Focus sur le réalisateur turc Onur Senturk qui a imaginé cette nouvelle et superbe vidéo, introduisant les différents noms présents à la conférence créative ‘Cincinnati OFFF 2013′. Une séquence et une animation 3D visuellement maîtrisée sur un sound-design de Cypher Audio à découvrir en images et en vidéo HD.
Produite par Hellohikimori, voici la vidéo de présentation pour le Offf On Tour à Istanbul qui s’est déroulée début mars. Autour du skater Matt Messiha assemblant puis utilisant son skateboard dans les rues de Paris, cette vidéo très réussie introduit les différents protagonistes du festival.
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Après la sélection du F5 Festival, voici maintenant la vidéo d’ouverturee du festival Offf de cette année 2009. Une réalisation du studio Prologue, avec une bande-son de Hecq. De très beaux plans, ainsi que des effets de couleurs et de textes, à découvrir dans la suite.
Site du studio Prologue
Apart from Joshua Davis’ talk, the other main highlight of OFFF, the software and visual communication conference which took place last week in Lisbon, was the panel on Data Visualization curated and moderated by the European evangelist of the discipline: Jose-Luis de Vicente.
Lounge at the LX factory where OFFF took place this year
As the abstract of the panel reminds: data visualization is a transversal discipline which harnesses the immense power of visual communication to explain, in an understandable manner, the relationships of meaning, causes and dependency found among great abstract masses of information generated by scientific and social processes.
Aaron Koblin, Manuel Lima, JL de Vicente and Santiago Ortiz (image JL de Vicente)
Interaction designer, information architect and design researcher Manuel Lima discussed the story of the website Visual Complexity and the lessons he learnt since he launched it 3 years back. Visual Complexity is not a blog, it is a collection of (so far) over 570 projects of data viz, it is also a space for people to discuss about what is happening in this area.
The project started while Lima was following an MFA program at Parsons School of Design. While working on his thesis project Blogviz: Mapping the dynamics of information diffusion in Blogspace, he had to research extensively the visualization of complex networks, and found out that there was a need for an integrated and extensive resource on this subject.
Lima’s presentation was very very fast with a lot of information crammed in a small amount of time. But here’s a few elements from it:
South-East Asia detail from Ptolemy’s geography. Redrawn in the 15th century
The transmission of information started with the wall paintings, got more sophisticated with the oldest registry of a written language (the Sumerian cuneiforms) and later with Ptolemy’s world map. More key landmarks for data viz can be found in Alfred W. Crosby‘s essay The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600.
One first important factor for the development of data viz is computer storage.
Our ability to generate data has by far outpaced our ability to make sense of that data. As someone at Razorfish said, everything that can be digitalized will be. When Lima started Visual Complexity, data viz blogs were just a handful. Today there are dozens of them. Kryder‘s Law draws from Moore’s law and declares that magnetic disk areal storage density doubles every 18 months. In 2001, iPod storage capacity was 5 GB, in 2007 it was 160 GB.
A second key factor for the development of data viz is Open Databases. Data has never been so widely available at minimal cost (not to say free).
See Swivel and IBM’s Many Eyes.
A third factor is online social networks.
Not as tools for mapping relationship between people but as instruments which help disclosing patterns within the abundance of shared content. Examples: uncovering music affinities like TuneGlue does; discovering how humans categorize information del.icio.us-like; human curiosity.
Over his three years observing dataviz, Lima spotted a number of trends: mapping blogosphere relationships, visualizing del.icio.us tags, terrorism, air routes, gps data, etc.
Next spoke Santiago Ortiz who started by presenting the spectacular website that Bestiario has put online a few days ago. The website gets a third dimension as you can “twist” and manipulate it in order to see its full length. The nicest feature is the navigation: you can browse Bestiario’s projects anti-chronologically of course but also according to the number of hours they spent working on the projects, by keywords, combination or exclusion of keywords, etc.
Bestiario’s brand new website
Founded 2 years ago, Bestiario is a small Barcelona/Lisbon-based company with a very impressive portfolio. Combining art and science (Ortiz is also a mathematician) they design interactive information spaces which follow their own moto: ‘making the complex comprehensible.’
