ryNTH, Cronosfera Festival, Turin

Recently I was invited to perform at Cronosfera Festival, taking place at the club venue, Hiroshima Mon Amour, in Turin. The second edition of this international media arts festival specifically concentrated on video art and live media with a special attention to synchronised audio-visual performances. The first day of the festival comprised of a 3 hour long film screen of submitted animations, generative compositions, abstract and non-representational films works.

The following two nights were devoted to a variety of live performances and audiovisuological investigations. Correctly identifying need for as a large screen to vision ratio, the organisers facilitated a 3-screen Matrox Triplehead set-up. Luisa & Francesca Mizzo and Emilio Corti, together managed to curate a dense and exciting program with more than a few exceptional surprises along the way.

Documentation (Flickr set) of the Festival can be found HERE

Baltan Labs Session, Eindhoven

‘BALTAN Laboratories initiates, supports and disseminates innovative research and development activities in the field of art, technology and culture. Located in Eindhoven, it is a first step towards a broader Art Science Lab in the former NatLab (Philips physics laboratory). BALTAN Laboratories actively pursues new collaborations between disciplines and acts as point of intersection for artists working with technology in Eindhoven and beyond.’

In May 2010 Angela Pohlman, Director of Baltan Labs, together with its consultant artist group, Telcosystems, invited me to give a talk about my own work, my blog Dataisnature and generative art/design in relation to architecture, space and spatiality.

A Flickr set of the session together with some interesting architecture found in Eindhoven can be found HERE

Top: RyNTH at the Planetarium Artis, Amsterdam [Sonic Acts XIII], Bottom: Slides from ‘Generative Spaces: The Spatio-temporal Subroutines of Runtime Planet Earth’

Trace Reddell has posted a comprehensive review of Sonic Acts XIII – The Poetics of Space at Leonardo Reviews Online. He wrote a positive reviews of both my full-dome piece, RyNTH, as documented in a previous post and my lecture: ‘The Spatio-temporal Subroutines of Runtime Planet Earth. On the former, a performance that took place at the Planetarium Artis, Amsterdam, he says:

‘Paul Prudence’s ‘RyNTH’ is a full-dome grayscale piece that frequently shifted from long lines and descending bars to vast spheres experienced from both interior and exterior vantage points. This was one of the most stunning uses of the full-dome that I have seen. The use of grayscale emphasized subtle contrasts and shifts from states of complexity to simplicity, all based on only a few basic, generative forms. The dynamic motility of these forms put the audience in motion both within the forms as well as in a space occupied by the formal structures. In this way, Prudence’s work visually and sonically enacted for me something compelling about the Sonic Acts XIII festival as a whole’

Trace is Associate Professor of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver. He has a strong interest in expanded cinema specializing in the works of Jordan Belson and the legendary Vortex planetarium concerts organised and performed by Belson and Henry Jacobs in the late 60’s.

My Flickr Set of the festival, conference and art exhibit can be found HERE

Top: Flash Math Creativity, Bottom: Fresh Flash: New Design Ideas with Flash MX

Between 2002 and 2005 I wrote chapters for a series of Flash books, published by Friends of Ed, exploring creative programming and generative design with Actionscript.

The first and probably the most well known of these books these was Flash Math Creativity [2002], a book of design experiment iterations. Fifteen artists made four code experiments and then mutated each experiment 10 times annotating the code, and explaining how minute changes to the code creates a wide range of differing effects.

Fresh Flash: New Design Ideas with Flash MX [2002] explored the new syntax and structure that appeared in Flash MX. My chapter , Experimental Interfaces, involved the production of a set of experimental GUI’s generated at runtime using the Drawing API and the new event model.

These experiments were developed further in Flash Interface & Application Design [2003]. Trig functions were used to plot elements of a multi-dimensional array generating spiral and DNA shaped data visualisations.

My contribution to MX Components: Most Wanted [2004] was a chapter entitled ‘Pattern generators, mouse toys & dynamic geometrical designs’ discussed three simple post-functional components for amusement and distraction.

Photographic documentation of the books can be found HERE

Work made for Vague Terrain 14: Biomorph

Back in early 2009 Greg Smith dropped me a line with an invitation to curate an issue of Vague Terrain – the web journal of digital arts he launched in collaboration with Neil Wiernik in fall 2005. Being a long time fan of both Vague Terrain and Greg’s personal online writing project Serial Consign, I took up the offer and decided to work with a topic dear to the heart of my recreational research weblog Dataisnature.

One of the central themes over the past 5 years of the Dataisanture weblog is the use of code by artists to create biological simulations, algorithmic botany and computational ecosystems. Drawing on some of my favourite artists working within this paradigm, and featured on this blog, the idea of VT:14 Biomorph came into being. 10 Artists/writers/architects were invited to submit work.

Some keywords and ideas to reflect upon were: Morphogenesis, Algorithmic Botany, Emergence, Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata, L-systems, Bacterial Aesthetics, Biomineralisation, Autogenesis, Self-generation; Cellular Division, Cosmobiotechnics, Biomimicry and DNA sequences.

