I came across the fuba_recorder on Flickr, which claims to be a “robot for generating abstract-images of Japanese TV programs”, requested by its followers. There seems to be some sort of automation process in action which blends together a series of images to create these beautiful montages. The graphical qualities of the pieces are delightful, and I love the use of Japanese script.
Deitch is a gallery with a great home page. The illustration features the original gallery building and depictions of the artists who exhibit there. There are few buttons or triggered animation, but some nice timeline animation, and the music works well with the graphics, emulating retro computer games. I also love the simplicity of the colour scheme.
This flash site allows users to explore the links between the 500 largest US companies through their directors, who often sit on the board of up to 7 of these organizations. The user can easily generate maps which explain these links, and can be dragged and manipulated to suit.
“They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004. The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and directors shift boards.”
We had a nice day trip to Oxford on Friday, and on the train my mate Digital Dave was complaining about his camera playing up. I asked to see it and unbelievably, it was doing this to his photos!
A fault in the camera was resulting in images from the memory being mashed together, so every time a new shot was taken, there were traces of previous images found in it.
Here you can see a chunk of an image he took of some t-shirts to put on eBay has forced its way into this pic of one of Oxford’s magnificent colleges. Digital memory is fused with its human equivalence, like the camera is daydreaming, thinking of the images it had taken a few days earlier.
I thought it might be interesting to glitch the laser cutter, but realised I’d probably struggle to get permission to mess around with a few grand’s worth of hardware. So I tried glitching this video of the laser cutter instead.
It’s probably just that I’m noticing more but its getting a little strange how often things are seeming to malfunction, glitch or decay in the digital realm of my life. Spotted this at Paddington station on Friday.
I’ve had a few funny looks recently as I’ve been collecting this printer spool which finds itself spread around uni. There’s an ancient printer in particular up on the 5th floor, which is rather temperamental. Every so often it will pump out a sheet of this code. I presume its the HEX or ASCII of the image it was supposed to print, but it produces some really nice looking graphics.
There is a sort of dialogue that takes place between the user and the printer, an argument almost, as it tries its best to ruin your expensive glossy paper. You have to trick it into printing your image, rather than the page of code. With practice you can learn the combination of buttons to press to get the thing to work, but every now and then it will spurt out a sheet of this code, just as you think it’s started to behave. If I could find out how this happens, and if I could find an old printer, it would be great to do some further experimentation to see what sort of outcome I could achieve. As interesting as it is however, its not ideal the day before a hand-in…
Structural Decay from Chris Coleman on Vimeo.
Another project I’ve just stumbled upon which offers a striking resemblance to my ideas for an installation. Chris Coleman is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver and has some fantastic work, a lot of which explores very similar areas to those I’m interested in for this thesis project. On this project:
“The work was created as part of a multi-story one building audio and visual festival called “Murder the Word” in Buffalo NY. Sensors were placed around the building and were activated by the people moving through the space. When activated each sensor would trigger a specific audio and video clip dealing with and pre-recorded and then processed from that particular space. The clips dealt with the decay of the aging structure which is normally abandoned and how the human activity was accelerating its shift to a more entropic state.” [from Vimeo]
I came across this great video by Belgian Electro-rock band Goose which utilizes some of the ‘Streak Photography’ techniques I mentioned previously, as well as one of those annoyingly confusing spinning optical illusions. Pretty good song too.
GOOSE “British Mode” from Tokib on Vimeo.
Another Time, Another Space (1993, 1999) is an interactive digital artwork by Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai which uses slit-scanning techniques to beautifully warp and distort the fabric of space-time, displaying the results of a series of large screens.
from The Leonardo Gallery: “Another Time, Another Space (1993, 1999) consists of four video cameras capturing live video images of visitors; these images are then manipulated in eight different ways by eight computers. For example, the images may be manipulated through the scanning of each line in a given number of video frames and altering the time reference, creating time-lapse delays, slow-motion effects and time compression, or through scanning individual horizontal pixel lines within frame stacks and combining these as output.
All of these processes could, theoretically, be achieved using traditional film-editing techniques, but not in real time. Another Time, Another Space exploits the possibilities afforded by computer-manipulated real-time video technology. This live sculpting generates strange and beautiful distortions of time and spatial dimensions displayed upon a rig of eight viewing monitors.”
There seems huge parallels between this work and my initial concept for an installation which explores digital decay. This project could prove seminal in the progression of my thesis!