It wasn’t the first time that i got to be impressed by Bestiario’s work and Ortiz’ thoughts on dataviz. One of Bestiario’s project was exhibited recently at LABoral as part of the Emergentes exhibition which closed a few days ago. The imaginary biological universe Mitozoos encodes and creates virtual organisms called “mitozoos” which interact among themselves. You can watch their life in a 3D environment that simulates birth, existence of a genetic code, the quest for food, energy dissipation, reproduction and death. Each variable and parameter of the model has a graphical representation.
Mitozoos
One of Bestiario’s latest projects was developed together with Irma Vila and JL de Vicente. The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space is an interactive representation of the services that use our electromagnetic radiospectrum, ranging from 10Khz “radio navigation” to 100Ghz “inter-satellite communication”. The activities which unfolds throughout the spectrum (e.g. mobile, satellite, wireless internet, broadcasting) are sorted by electromagnetic frequency. What totally won me over was the features showing the artistic interventions that are commenting on and/or taking place in the spectrum.
City Distances illuminates the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The main idea is to compare the number of pages on internet where the two cities appear one close to the other, with the number of pages they appear isolated. This proportion indicates some kind of intensity of relation between the cities. The “google proximity” is then divided by its geographical distance. The result indicates the strength of the relation in spite of the real distance, a kind of informational distance between cities.
Finally, Aaron Koblin took the stage to present his own work. Crap! this guy is so talented it’s scary. Aaron studied Design and Media Art with Casey Reas at UCLA and used processing a lot in his projects which not only represent huge amounts of data, but are also producing data to raise questions about a series of issues.
Narrative made sense for cultures based on tradition and a small amount of information circulating in a culture – it was a way to make sense of this information and to tie it together (for instance, Greek mythology). Database can be thought of as a new cultural form in a society where a subject deals with huge amounts of information, which constantly keep changing, said Lev Manovich whom Aaron quoted to further ask the audience:
A first answer is that visualization help us understand what it means to have dozens of thousands of planes flying above North America every day. Video demonstrating how Flight Patterns does exactly that:
Data from the U.S. Federal aviation administration is used to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density.
The Sheep Market is one of my favourite projects ever. The very Petit Prince work manages to be critical and poetical at the same time. Thousands of workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk webservice were paid two cents to “draw a sheep facing to the left.” Their sheep drawings were collected over a period of 40 days, selected and printed on stamps. You can also head to the project website and spend the evening counting the animals.
Video showing Aaron Koblin explaining The Sheep Market:
Aside from his purely artistic works, Aaron also works for Yahoo and collaborate on research project. For example, he developed the visualizations for the New York Talk Exchange, a project by the Senseable City Lab at MIT.
Based on a principle similar to The Sheep Market, Ten Thousand Cents has thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of of a $100 bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The project, which has been developed in collaboration with Takashi Kawashima, explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.
Video of Ten Thousand Cents:
The panel ended with JL de Vicente reminding the audience of the Visualizar workshops he periodically organized at Medialab Prado in Madrid. A new call for project proposals will be launched later this year.
Related: Coverage of Visualizar workshop.
Just back from the OFFF festival which this year had the very good taste to move to Lisbon. Offf gathers designers, programmers, illustrators and visual artists whose creativity explores and fashions digital aesthetics and software language.
I’ll leave aside all the digital animation and pretty flash websites presentations and go straight to the keynote of the first evening which was performed more than given by web designer and artist Joshua Davis. I’ve always liked his works, they have something very girly in sharp contrast with his tattooed soft-punk image.
Davis likes Jackson Pollock, not so much for his paintings, more for his approach to gesture. Pollock regarded the process of its creation as art and not so much the final product. Like Pollack, Davis’ art is based on gestures, but he relies on technology to create. He designs programs which follow randomly what he draws. He sets the rules and the program takes from there, surprising the artist each time.
