king talk

I first stumbled upon Rhonda some months ago (how the hell could I not write a post about it then!?). It is a very interesting 3D drawing application made with openframeworks. The basic idea is to always draw in 2D, but to be able to rotate your drawing around any axis at any time, thereby creating three dimensional wire artworks. You get a pretty decent impression from the demo video on their site.

What’s new is that Rhonda now has a sister project called Sonic Wire Sculptor, which is all about music. The y axis translates to the pitch of a note and the whole drawing is revolving in 3D. Again, the demo video gives you everything you need!

One of the most interesting aspects of generative art for me is when the outcomes of your code reach a point where the underlying mathematical and logical concepts are completely obscured and the image or animation stands entirely for itsself. This is what happened with the third iteration of my logspots / colorspots experiments. The outcome: re-birth. A set of images where even I as the creator have problems with understanding.

Unfortunately, this also leads to sort of a problem. I sometimes create hundreds of versions of my code when experimenting. Afterwards, when I select which versions are suitable for further refinement, I’m often having a hard time reproducing how exactly the code worked at this particular time. So, if anyone has any special techniques or tools to keep track of a ton versions of code, I’d appreciate any suggestions.

The Blast Studio is a brand new online and real time art installation allowing you to dabble in your own creativity. It’s been designed to give you an opportunity to explore the creative artist within you and add your mark to a unique art installation that will be created together over the next four weeks.

Housed in the Topolski studio at London’s Southbank Centre, this great new initiative lets you take control of four machines. Each machine will provide you with the tools to remotely control how you paint and design this space. Control from a choice of a cool glue gun, paint pellet machine, printer or hanging light strips all directed from your computer.

The Studio is live everyday between 12pm and 12am, from 12th May till 9th June. Watch the action online and get involved at www.blastgetcreative.co.uk or pop down to the Blast Studio on London’s Southbank to see it all happen in real time. The Blast Studio address can be found by clicking the information icon on the blastgetcreative.co.uk home page.

The Blast Studio is all about you – enjoy creating and don’t forget to tell your friends about it too!

Finally, I found some time to play around with generative art a little again. After being absent from that field for almost two years now, I was delighted by how fast one can get nice results by using just simple algorythms. The pieces displayed here are all based on more or less the same code, making heavy use of trigonometric functions. There’s more in this flickr set!