What lies at TODAY’s core was the idea of using personal data as the basis for an aesthetic system, while providing individuals with a visual diary of their communication patterns. It’s an intimate piece that “lives” in your pocket and freely distributed for Symbian phones.

Credits:

A Project by CADA
Idea and Design: Sofia Oliveira/Jared Hawkey
Symbian Programming: Heitor Ferreira
Site Developer: Damian Stewart

Second phase of development funded by: DGArtes, Ministerio Cultura, Portugal

Another reason Thayer released an online version is because of its “documentation.” The “about this work” link reveals the source-code for the work, which Thayer has open-sourced under a GPL license. He writes “The source-code is presented in a framework I’ve designed called CodeChat.”

Separated into three categories — (1) Visualizer client (what you see), (2) Image retrieval, image manipulation and network communication, and (3) Real-time seismic data retrieval — “it’s a web-based, threaded discussion forum that allows for separate discussion at each line of the code. What I do to start things off is put in a few comments, trying to focus mostly on the conceptual and aesthetic implications of the lines I choose to comment on as I want the discussion to be more at that level rather than a technical level. By doing this what I’m pointing out … is that everything you need to know about the work is in the code … (which) can easily be materialized … (W)hen galleries and museums are wondering how to preserve this type of art, they should be looking at preserving the source-code.“

Watz uses the computer to generate work which he describes as “a particular brand of visual hedonism, marked by colorful organic shapes and a ‘more is more’ attitude.” Most of his works deal with drawing machines implemented in software, live visuals for music or large-scale projections. The exhibition will showcase a variety of Watz’s generative work, including large scale projections of ElectroPlastiques #1 and #2, five rapid prototypes, large format printouts, and his Universal Digest Machine, which received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica — the world’s leading media arts festival in Linz, Austria.

Marius Watz is a Norwegian artist who currently lives in Berlin where he edits the Generator.x blog (a platform for generative art and design) and prepares future Generator.x events including concert tours, exhibitions and conferences. In addition, Watz travels around the world to teach workshops in computational design and generative art.

“In 2007 I began to learn to ride a bicycle. This for me was a choice not so much determined by reasons of pleasure but as a way of manifesting my need to literally move on with my life. Around the same time, I began to read Beckett’s famous Three Novels, and was moved in particular by “Molloy.” Bicycles are a very important metaphor in this book.” Haeyoung Kim

“To escape their lack of freedom, Beckett’s characters travel, taking with them a few private possessions, which reflect their personality. Of these emblematic items, by far the most important is the bicycle: it is a moving man-powered machine made for traveling (which can be both easy and difficult, according to the conditions prevailing); and it is also a prized possession through which an owner may express his personality. In this respect the bicycle is like the plot.” Janet Menzies

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with the funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

A sound artist, composer, and audio engineer, Haeyoung Kim explores the territory of sounds in electronic music. Currently, under the name Bubblyfish, she has been creating 8-bit and experimental sound works. Haeyoung has collaborated with many respected sound and visual artists such as Malcolm McLaren, the founder of Sex Pistols, Hans Jochim Rodelius, and the Brussels based media art group, Lab[au]. Her work has been presented in art venues, clubs, festivals, and galleries internationally including The American Museum of the Moving Image, Pompidou Center, Kunsthalle Wien, MUTEK, LABoral, Lincoln Center Walter Reed Theater, and The New Museum.

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses (iPak) is a playful, inter-active and participatory art work, that integrates your creativity, the random generation of works by a computer, and art engendered by Ajaykumar. iPak synthesises conceptual innovation, social engagement and therapeutic process: generative art as re-generative force; art-making as a medicine; inspiration emerging from tragedy; and the notion that social factors — such as marginalisation and racism — cause mental illness. Ajaykumar has created the foundation for a ‘polyphonic’ narrative, one created by many stories — yours essentially. You can upload still images, movies, texts, music, sounds, and ideas, to create a dynamic, evolving, relational entity in cyberspace. iPak fully comes into ‘being’ through your participation.

