A little “data art” to finish with Marcin Ignac, a Danish artist, programmer and designer. In his project Every Day of My Life, he visualises every time he has used his computer in the past 30 months.
Each line represents a day and each colour block, the main application opened during that time. The black gaps are times when the computer was switched off. It’s particularly interesting to see, year after year, the frequency of black-out areas.
They’re called Thixotropes. Compositions comprised of eight illuminated mechanized structures create choreographies of lighting effects that alternate form warm to cold light. Designed by London based design firm Troika, these suspended systems merge technology with art and explore the realm in which rational observations intersect with the metaphysical and surreal.
Each of the structures is shaped as a composition of intersecting angular and geometric forms, made of thin tensed banding lined with rows of LED’s. The constructions continuously revolve around their own axis thereby materializing the path of the light and dissolving the spinning structures into compositions of aerial cones, spheres and ribbons of warm and cold light while giving life and shape to an immaterial construct.
The lighting design combines Troika’s interest in art and science and stretches the boundaries of a long history of light painting photography that can be traced back to 1914 when Frank Gilbreth, along with his wife Lillian Moller Gilbreth, used small lights and the open shutter of a camera to track the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers.
At Chicago's Alinea restaurant, "chefs defy gravity": green apple-flavored helium-filled "balloons" have become its latest (and lightest) dessert delicacy. Diners can either pop the balloon with a pin, or devour the whole thing at once. And yes, your voice will get a few octaves higher.
A curious project and fake old book about the future that Christophe Guignard pointed out to me. Designed as an exhibition project by designer/photographer Cameron Baxter.
Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is full of examples of the latter's 'challenging' behaviour. But when Jobs asked Paul Rand to create the identity for his Next business, he finally met his match
Isaacson's book describes how Jobs, in 1986 and recently ousted from Apple, wanted a logo for his new computer business, Next. He decided to go for the best – Paul Rand. But Rand was contracted to IBM at the time. After pestering IBM senior management, Jobs managed to get their permission to use Rand and flew him out to California.
The Next was to be cube-shaped so Rand suggested the logo be so too. Jobs agreed and asked to see some options. Big mistake. Rand didn't do options.
"I will solve your problem and you will pay me," he told Jobs. "You can use what I produce or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me." And it would cost $100,000.
Two weeks later, Rand flew back and presented his solution in the form of a book (scan above, more at Imprint here) walking Jobs through the rationale. Jobs loved it but asked for the yellow of the 'e' to be brighter. According to Isaacson, "Rand banged his fist and declared, 'I've been doing this for fifty years and I know what I'm doing.' Jobs relented."
Not only that, but he respected Rand for standing up to him, as this interview shows (spotted over at David Airey's LogoDesignLove site). A lesson there for anyone presenting to clients? Perhaps, but Rand was 71 at the time and a globally-renowned expert in his field: not everyone could get away with it.
The word beautiful gets thrown around a lot when talking about creative projects, but I’m not sure many are as worthy of the tag as Oscar Lermitte’s Urban Stargazing. Frustrated with not being able to see constellations in the overly light-polluted sky of our beloved capital city, Oscar took the law into his own hands and not only invented his own, but also made them a physical reality with some nifty use of ultra-thin nylon line and fibre optics. Crane your neck and say “ohhhhhh.”
Instead of clicking on all of these internal links above, you can watch all this, and much more, in less than 20 minutes below.
Aaron currently leads the "Data Arts Team" in the "Google Creative Lab", a team who initiated the Google Data Viz challenge and just launched their WebGL globe.
He claims that "an interface can be powerful narrative device. As we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to ... tell some amazing stories".
In creating a foundational piece of software infrastructure Ben Fry and Casey Reas have done myself and countless peers a great service and helped launch thousands of arty new-media applets. In Form+Code (F+C) Reas teams up with Chandler McWilliams and LUST design studio to produce a slim introductory text on procedural and code-influenced art and design. While the book makes only the briefest mention of Processing, a good percentage of the work documented in it can be traced directly or indirectly to the platform that emerged from the MIT Aesthetics and Computation work group. F+C also includes historical precedents, from loving documentation of green Cathode Ray Tube Spacewar!, to one of Sol LeWitt's wall drawing instruction cards (presented here as code only — LeWitt's typed out gallery proposal). There are a few other nods to post-minimalism and other pre-P5 projects. Additionally, F+C also breaks out of the screen-based ghetto, including images from proposed and built architectural investigations, art installations, design prototypes and sculptures.
The book itself is broken down into conceptual chapters that explore techniques that are code-like or only practically achievable with code-based tools: repetition, geometric transformation, parametrization, visualization, simulation. Each chapter includes spare descriptive pages which introduce overall themes and very briefly discuss the documented projects. F+C is a fairly no-nonesense machine -- it moves briskly through its functional structure of chapters, never pausing to dwell on any one project or image. Yoshi Sodeoka's 2004 video work based on presidential State of the Union addresses is presented in much the same way that Marius Watz's beautiful software generated abstractions are. Both sit alongside a Rafael Lozano-Hemmer installation, an elegant Cory Arcangle data-vis deconstruction, images of a Morphosis tower project for Paris, news-stream visualizations, and Mark Lombardi inspired diagramming. To some extent all these projects (and many others) are being stripped mined for the illustration of a technique or concept. This undifferentiated treatment of a really diverse set of work and ideas is, for me, the primary weakness of the book.
Even with some notable omissions in the projects covered, there's likely to be a items here most of us haven't seen yet – I discovered many. If you are looking for an overview and introduction, or a catalog of interesting work, Form+Code will be a useful resource. Ultimately, though, it leaves me hungry for a more focused and critical approach to this incredibly interesting subject. It's clear that Reas, McWilliams and LUST would be particularly well qualified to produce exactly that sort of text.
Personal comment:
The more and more code based / behavioral design, documented and commented here in this new book by Casey Reas et al.
I have been utterly seduced by this piece from Stockholm’s Klaus Ernflo. I (like you) am still kicking myself for not thinking of it first, such a simple idea incredibly well executed – a story with its words coloured to create an image about that piece of writing. How nice would a whole series of these be?
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