Digital Arts Global

left: General Dynamics 1956 Annual Report Cover - Erik Nitsche Right: Phytological History 1673 Nehemiah Grew – Pecay Kick starting 09 @ D=N with a crop of Flickr finery: If you spend time beachcombing the blogosphere for treasures, at some point you will have come across the excellent Bibliodyssey – a compendium of ‘Visual Materia [...]

left: Geo-phages infecting an unsuspecting coastline at Pruned Right: Slow Decay at Bldblog (Detail of Yvette Molina’s work) Pruned compiles a catalogue of coastal curiosities with an image of ‘Geo-phages infecting an unsuspecting coastline’. Of particular interest to disciples of self-similarity are the iterations produced by coastal engineering and erosion prevention. Bldblog’s post, Resampled Space [...]

left: “Impulsfeldstudien” (Nautilus II) - Jorinde Voigt Right: “Impulsfeldstudien” (Nautilus II) (detail) - Jorinde Voigt At the core of Jorinde Voigt’s drawings lays the proposition of a system or set of systems, with many individual parts collaborating and corroborating harmonically. Networked elements are connected, like a sketch for visual programming project, forcing the [...]

left: Box Pyramid Top - Sublue Right: Nabla - Syntopia Structure Synth is an application for creating complex three-dimensional structures using simple rule sets. Using a few line of code, with statements condensed to a few characters, iterated multiforms can be generated consisting of thousands of individual objects. Developed by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen, this free [...]

left: System5_14-MstogRnd01 - Frank Berg Right: Collage 11/30/07 - Mumblion Frank Bergs Progress set documents experiments involving Delaunay triangulation, networks, maze building algorithms, circle packing and Voronoi diagrams, and at times combining more than one of these in the same system. Restricting the palette to just black and white accentuates the structures and configurations - [...]

Calculated Movements, by Larry Cuba, is composed of syncopated geometric elements that move through space, re-arranging nested versions of themselves in synchronicity - the work is strongly reminiscent of Oscar Fischinger’s pioneering animations. Like robotic wyldestyle glyphs the elements insinuate some kind of hermetic mathematical ordering or purpose. Made in 1980, it’s the last computer [...]

Glen Marshall’s sound visualisation software, built with Processing, combines the incendary colours of pyrotechnics with organic growth where particles, clouds and rhizomes react and grow as the music develops. The Zeno Music Visualiser is the latest in the sequence of his works combining generative and audio reactive animation. The engine is based on his ‘Zeno [...]

Agent Orange (detail) & Thinking Nothing, Then Everything (detail) - Jill Gallenstein Biological and floral patterns define their own elaborate development, producing complex organic geometries in Jill Gallenstein ink drawings on paper. ‘The patterns created are not static and they are not perfect. There is room for anomalies that lead to mutations….As time and space move on, [...]

The 2-day Playgrounds Festival of Audio Visuals Arts begins on Thursday 30th Oct in Tilburg, Holland. The yearly festival is featuring such notables as Tokyoplastic, the animation crew who came to fame with the perfectly syncopated Drum Machine, Eyesupply, the Resolume championing VJ collective and OnedotZero, the DVD label promoting progressive moving image and experimental [...]

left: Surface Works 2 – Capturevision Right: Rotation7 - Don Relyea The growing trend towards producing generative works that mimic human gestures continues. Whitecross has produced a fresh set of works that use Miró as a reference point, whilst combining a space filling splatter pattern. Don Relyea has used a programmed slitscan technique to generate [...]

Daniel Brown - Flowers Construction Kit Daniel Brown well known for his excellent work back in the days when Director was king of browserspace interactivity with his eclectic collection of interactive toys at the famous Noodlebox - now archived at his play-create site. Back then much of the web was composed of black pages with flickering [...]

I little note to the friendly readers of Dataisnature. This site may well be in a precarious position. The hosting company who I registered this domain with 4 years ago seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet leaving a poorly maintained, non-functional automated system for administration and billing. A little while back [...]

The Limits to Growth (details) - Mitchell Whitelaw ‘Computer herding’ is the term given to computer driven automated trading systems’ similar self-operation that produces a feedback loop of procedures creating a vicious cycle of share selling. From the late 70’s computational models for financial trading have become more prevalent, much of the problematic dealing that has [...]

left: Drawing - Jim Denevan Right: Spiral Jetty - Robert Smithson At low tide Jim Denevan makes large-scale freehand drawings into sand, temporal earth-art works that are consumed by the next incoming tide. Particularly of interest are the rule-based works, where circle-packing and space-filling processes are employed. ‘After finding a good stick and composing himself in the [...]

