Monday, December 13. 2010
by marius watz

Control rooms are the nerve centers of a world permeated by systems of abstraction. In these concentrated places, the ‘status quo’ of the systems that surround us forms an aesthetic surface. Signals and values serve to make control decisions for the system. Here the human and the system communicate using the control room as an ‘interface’.
However, (information) architectures are only seemingly neutral and arranged according to inherent necessities. The photo series by Patrick Raddatz reveals how much user interfaces are not purely functional but are a ‘projection screen’ for the utopias of their times; subject to fashion and taste, they ultimately turn into cultural clichés of our society.
This text is taken from the NODE10 catalogue, written by Eno Henze and Marius Watz and edited by Valérie-Françoise Vogt.



Via ArchDaily
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by David Basulto
Remember Zebra’s holographic sheets we presented you back in February? Well, Zebra Imaging has released new videos that show how this technology can be used for planners/urban designers (as seen on Seattle’s video above), or to get an accurate preview of HVAC.
Price for this sheets? $1,500 for a 12- x 18-inch version to $3,500 for the largest 2- x 3-foot size.
Another video after the break:
Personal comment:
Instead of the old white plaster models...
Thursday, December 09. 2010
Via Creative Review
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by Mark Sinclair

Detail from In Transit 4 by Diego Kuffer
Brazilian photographer Diego Kuffer takes the concept of photomontage to another level in his series, In Transit...
Recently posted to his website (and noted on BoingBoing), Kuffer's pixellated-looking work presents several images of the same thing – be it a merry-go-round or traffic on an underpass – chopped up into a composite image.

In Transit 12
Unlike the traditional 'photomontage' technique of overlaying printed images to form a unified picture – which everyone from me to David Hockney has had a go at (why not just use a wide angle lens?) – Kuffer's creations suggest what is and isn't there in any given stretch of time. Almost like a still image of a whole film, if that were possible.
After experimenting with the medium, Kuffer explains on his website, he became frustrated at only being able to capture "instants".
"So, I decided to hack photography," he writes, "[taking] the technique behind movie making and applying it to my photos. Photographing the same instant several times, slicing and dicing the results and mixing it all together chronologically. This way I was able to capture a moment, not showing what exactly happened, but at least showing that a moment happened."

In Transit 18
While some of the images perhaps don't record the most interesting of subjects and are more concerned with capturing the 'movement' of a street scene, for example, some of the more abstract pieces are really rather beautiful.
The whole series can be viewed at diegokuffer.com.br.

In Transit 14

In Transit 2

In Transit 4 (detail show, top)
Tuesday, December 07. 2010
Via Vague Terrain
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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.
Monday, December 06. 2010
Via Creative Applications
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(...)
Expressions Dispatcher

Many decisions made in our everyday lives are influenced by expert advice, from hairstyles to insurance policies. Yet, millions of decisions are made on a daily basis and instantly expressed through our own facial expressions without any preconceived external reassurance. We continuously strive to project a desired physical self image of ourselves, sometimes requiring most of our cognitive resources, and paradoxically, this daily challenge has a big impact on our lives. Expressions Dispatcher is designed to help people in their quest for expressiveness.
Project Page


photos above by ha++
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Full post with other "devices for mindless communication" here.
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