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Its production has also been funded by Arts Council England. “iPak” has been researched, developed, and realised through a digital media bursary and support from Artsadmin (UK), funded by Arts Council England; as well as through collaboration with Re-Active (Italy). “iPak” - is a research project of Goldsmiths University of London, curated and engendered by Ajaykumar.

BIOGRAPHY

Ajaykumar’s art and research focuses on ‘being’: interrogating notions of ‘relational being’, ‘the being of a space’, and ‘non-anthropocentric being’. It is concerned with engendering new epistemologies in ontological art practice: through reappraising Buddhist, Tantric, and Animistic processes; through investigating the contemporary pertinence of a hypothesis of ‘dependent origination’ beyond its original Buddhist cultural and religious significance, particularly with regard spectatorship, ludic, performative, and pedagogic processes.

Ajaykumar teaches at Goldsmith’s College, London. His current courses include: Technology, Art, and Being; Narrative Construction in Film; Notions of void, emptiness, and ‘an art of spectatorship’ in Japanese Art and Culture; Multi-Media and Site-Specific Art. He is a member of the University of Arts London Research Centre, Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN); and a co-director of the Shapes Design Studio where he is collaborating with an architect and product designer to engender furniture, lighting and gardens that come into ‘being’ through the play of others.

Ajaykumar studied fine art, film, and performance at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London; the Institute of Education, University of London; and at the Royal College of Art.

Space Race #1 is a 3d simulation in which teams of autonomous elements compete for a mysterious green fuel, that allows for a spaceship, the only possible way of escaping, to take them to another planet, the next level of the game. The team members are always organized and operating according to the team’s internal logic, either it being looking for the spaceship and running to it, gathering fuel and working either together or independently. Each member is characterized by unique features and each group is organized in swarms that perform the required tasks in order to achieve their goal, conquering the spaceship and traveling to another world. When they arrive to the new planet, they alert the local population that they are ready to compete with them in search of fuel for the next spaceship that will, once again, transport them to yet another planet.
Space race #1 follows and repeats this logic endlessly, taking on the structure of an abstract computer game, where accomplishing certain tasks and defeating the enemy allows the team to reach subsequent levels. But reaching another level never brings the teams closer to the end of their missions. This space race has no visible end or any kind of possible gameplay for us to interact with it. It is an abstract generative fantasy that explores the language, codes and strategies of contemporary computer gaming.

André Sier works as a media artist-programmer. He has a degree in philosophy but studied also painting and sculpture. Sier creates objects involving audio-visual programming languages and has been showing them since the late 90’s , as well as collaborating with visual artists, performers and musicians. He teaches audio-visual programming since 2002.

The main NODE08 exhibition hall in the Diakoniekirche also features a large projection screen. We kindly ask you to submit generative work or videos only, that are in accordance with the festivals topics. An informal jury will select the pieces for the screening.

The rules: Videos should not exceed 12 minutes, maximum resolution is 1280×720 px, preferably encoded as Xvid avi. You may also send us a download link instead of physical storage media or autonomously running vvvv patches. Each feature will run for 12 min. If you decide to submit a patch, please download the development package here.

Your patch will run inside this environment under beta 14, please make sure it’s compatible and don’t forget to include all your media, models, shaders etc. and have them and your subpatches in one folder and as relative paths inside your patch plus a screenshot of how the output should look like (so we can see if everything works fine). Do test this before, because we won’t fix broken links inside your patch.

More about NODE08

1. WORKSHOPS: Over six days, the vvvv developers as well as a great part of the most distinguished and most obsessed vvvv users impart their methods and techniques in a string of workshops. From absolute beginner level (zero to “Wow!” in two days) to the very advanced ones, the workshop program is widely spread. Here are some highlights:

vvvv for Beginners
Lighting and Tracking Techniques
Shader Programming
Video Effects and Reactive Animation
vvvv Plugins
Microcontroller And Sensor Handling
Virtual Architecture and Installation Setup
vvvv Project Organisation
… and many more.

