Via the wonderful San Francisco-based culture blog of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid, comes this incredible hand-animated series of graffiti animations:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

blublu.org

Prediction: we’ll see lots more innovation in future mixing code-based, digital artwork and physical media. And since that’ll take some time, and we, uh, missed doing an installment of Weekend Inspiration, you’ve now got a head start on it this week!

As visualists we tend to spend most of our time working with digital processes. So it’s good to step back occasionally and remember that computers don’t need to do all of the work:

1154 stills taken over 2-3 weeks. The lighting and setting is kept remarkably consistent, although I’m guessing someone with a little more production knowledge (or spare time) would have removed the tripod-bump in post.

Space exploration has had a deep impact on the way a lot of us see the world and think about our art. So I can’t wait for this Saturday’s Yuri’s Night Bay Area, which will bring a convergence of bleeding-edge music, art, technology, science, and visualism to a 12 hour-long party on NASA’s airfield outside San Francisco. We’ll be bringing some of the best of this event to you all around the world. Read or subscribe to RSS for our special minisite to make sure you don’t miss a thing, wherever you are on the planet; updates will continue live through the event and in the couple of weeks afterward:

yuricdm.com: Yuri + CDM + music + motion
yuricdm.com RSS feed

If you’re near the Bay Area, let us know if you’re coming to the event. We’d love help with photos, video, and coverage. And if you’re involved in a Yuri’s Night somewhere else in the world, let us know about that, too.

Here’s just a sample of the visualist angle at Yuri’s Bay Area:

Bjork lays on the spectacle in a new music video for “Wanderlust,” and the results are quite gorgeous, even in advance of a promised 3D version. If you had the misfortune of trying to watch it in Yahoo’s world-premiere, horribly-overcompressed video early this week, give it another go. (I’m glad I waited to post this rather than have to show that! Yikes!)

As of press time, Motionographer has a high-quality QuickTime file so you can watch this in all its glory.

The results are a real multimedia extravaganza. The painterly wonderland in the surrounding world is clever digital graphics and computer 3D, though made to look organic, while foreground beasties, costumes, and prosthetics are all real-for-real. Here’s the timelapse of it all coming together:

The cast of thousands includes:

• Directors Encyclopedia Pictura (Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch), who got the music vid world buzzing earlier with their video “Knife” for Grizzly Bear; see further commentary from blog Shots Ring Out
• NYC motion graphics firm UVPHACTORY, seen before working on My Chemical Romance’s “I Don’t Love You.”
• Damijan Saccio led the CG team from UVPHACTORY. I don’t know who he is, not that that means much. Damijan, say hi if you’re out there…
• John Weissberger and Vanessa Waring did the puppetry; Circus Minimus member Jessica Scott was lead pupeteer
• Chris Elam, whom I do happen to know personally, was choreographer

… to say nothing of the stereography work which we’ll be seeing soon.

Now, the odds of any of us ascending to Bjork-like budgets tend on the slim side, but I do like the convergence of the pro digital motion scene with the artsy puppetry - making physical stuff crowd. I know at least a couple of the people on the dance/puppetry side of this project, and I also know making that convergence work is a tremendous challenge, artistically and technically. The challenge remains making it come together in lower-budget projects and with the often more-challenging realm of live performance.

How to get free 3D specs for the 3D version [bjork.com]

Making of video timelapse on Facebook

The Digital Worlds blog, an Open University blog, has an excellent look back at the artistry of early video tubes entitled “Oscilloscopy.”

There’s John Whitney’s “showreel” from 1961, which shows off the ground-breaking (1961, folks!) possibilities of his “mechanical analog computer,” as appropriated from an antiaircraft gun director. Wait … say that again? Yep, Whitney actually used a mechanical contrivance to rotate layers of graphics. When that technique met up with the power of  It’s an idea that’s just waiting for today’s DIYers to tackle, perhaps mixing modern digital techniques with mechanical ones.

