king talk

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!

From spirals, to abstract lines to jellyfish. I love to iterate from basic mathematic algorithms into different directions. Again, the math behind the whole thing starts to fade into the background while movement and aesthetics start playing the primary role.

For the ones interested, the basic formula I’ve been building all this on is the following:

x = a * exp(k*phi) * cos(phi)
y = a * exp(k*phi) * sin(phi)

wherein a is the general size of the spiral and k determines how much the spiral grows with each iteration. phi itself is the iterator, increased by a given value at every step. If you want a nerdier form of this formular, check this out.

Additionally, I am using a midi controller (this one to be exact) to influence various parameters in real time.

Oh, and yes, there’s also a Flickr set for this!