Soundwires, 2007
Davis never liked mathematics. He went to art school and had to teach himself math and programming. At art school he was mostly into painting and became obsessed with the idea of creating his own drawing tools and experimenting with his materials. He would put his paintings in the freezer but the outcome was disappointing: the paintings were cold, nothing else happened. More interesting things occurred when Davis baked his paintings in the oven: the varnish on top would dry faster than the oil of the painting. As a result the painting would shatter. But the lesson he learned was that he enjoyed the idea that he didn’t have total control over the final artwork.
According to Davis, computational design is divided in two clans: the purists and the hybrids. The purists are Ben Fry, Casey Reas, John Maeda, Golan Levin, etc. They only use code. The hybrid, like himself, Niko Stumpo, Geoff Lillemon and others blend the code with art works. The artwork is thrown into the swarm system and emerges as a series of art/design works which are all different from the other. The artists defines some parameters such as speed, rotation, indecision and the system maps the drawing according to these lines.
He was commisioned by BMW a series of limited edition prints that would “capture the essence” of the company‘ s Z4 Coup??. The artist translated a number of views of the coup?? and its components into an algorithm that served as the basis for prints. Davis also selected geographic notes and scales from a German school atlas to act as a symbol of mobility in the prints. Video documenting the process.
Despite his reliance on programs and codes, Davis still sees his work as being one of an artist: he creates the programs, sets the rules, chooses the colours to use, feeds the program with his own handmade drawings and ideas and at the end of the process he takes the role of the critics by selecting which of the pieces made by the program will be kept or deleted.
Kimono Blue, 2007
For example, to realize his Kimono series, he gathered the assets and forms found in his collection of books on Kimonos, drew them and fed them to the generative system.
Adobe CS3, the Snow Owl, 2007
He selected only 250 of the resulting drawings. His limited edition prints are all different from each other. But instead of numbering them 1/1, he numbers them 1/250, 2/250, etc. The reason for that is that what matters is the program, not the visual output.
Yellow Tiger
After some crazy hotel carpet stories Davis ran us through some of his latest works and exhibitions:
– His collaboration with Chuck Anderson for AMP Energy drink.
– The cover of the CD Yellow Tiger by Ming Dynasty,
– Solo exhibition at Maxalot Gallery in Barcelona.
Drawing outside the Maxalot gallery in Barcelona
– projection on a building facade for the 4th edition of the TodaysArt Festival in The Hague.
– Davis commented on Random Assistant which was exhibited at OFFF too. Random Assistant is a long stripe of lack and white prints accompanied by transparent watercolors and brushes for the public to colour the print.
As usual, Davis used a generative system to create the artwork, leaving the decision making of the compositions to the programs. This time though, one of the components of the system which governs the way the work is colored and painted was removed from the software. Instead, the public will fulfill this functionality by using the brushes and watercolors at their disposal. Davis did a first version of the project in Rovereto (Italy) for the festival Futuro Presente. The OFFF version was incredibly successful.
Random Assistant, OFFF, Lisbon, Day 1
Random Assistant, OFFF, Lisbon, Day 2
For Tropism in New York he worked on new organic forms to create a “super nature.” For the first time his generative graphics were turned into 3D-printed objects: a series of vases in porcelain.
Tropism vase, 2007
– To celebrate the launch of his first line of housewares (trash cans and pillows) at the Umbra Concept Store in Toronto, Davis used the Tropism Engine to generate huge panels (like he did at the OFFF Festival in New York.), he had them printed and pasted on the window of the shop.
Image blogto
The artist then listed his sources of inspiration: there’s Basquiat, Cy Twombly, the indeed awesome 18th century painter Ito Jakuchu, the Batu Cave in Malaysia, etc.
Ito Jakuchu, Rooster and Hen with Hydrangeas
Davis ended the presentation with a list of (not very original) tips for the audience:
Look for what you don’t see in your immediate environment, you don’t have to fly to the other end of the globe to find some source of inspiration, make work for love, not for awards or acceptance, complacency is your enemy, find your own voice, if you are using someone else’s you run out of conversation pretty quickly. And work like hell.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