Next, also from the above blog post, witness the gorgeous oscilloscope graphics and mechanical control pads of Tennis for Two, an early (thought to be the second-ever, though you never know with these things) video game made by William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Again, DIY project? Mechanical controllers, but this time coupled with 3D graphics? It is the 50th anniversary year of the title. (People under 35, remember that the next time your parents start talking about “back in their day” before video games. Tell them it’s not your fault they never dropped by the Brookhaven National Laboratory.)

Heck, I wish even oscilloscopes looked that pretty now.

There’s something really inspiring and elemental about these works — amplified by mechanical elements used in their creation and control. It’s something I think is possible in code; maybe it’s just challenging in a different way. (And maybe when you have that feeling of magic, you know you’re in the right place.)

This certainly gives me a different source of inspiration as I work with generative techniques in Java/Processing and the like. If this inspires any of your work, send us photos / video links — we’d love to see it! And motion graphics history buffs, happy to know more about these — and other — pioneers.

I had the pleasure of participating in this year’s Motion Graphics Festival, and just being there provided enough inspiration for a year’s worth of projects.

I’ve tried to track down and compile some of the highlights that really struck me as being innovative and interesting. The actual environments were so saturated with visual media that it was tough to take it all in, so I’ve also enlisted the help of a few participants/attendees to sort it all out.

I miss ANSI art. In the character-only days of the online world (pre-Web), these text-based graphics had a strangely pop-art quality, with hard edges, digital textures, and bold colors. This is not to be confused with ASCII art, mind you — ANSI art had lots of extra graphical features. Even by the early 1990s, landing on a modem-based BBS with ANSI art felt like leaving the grungy dullness of the country for the Los Vegas strip.

Which brings us to the relevance to this site. I’ve seen lots of cheesy ASCII art filters for video, implemented in environments like Processing, for one. But how about motion graphics with ANSI? Now that’s an interesting challenge. Or, for that matter, given infinite choices, how can you make your own creative constraints to do something essential and artistic? ANSI’s appeal might be purely nostalgic, but it suggests that more power over pixels has sometimes given us less freedom, not more. Something to ponder while you’re coding / editing / visualizing — there’s a chance to make up your own restrictions.

20 goto 10 in San Francisco will feature “ANSI”, curated by Acid Jazz from artists Somms & Lord Jazz.

20 goto 10 gallery page

Rhizome News: Escape Code to the Past

Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a fantastic overview (summarizing a recent workshop) of presenting data and numbers visually:

Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data

It’s a great read; well worth working through the whole thing.

The art of presenting data more expressively is exploding fast. It was a big part of the impetus behind the creation of Processing, the artistic coding tool. (In fact, a lot of those post reminds me of some of the ideas Ben Fry explored at a workshop I attended in Aspen, Colorado. While Processing is often used by artists for other purposes, it was born as a means of making data visual.)

Ben describes data visualization as “thinking with the eyes” — provocative stuff. But coming from a music background, I’m always interested in the senses going beyond thought. Could data become a live performance tool? With Processing (and other tools) in the hands of VJs/visualists, there’s nothing preventing artists from taking that next step.

If you’re going to South by Southwest Interactive (March in Austin), I’ll be presenting a panel (and possibly one or two events) on data as art, both in visuals and music, and will speak specifically to this question of performance tool. Already confirmed for the panel session is pioneering interaction designer S. Joy Mountford, who led Appple’s International Interface Design Project and is now on Yahoo’s Design Innovation Team. More details on that event soon.

What happens when data artists and interaction designers collide with VJs and digital musicians? I’m excited to find out.

New York City, despite its reputation, is actually a pretty peaceful place to live in a lot of ways. Most visitors here never make it out of Times Square, though even that experience to me is more Vegas than Blade Runner. But even here, the days of electronic synesthesia as something alien are over. It’s a far cry from the 1960s, when, even if they were only slightly drugged up, audiences would actually begin to believe light shows and synths were an alien invasion. Today, even people on an acid trip are jaded.

