“Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationships between creative design and the field of information visualization, with a focus on historical connotations and newest developments that show great potential. Empirical evidence shows how designers often employ information visualization as a creative concept capable of significantly determining the design outcome, and vice versa, how information visualization can be enhanced by exploring interdisciplinary concepts, such as design cognition, user engagement, aesthetics and art. Several symbiotic dependencies are explained and demonstrated, including the first conceptual cyberspace and information architecture definitions. Continue reading

Info-Aesthetics: Information and Form by Lev Manovich :: April 22, 2008; 3 - 5 pm :: Studio Ciborra, Fifth Floor, Tower One, London School of Economics and Politics, Houghton Street
London.

The unprecedented growth of information puts new pressures on contemporary societies. We need to invent new ways to interact with information, new ways to represent it, and new ways to make sense of it. How are artists, designers, and architects are responding to these challenges? Rather than trying to defend ourselves against “information glut,” can we approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world? Continue reading

THURSDAY CLUB :: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer: Knitting Intangibles :: April 17, 2008; 6-8 pm :: Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross :: FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will be presenting work in progress from her residency that explores the motion of knitting and the motion of code. Some of the work includes a knit zoetrope, interactive virtual knitting, knitting with the Nintendo Wii and others. She describes the interactive virtual knitting as demonstrating the motion from the knitting actions are tracked and translated into a visualization of knit code displayed on screen (and eventually on the web). Continue reading

Made partly in a Generator.x 2.0 workshop, Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s ‘A week in the life’ is a three dimensional visualisation of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin. Using bespoke software written for his mobile phone, Andreas was able to record the longitude and latitude of his position in the city. The data was then passed to a Processing sketch, which resulted in the 3D representation. WMMNA extracted the following info regarding the journey from Processing to final data sculpture:

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’ Continue reading

[Image: Robert Duffy] Leonardo Day at Berkeley Big Bang 2008: Remix: From Science to Art and Back in the Digital Age :: June 3, 2008 :: UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.

Join us in Berkeley for a three-day symposium and festival of new media and art hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Berkeley Center for New Media. This event is timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, so come spend the week in the Bay Area and be part of the biggest explosion of new media art in the nation. [On June 2, Embodied Media, the first of a two-part symposium.] June 3: Continue reading

Troika’s All the time in the world is a 22m long electroluminescent wall that marks the entrance to the First and Concorde Galleries lounges in the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

All the time in the World extends the conventional notion of a world clock, which commonly concentrates on capital cities in different time zones, by linking real time to places with exciting associations. It allows passengers to extend their imagination to the great natural wonders of the world, the highest mountains, the most beautiful lakes, the tallest buildings, the longest rivers, ancient cities, museums with untold treasures, dream islands and exotic deserts, thereby subverting the hard function of the traditional world clock into a poetic, fictional tool. Continue reading

Light, Space, and Perception is workshop/work group led by Daniel Canogar, Julian Oliver and Pablo Valbuena that aims to conduct research and experiments with the use of light, projection, and visual perception in different settings, gathering people from fields including architecture, visual arts, urbanism, stage and set design, programming, physics, optics, psychology, and the physiology of perception :: Medialab - Prado, Plaza de las Letras. C/ Alameda, 15, 28014 Madrid :: Sessions: April, 3, May 24, and June 26, 2008 (to be continued in the Fall). Online registration deadline: March 26.

The meetings will focus on conceptual discussions and project presentations and, as far as possible, on the development of prototypes and tools. Continue reading

[Image 3: ZeroG SkyDancers poster by DC Spensley] Fibreculture Journal: Issue 11 - Digital Arts and Culture Conference (Perth): “[…]The eleven papers presented here from the perthDAC (Digital Arts and Culture) 2007 conference offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on the future of digital media art and culture, speculating on recent trends and developments, presenting research outcomes, describing works in progress, or documenting histories and challenging existing paradigms of digital media use, creation and perception. Continue reading

Last summer, Cati Vaucelle at Architectradure tipped me off about Meta-Markets, a project which created a means to buy and sell units of social media. I penned an enthusiastic review of the project in the fall and continue to be engaged by this ongoing thought-experiment. Meta-Markets was authored by Burak Arikan, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab who is currently based in Brooklyn. This Friday, Burak will be taking part in a panel discussion entitled Real World Implications of Virtual Economies at the Turbulence Mixed Realities Exhibition and Symposium in Boston (and streaming live in Second Life). Continue reading

The Climate Clock Global Initiative is seeking ideas from artist-led teams to create a major artwork entitled Climate Clock, which will measure changes in greenhouse gas levels, and be the first in a series of global projects calling attention to climate change. Climate Clock will be an instrument of long-term measurement and will collect data for 100 years. The artwork will be located in downtown San Jose, California, Silicon Valley’s city center, and will be a collaboration between an artist-led team composed of artists, international and Silicon Valley engineers and other creative professionals who are working with climate measurement and data visualization. It is anticipated that the budget for the construction of Climate Clock will be between $5 and $15 million, depending upon the scope of the final proposal. Continue reading