Food for thought. I’ve definitely spent some time in what felt like procedurally-generated architecture — some of which seemed to have some bugs in it, where the algorithm created spaces that made no sense. And yet they were built by human hands… discuss?

Top: from comments, Procedural System Structure, as discovered by Joahnsonn.
http://proceduralcity.com/ as powered by NVIDIA PhysX and OpenGL

Another (stunning) example: Procedural CitySystem.
http://www.procedural.com/

Bottom: Introversion’s engine builds what looks like generic European cities. Lots of discussion on the Introversion forums:
It’s all in your head, Part 7

Wow, it’s Milklovano, from the former Soviet satellite nation you’ve forgotten, recreated in all its gritty blandness!

Wait, actually, Introversion is from the UK…

Wow, it’s Nortchesterhampton, recreated in all its gritty blandness!

Seriously, really quite brilliant work making this function - and it says a lot about what could be generated procedurally for art as well as games (to say nothing of game art).

We already knew Introversion had some serious game design chops from their gorgeously minimal game Darwinia. Now, can we play Darwinia in a city?

Previously:
Evening in a Procedural City, Built in OpenGL

Compression Reel from David OReilly on Vimeo.

8-bit chip music went mainstream in the last few years. Well, now it’s video compression’s turn. What, you thought crunchy blippy glitch sounds were cool, but that video could only look crap when over-compressed digitally? Too late: even Kanye West is doing it now.

First up: the best of this genre seems to come from director David O’Reilly, pictured above. The man has his own compression-themed t-shirts.

The music video getting the most blogosphere airplay comes from Chairlift. Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil” is a music video made of datamosh errors - a twisted visual special effect formed from an algorithmic anomaly. You’ve seen it before, and like many of us, were as fascinated by these digital artifacts as you were by the patterns your NES made when the carts got dusty and the VHS’s when you taped one few too many Cinemax feature presentations. Of course, because this is pieced together from compression artifacts, it looks even more horrible compressed, so you need the HD version. As the uploader says:

NORMAL QUALITY LOOKS LIKE BUNK. clink on “WATCH IN HD” to WATCH IN HD!!! HD stands for “HOLY DATAMOSH,” which is what G-D bestowed upon us in the form of a MASSIVE COMPUTER GLITCH that eats up INDIE MUSIC VIDEOS and turns them into INTERNET GOLD. See the gold in its purest form at:
http://www.court13.com/Chairlift-EvidentUtensil.mov

Evident Utensil, HD on Vimeo

But don’t think for a second this is going to stay some obscure “Internet” thing. No, media moves too fast for that now. Enter Kanye West. As Jeremy Elder writes on his blog shape+colour:

Datamoshing is the new tiltshift. I guarantee. Now it’s just a matter of who’ll do it well and which big company will soullessly made a campaign out of it “because the kids think it’s ‘dope.’”

datamoshing: kanye west + nabil elderkin: welcome to heartbreak. chairlift + ray tintori: evident utensil. « shape+colour

That’s just the beginning.

Then you discover a visual wormhole full of datamosh. After all, YouTube’s “related” feature is only going to pull up more digital nonsense. And so you dive in — and the vids with 300 counts turn out to be way more interesting.

They start normal, but get strange. You’re soon under someone’s umbrella of glitch.

And then you’re here, like, following a glowing piñata down your own optic nerve.

Something’s happening in software. Generative techniques have been around about as long as computers, but from Spore’s game design, soundtrack and creature editors to new music software like Nodal and Noatikl, in 2008 we’re seeing those techniques more accessible than ever. Good news for fans of the demoscene (an underground movement melding coding and art): it’s back with a vengeance, now interconnected with the larger Web and friendlier software-making tools.

It’s only a public alpha, but Toolbox, bargain-priced at 20 Euros (EUR50 when released), suggests what graphics apps might look like with an entirely different metaphor, built on generative lines. The creator describes the tool as a “node-based editor for making digital art,” or a “visual programming language” — the latter something we usually associate exclusively with patching tools like Max/MSP/Jitter and Quartz Composer. The difference here is, whereas those are open-ended software sketchpads, Toolbox is a single-window editor and integrated environment for making visuals, more along the lines of a Photoshop or Illustrator. I’m not suggesting you’ll toss your Creative Suite 3 license out the window, but what this does mean is you could generate an asset from start to finish in this tool — and, perhaps, take it out to another program.

Toolbox App Product Page, Download
Video Album on Vimeo
Flickr Set

The whole project is the work of one developer, Simon Strandgaard. (Remember, too, Quartz Composer began as the project of one Pierre Oliver-Latour.)

What does all this mean? It means you can make UI elements quickly, or destroy existing graphics, and play with vectors in a fluid, magically generative way. The alpha state can make it slow and unpredictable to work with, but it’s already capable of some fun stuff. Here’s a look at vector filtering:

Random vector filter experiments from Simon Strandgaard on Vimeo.

Data Is Nature brings to our attention the Valsuka Archive, an incredible trove of early video art history, exhibitions, work, designs and circuit diagrams. Paul describes it better than I:

The Vasulka Archive is massive repository of documents from the pioneering days of electronic, computer and video art. Containing a staggering 27000 pages of scanned documents, replete with hand typed texts, circuit diagrams and skuzzy ink marks, I could spend the rest of the week perusing this stuff, believe me. The big names are here, Crutchfield, Conrad, Paik, Van der Beek, Youngblood etc - hand written correspondences to the Vasulka’s as well as reviews and even obituaries of each artist/scientist - but history is selective and remembers according to its own algorithm. Encouragingly, not only do we find artifacts from the so called key movers of the time but also an exhaustive list of lesser, and relatively unknown practitioners waiting to be (re)discovered.

Check out the The Vasulka Archive and see what has inspired every generation of video artist. From TV to film to Music Video and club style VJing, it all started with these pioneers.

Via Data is Nature.

We’re long past the days when we believed running screen savers would stop phospher burn-in (though there are days when I miss After Dark). Now we can run screen savers that imagine, through genetic algorithms, our computers “dreaming of electric sheep.”

Electric Sheep is software that produces evolving paintings that can be synthesized by distributed networks of computers. It’s available as a free screen saver for Mac and Windows:

Electric Sheep

The animations are pretty abstract, but (apparently using a lot of imagination), users refer to them as “sheep.” Just be careful, because apparently you can become overly attached to those animations, like this person did:

can anyone help me??????, I fell in love with this sheep and now it is dead. I just got electric sheep and I did not know that my computer would delete my sheeps so fast….If anyone still has sheep 8915 or any of it’s relations…PLEASE tell me. I would be so pleased to see this sheep again…

Okay, a little odd. Anyway, here on Create Digital Motion when we’re not running oldskool vector graphics, we’re what you would call Whores for High Resolution. (I’ll explain later how I wound up running a SketchUp rendering for 18 hours earlier this week.) So, naturally, I’m pleased to learn there will be a higher-resolution version of the project at SIGGRAPH in the gallery:

Dreams in High Fidelity, via spot blog, the creator’s site

There are some stunningly-organic looking images; the added resolution on this custom hardware setup really does make a difference. If you make it to Boston, stop by and say hi to the creator, and try to steal secrets at a panel on simulation, evolution, and distributed systems.

Images courtesy the Dreams in High Fidelity site.