So I found this quote interesting, from Rhizome, in regards to Hong Kong’s decade-old new media bash, the Microwave International Arts Festival:

In inspecting our flashing city that is Hong Kong, sound, light, and images are constantly coming at us from all directions, collectively attacking our senses…

[the festival will resurrect] the pleasure elicited by the audio-visual interactions will help visitors recover the fascinations in our daily lives that have so been overwhelmed and numbed.

It’s an interesting thought, and I think says a lot about where performance may be headed. I got to see Simian Mobile Disco last month, and they were able to run a near-blinding light show, synced to the beat. People loved it, mostly, but even there, the effect was wearing off, and I actually heard some complaints. (Not from me. I never get tired of overstimulation.)

What I came away with, though, was that there’s a real opportunity to make the sensory in digital art something very different. I think the initial birthing of digital art and media art may finally be concluding, and we can begin to aim for something approaching maturity. (The fact that various entities are now preoccupied with writing histories is a good sign: the artists can get on with doing something new.)

If you are in Hong Kong (and if you aren’t, schedule that layover between LA and Singapore), the festival looks great. A nice mix of electronic music and digital motion. Hmmm… digital music and digital motion? But will it work?

Rhizome News: Resensitizng to Light, Image, and Sound

Chris O’Shea (also of the blog Pixelsumo) has a brilliant installation that allows people to see through walls. It’s an idea I’ve seen done before, but Chris actually makes the effect convincing, by giving visitors an infrared torch (what we’d call a flashlight here in the States, though torch in this case is an even better word). Software tracks the position of the IR emitter via an overhead security camera, and the whole thing is coded to make the impact realistic.

Software is coded in OpenCV (an open-source computer vision library from Intel, in C++) and OpenFrameworks (a lightweight multimedia C++ framework for artists, on some level trying to do for C++ what Processing has done for Java).

There is a childlike quality about wanting the ability to see through walls with x-ray vision like a superhero character. This memory is something Chris O’Shea wants to capture in the interactive installation Out of Bounds. The work encourages visitors to bore through the walls of the museum and engage in a ‘behind the scenes’ experience with an x-ray torch. This playful interaction encourages childlike curiosity in young and old alike, and opens up a portal into the Museum’s forbidden spaces.

Shine the torch at the wall to reveal the secrets hidden beneath. Pay an anonymous visit to the staff office, collection’s store, workshop, roof hatch or plant room.

Out of Bounds on Pixelsumo
Designers in Residence Program, Design Museum, London
Now showing at DesignTide, Tokyo
Out of Bounds Project Description, Documentation

Seeing the IR Rainbow

The results are so realistic, Chris says he’s gotten emails from people thinking it was real. But the whole effect is purely illusion; IR emitters of this type (near-infrared) aren’t capable of penetrating surfaces. That’s something I had to explain to people when I was using IR-sensitive cameras myself (nothing fancier than a DV cam in night vision mode). Higher up the IR spectrum, it is possible to sense heat through walls, though the effect is nothing like the Superman “X-ray vision” seen here.

But among those fooled by near-IR’s “magical” properties? The US government, evidently. It seems our government, in the latest expression of its infinite wisdom, has placed import/export bans on simple IR flashlights for security reasons. (This sounds really odd, even for us; if anyone knows more about this, I’m curious to know.) I’m not sure what the precise security threat would be; maybe commandeering someone’s TiVO by shining at its remote control receiver? Don’t tell the US government, but there’s all kinds of mobile lighting technology that allows you to see in the dark, too. Like Mag-Lites.

Reimagining Projection

What I most like about this project, separate from how lovely it is as installation art, is that it breaks up the projection itself. The spotlight mechanism is simple, but it suggests the potential for letting viewers control projection, and “virtualizing” the projected image rather than letting it simply be a rectangle. (Not that I don’t love rectangular images — I sure spent a lot of time watching TV episodes in rectangles this weekend. But you get the idea.) I’ll be interested to see how ideas like this show up in clubs and performances.