Leave No Trace

Visitors Studio is an online collaborative space for live interactive creativity, though I’ve no idea how useful it is. Has anyone any experience of this?

Some people say that the most interesting work is created when working within severe constraints, because it forces you to be more creative. Well, how about these for constraints:

No easy easy key-frames or curves aceleration

No gradients

No feathers

No perspective or 3d space

Forget Third-party plugins

The result is surprisingly interesting.

I received a request from zenbullets, in response to my post the other day about his work, asking to see some images of our gallery space, because he’s interested in submitting a proposal for the exhibition, which is good news. He lives far from Stoke-on-Trent and is therefore unable to travel here for any meetings, so I thought it a good idea to post some on the blog, taken from the presentation we gave earlier in the week:

The creators of this music sequencer (based on light levels from a webcam) describe it as too compex but a fun experiment, and I’d have to agree – but I couldn’t resist posting a link to something described as “what might happen if Terry Riley did chiptunes”.

Given what Marcel Duchamp famously did to the Mona Lisa, I’m not going to claim that this version created with Processing isn’t art, but I’d say the most interesting effect is the tiny variations make it look like the texture of tapestry.

I posted yesterday about zenbullet’s video projection on a church in Brighton. Some people expressed an interest at the meeting the other night about external video projection, so here are a few more examples:

• theatre facade
• grain silos in Quebec
• church in Utrecht

There’s a lot of other good work around, including a fantastic piece inside a cathedral in Holland, where the organ pipes appear to float off into space, but I can’t find the link. If anyone knows the piece, please post it in the comments.

If you’re interested in video projection, you should check out Create Digital Motion. They frequently blog about vj equipment and performances, both outdoors and indoors.

Zenbullets frequently produces interesting work, using both Flash and Processing, including his 100 abandoned artworks project, which is due to be published in book form next year. He posted on his blog yesterday about some of his recent work, including a reminder of his video projection on a church in Brighton, complete with source code for the various sections. That’s right – not only does he do great work, but he lets other people see how he’s done it and encourages people to come up with improvements. What a guy!

Wow! Everone was so positive and enthusiastic at last night’s meeting. Thank you all so much for attending and making such useful suggestions and just generally being so supportive about the idea of the exhibition. It sounds like some people are already working on ideas that are relevant, while others immediately started thinking about possibilities. I particularly liked Ben’s idea of skill sharing – I’ll post about this in the next few days.

If you weren’t able to attend last night – don’t worry. It wasn’t a one-off opportunity. We’ll arrange another meeting, possibly around the middle of January so that everyone can chat about progress as well as allow others to come along and get involved.

In the meantime, I hope lots of people will post on this blog, to start discussions and to provide links to interesting stuff.

Tonight’s the night for the meeting at Burslem School of Art, to discuss with artists the forthcoming Erasure exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. I have no idea how many people will turn up, but quite a few have expressed interest and promoted it to their circles of contacts, so I hope it’s a good sized crowd.

The programme is simple: we start at 5pm, available for informal chat with anyone who wants to (light refreshments available), then a short presentation at 6pm followed by open discussion, ending at 7pm in time for the Blurb sessions at ArtWaves gallery/studio.

I posted recently about the forthcoming Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London, opening on 8th December. There’s an article in the Autumn/Winter 2009 edition of the V&A magazine about the exhibition, written by Michael Horsham. You can’t read the article online, which is a shame because it’s very interesting, though if you’re really keen, you can subscribe here at £11 per year.

In brief, accompanying sixteen images of work on show, there are short statements from several of the artists, including a tribute to the role of Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the creators of Processing, whose influence is threaded throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition looks fascinating, and I for one will be going to see it as soon as possible.