king talk

The second part of our workshop CODE = DESIGN took place in Graz last weekend. This time we focused on the ways in which code could be used to generate print content. Many thanks to all the participants and congratulations for your great results! We created a Flickr set for them and you can also see them in the slideshow below.

We’ve been working late to bring you this piece of audiovisual art. It has been created for an article that will appear in the next WEAVE magazine (should be out in early march), where we describe the making of it.

So, what is it you ask? It is an audiovisual composition that is based on a single set of MIDI notes. Those notes influence both music and graphics at the same time. We did not take the usual route of creating a piece of music first and then find some visualization for it; instead both elements have been developed at the same time. When we decided to change something with the graphics, the changes immediately influenced the music as well.

We find this approach most fascinating and are thrilled to explore it in more depth as soon as possible.

There’s also a Flickr set for this. Oh, and it has been done with Processing and Live.

After a timeout over christmas, it was time to fire up processing once again. We needed to create some artwork to use in a poster for our upcoming talk at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd on january 20th (which is open to the public for free, so drop by if you’re in the Stuttgart/Schwäbisch Gmünd area).

A few hours of experiments later, our computers rendered the lovely picture above and – as always – produced a ton of beautiful intermediate results on the way there. You can see them in all their glory in this flickr set!

We spent the better part of last weekend in Graz with the fine students of FH JOANNEUMs information design department. They were taking part in a workshop on Processing and the general idea of computed and generative design.

Our basic idea was to present the students with snippets of code that can be combined in different ways in order to foster creative use of programming languages.

The outcomes quite frankly exceeded our expectations. You can explore them in their full variety in this flickr set.

Congratulations to all participants for what you achieved:
Christoph Mauerhofer
Franz Ferdinand Kubin
Gianna Tatzel
Julian Kogler
Lisa Weishäupl
Magdalena Kahr
Moritz Rzehak
Roland Mariacher
Thomas Raggam

We hope you enjoyed the two days as much as we did!

For the research about current generative projects, Markus found that very inspiring work called LAIKA, the dynamic typeface.

Michael Flückiger and Nicolas Kunz engaged theirselfs with dynamic typography and typefaces for their Bachelor thesis at Hochschule der Künste Bern this year. Since not much work has been done in this field, they devised a system in which a typeface would not be defined static fonty styles anymore but would be able to change it‘s shape and appearance at any moment reacting to a broad spectrum of inputs. Via a custom designed control panel, user can adjust kerning, italics, size and other properties of a typeface. This reminded us a little bit at our own experiences with the bugworld, were we build our own interface for controlling the generative world. In the end, they made the type responsive to passers-by. We think this work is a very good example for generative design in a different context.