2. LECTURES: Along with the vvvv group (Sebastian Oschatz, Max Wolf, Joreg and Sebastian Gregor), a line of renowned speakers provide insights to their works and domains on April 8th 2008, moderated by Eno Henze at the Velvet Club (Weissfrauenstrasse 12-16, Frankfurt) — and take your questions and comments at the Forum Symposium. Speakers include:

Casey Reas
Herbert W. Franke
Paul Prudence
Verena Kuni
Mark Fornes & Skylar Tibbits
Berthold Scharrer
The lectures conclude with an audio-visual performance from: Paul Prudence

3. EXHIBITION:The bland facade just opposite the Forum base Velvet Club will be given a new life and look by the French collective Digital Slaves. The Diakonie Kirche (Weserstrasse 5, Frankfurt) is going to be the NODE08 Exhibition Hall. Here you can see works by Eno Henze, Martin Zeplichal, Phillip Steinweber & Adreas Koller, Benedikt Gross, Pedro Mari & Claudio Midolo, OMA International and many more. Other installtions by Pinar Yoldas, Jannis Kreft, Jens Fischer, Sebastian Pforr, Jennifer Schaper, Jan Snippen can be seen in the lower level of the Velvet Club (Weissfrauenstrasse 12-16, Frankfurt). During the second part of the Forum, the exhibits created during the workshops will be shown at the Cube, next to the Velvet Club. All locations will be open daily 5pm - midnight, admission is free of charge.

4. VVVVINISAGE: As it should be, we will celebrate the grande finissage – on Saturday April 12th, at the Velvet Club. At the controls will be our vvvv users onoxo (Zagreb), u7agel (Hamburg), Elektromeier (Switzerland), Desaxismundi (France), Catweasel (London), VA (SanchTV-France, Nushitzu-Berlin), Live: Melchior Productions (Cadeza, Berlin), Gaiser (M-nus/Detroit, USA), B-Film (Tonfilm-Amsterdam). DJ: Alex Flitsch (Connaisseur Recordings Frankfurt), Sylvie Marks (Bpitch Control, HAL 9000, Frankfurt)

5. EVERYTHING ELSE: Besides the fixed programme, there will be projections and working space for all NODE08 Members. You can spontaneously show your work, patch, talk and create the exhibit you always wanted to realize. Thanks to the hardware generously sponsored by Satis & Fy and Markus Berger (MSBERGER), we can provide you with projectors and canvas. We strongly recommend that you bring a laptop to NODE08 so you can work in the workshops and in the OpenLab.

6. ACCESS: NODE08 is not profit-oriented. However, participation in the workshops and lectures requires a ticket: this helps to pay for costs and expenses of the lecturers, artists, rentals, gear, etc. Relating to the licensing scheme of vvvv, we trust our guests to choose the right ticket scheme.

The available tickets are
Full week Pro-Pass (all included) EUR 444
Full week Fan-Pass (all included) EUR 111
3Day-Pass (April 5 - 7) EUR 55
2Day-Pass (April 9 - 10) EUR 55
2Day-Pass (April 11 - 12) EUR 55
Lecture-Pass (April EUR 33

The Isaidif graphic elements are circles, trajectories, dots, and ensued crossing lines, with the usual ultra-minimal palette (red, white and black) able to optically create soft lights and shadows. Equipped with autonomous (truly generative) and reset modes, the piece uses simple audio loops that start similarly and then develop in infinite dissonant and rattling juxtapositions. Time is diluted, also thanks to a sober and instinctual interface that lacks support (no help button is admitted here) but invites the user/spectator to decipher and find out himself symbols and values meanings (note: mac.intel users should start browsers in rosetta mode). - Neural

The technique chosen to be used for the reconstruction of the camera images is the eigenface method which, along with other similar face recognition techniques, is mainly used in surveillance systems for finding blacklisted or wanted individuals computationally. Countries such as US, Canada and some EU countries require biometric passport or visa photographs which are taken according to strict rules and guidelines in order to be stored in the governments’ databases in a standardized way. This way, the appearance of a person who gets in front of the camera can be compared to the people previously stored in the system. In this project, the previously stored face images are those of the members of the Turkish National Assembly. The face of the viewer in front of the camera is reconstructed by computer algorithms as if that viewer were one of the members of the Turkish National Assembly although he or she does not resemble to any of them and the result is directly shown on the screen