The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit – the punched paper cards used to program early computers are direct descendents of similar cards used to program Jacquard looms during the height of the industrial revolution, More so terms like ‘interlaced’ (among other synonyms) which describe the way pixels are weaved onto the screen, only [...]

Robert Walden’s drawings are overt process based recordings of labour intensive mark making journeys, which result in his Ontological Road and Surveillance Maps. Using ink, pencil and acrylic on paper his city structures move from linearity and order and gradually transform organically into urban sprawls. The cellular nature of these drawings, not surprisingly, also implies [...]

While deep below the earths surface at Cern physicists try to unravel the secrets of the formation of the Universe, artists Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand send a probe through the slight space of a soap bubble membrane allowing a different perspective on our embryonic cosmological past. ‘A Vacuum or semi-vacuum encased within a gravity [...]

Melbourne based artist and musician Dylan Martorell uses an organic procedural method to build up complex mythologies using ‘structural building blocks of nature as a reference point’. Mostly drawn in ink, incredible complex filigree structures contain animals and other worldly people that betray his influences including occult material. Aleister Crowley, psychic self-defence manuals and witchcraft [...]

Jumping on bandwagons is best done sooner rather than later, so we are hereby happy to announce that Generator.x now has its very own Twitter feed.

Microblogs like Twitter allow for a very immediate communication that requires less of a commitment than a regular blog. A 500 word blog post might take a few hours to write, whereas a 140 character long Twitter update only takes a few minutes. The interaction between Twitter users is also more explicit than is typical for blogs, creating a distributed conversation that at best can be thought of as a hive mind.

Here is the feed from twitter.com/generatorx so far:

• Visualization: 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama http://is.gd/3iPS
• Erik Natzke goes to NextFest: http://is.gd/3mCb
• Martin Wattenberg talks to WIRED about big text data: http://is.gd/3mzI
• Knowledge Cartography - cartography as tool for communication and the production of meaning: http://is.gd/3lma Video: http://is.gd/3lmj
• Media Facades 2008 in Berlin looks interesting: http://is.gd/3kQQ
• Blinkenlights: Oldie but Goodie. http://is.gd/3irX Now with a library for Processing for creating Blinkenlights movies.
• Maxalot presents the projection series “Processing Light” tonight at Todaysart, The Hague: http://is.gd/3a9t.
• @anfischer has posted nice documentation of recent work on Flickr: http://is.gd/3a2a
• Podcast from Die Gestalten about Data Flow, their new book about visualization: http://is.gd/37Lm
• Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective http://is.gd/35jU, MASS MoCA
• Vizualizar’08: Database City - Call for papers http://is.gd/33bV. The seminar will be at Medialab Prado, curated by Jose Luis De Vicente.
• The Piksel festival in Bergen has posted calls for their “abstract code real code” theme: http://is.gd/2Ytd
• Mitchell Whitelaw has an interesting new series: Limits to Growth http://is.gd/2WIR. See also his Flickr: http://is.gd/2WIU
• @toxi retweet : new blog post: Generative design in 4096 bytes or less (Will Wright & the 4k demoscene) http://is.gd/2UFj
• WMMNA has a nice summary of C.STEM 2008: Breeding Objects http://is.gd/2VJV.
• CORE.FORMULA has a nice blog post about Austrian sculptor Erwin Hauger: http://is.gd/2TIF. See also Flickr:http://is.gd/2TIO
• C.STEM 2008 - BREEDING OBJECTS currently underway in Turin, feat. fabbing and generative art. http://is.gd/2OTX
• Esther Stocker makes wonderful installations of grid structures in 2D and 3D: http://is.gd/2OTM
• New issue of Vague Terrain about curating net-based art, guest edited by CONT3XT.NET. http://is.gd/2DdM
• Blog post from @arikan: From Network Diagram to Structured Text http://tinyurl.com/5kb8g5
• C.STEM 2008 in Turin has a nice lineup of fabbing works : http://is.gd/2mEl (In Italian)
• Jeff Clark is doing some nice visualization work with a focus on social media: http://www.neoformix.com/
• Just created a Generator.x Twitter feed to compensate for long breaks between blog posts…

Today, the 18th September sees the opening of Le Name Festival in Lille, an electronic music and multimedia showcase organised by Art Point M. Hosting a spectrum of techno/electro DJ’s and VJ’s it looks to be a crammed packed, giddy event. If the Channel Tunnel permits (A fire destroyed part of it last weekend) I’ll [...]