VT14 showcases the work of Kat Masback, Daniel Widrig, Biothing, Robert Hodgin, Emma McNally, Jon McCabe, Michael Hansmeyer, Wilfred Hou Je Bek, David Lu and Marc Fornes. You will find Cosmobiotechnic drawings and biochemical schemas, form-finding, algorithmic and emergent architecture, work inspired by Alan Turing and Ernst Haeckle, and a conjectural piece of Bacteriopoetics to boot.

Vague Terrain 14: Biomorph can be viewed HERE.

Orphx and Paul Prudence at Qwartz Electronic Music Conference and Awards

‘Qwartz is an organization and event, based in Paris, that promotes and supports independent musical creation through an international contest. The event brings together different waves of new and old electronic music, from its pioneers to contemporary artists, from electro-acoustic to electro’.

I was invited to perform a short set of audio-visuals with Orphx during the award ceremony in early April 2010. I re-purposed ryNTH to accommodate and provide a real-time visual reading of Orphx’s minimal experimental techno and modular synthesized noise-fields.

RyNTH [n3]

RyNTH [n3] is new version of my Superformula sonification designed specially for projection onto a planetarium dome surface. I will accompany the video with live audio for the Beyond Space event at Sonic Acts XIII – The Poetics of Space, in Amsterdam. Outputting video from VVVV at 2048×2048 at the best possible quality takes considerable time and CPU power with 1 minute of video taking around 3 hours of render time [Core2 Duo 2.66GHz 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M 1GB]. The final 17 minute cut was shipped to Sonic Acts XIII on 11 DVDs to be converted to Dome Masters.

RyNTH [n3]

New features were added to the patch to give a greater variety to the shapes generated. A range of sonic material was fed into the patch during the rendering process ensuring that the final video conformed to specific frequency-forms. More stills of Rynth [n3] can be found HERE

RyNTH [n3]

Beyond Space
Sunday 28 Feb 2010. 19:30. Planetarium Artis

‘An extraordinary programme in a remarkable location: the Beyond Space event in the Planetarium at the Amsterdam Zoo (Artis) includes the international premiere of a composition by the recently deceased innovative composer Maryanne Amacher in acknowledgement of her lifelong dedication to her craft; a new audiovisual work by the Italian multi-talent TeZ; Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand explore the potential of laser and light projections on the Planetarium dome and on soap bubbles, accompanied by live audio by Francisco López; and the British designer Paul Prudence guides the visitors through a visual spectacle specially designed for the Planetarium dome.

RyNTH [n3]

RyNTH uses parameters from real-time sound analysis to generate transformations and deformations of the ‘superformula’ (a generic geometric transformation equation that encompasses a wide range forms found in nature). Its dynamic surface texture is generated by incoming audio frequencies resulting in a kind of synaesthetic surface tension and modulation. The result morphing geometric construction pays homage to gyroscopic devices and anti-gravity mechanics. The periodicity of the individual elements in RyNTH, and their harmonic relationships with respect to sound alludes to the ancient concept of ‘The Music of the Spheres’.

Parhelia

Generated in VVVV, the Parhelia set utilises external data driven [FFT & XML] textures applied to geometric mesh deformations.

Parhelia was performed at Electrovision, The Roxy Bar and Screen, London, September 2009 along with 2 other generative pieces.

A Parhelion (plural Parhelia, from “beside the sun”, also called a ‘Mock Sun’) is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots of light in the sky, often on a luminous ring or halo on either side of the sun. Parhelia are formed by plate shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or – during very cold weather – by ice crystals called diamond dust drifting in the air at low level.

Parhelia

‘Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule—when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm’

From ‘Pale Fire’ by the fictional John Shade (From Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name)

CLICK HERE to view the Parhelia Flickr set

Blogs – Mad About Design [published by Maomao, 2009]

Dataisnature was recently included in a book about design blogs, ‘Blogs – Mad About Design’, edited and written by Macarena San Martin and published by Maomao, 2009.

‘Although Blogs have existed since the end of the 1990s, they flourished only in recent years. Weblogs gained popularity as a medium to tell stories and develop thoughts through dialogue. With advancements in Internet technology, creating and publishing a blog is as simple as it is to check your emails. What makes the difference is, therefore, outstanding content. Blogs, Mad about Design is a collection of the most interesting and exciting graphic design blogs.’

Blogs – Mad About Design [published by Maomao, 2009]

‘The founder of this blog is an artist, designer and VJ, who uses the site to document his personal searches and explorations. Philosophical thoughts, information and links are found here related to generative, algorithmic, process based artworks, computational aesthetics and code orientated architectural modelling. These are treated from a contemporary view point, as well as a historical context.’

CLICK HERE to view Dataisnature.com

Zero to Infinity, Dana Center, London

‘What is zero? Is infinity a number? How have mathematicians made sense of zero and infinity, and what relevance does this have for understanding the universe around us?’

In November 2008, Zero to Infinity, an event organised by the Dana Centre (Part of the London Science Museum) set out to explore and answer some of these questions. I was invited to join a panel discussion including Marcus du Sautoy (mathematician, University of Oxford), Eleanor Robson, (historian of mathematics, University of Cambridge) and Jane Wess (curator, Science Museum). I was also invited to present some generative artwork and culminate the night with a live performance.

A Flickr set documenting the event can be found HERE.