope

Cope on his project:

I’d like to generate map tiles that give you that same dizzy feeling you get when you look down at a city at night, from an airplane. We’ve spent so long fussing over the relentless details in cartography that we’ve sort of forgotten what things (should) look like at a distance.

Grace Hopper: The gifted mathematician and pioneer by Charis Tsevis. 

We’re flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We’ve tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question. — Grace Hopper

Dictionary Words is a project by code artist Scott Murray.

Murray describes his project:

Simple, yet hypnotic: the system randomly selects two words from an extensive English dictionary and displays them on-screen. The words fade out, and are replaced by two new ones, ad infinitum.

The word pairings are unexpected, and range from poignant to absurd — or, more accurately, we perceive them as such. I was surprised to see this piece elicit a range of reactions, including discomfort, joy, sadness, and laughter: complex emotional responses to random data!

The piece triggered my interest in narrative and human perception. How do our brains make meaning when none objectively exists? (More problematic: How susceptible are we to misinterpreting meaning that is being communicated?)