From cosmology to calligraphy at Crystalpunk

Stumbled upon Crystalpunk today, a loose organisation and series of workshops under the socialfiction.org banner. In their words, the site "Socialfiction.org is a long-term research project that seeks to develop speculative knowledge that subverts ordinary ways to employ, experience and measure space, time and language.

The day to day reality of socialfiction.org is filled with projects. For most of them we encourage participation by persons known and unknown. Some of our projects are like whales, most are like plankton: the small ones feed the large ones."


Among the standouts, a Virtual raindrop installation by Tao Sambolec, a poem on e.coli bacteria, and the masks of Marcel Janco. General areas of continued interest seem to include the patterns and profundity of Go, Chinese calligraphy, bioengineering, and soft hardware. Where else could you find titles such as, "Quilts, Dreams and a Haunting by Cellular Automata".

Cartography as controversy

Julian Oliver sends word about his recent keynote at the Inclusiva Net conference:

From the earliest world maps to Google Earth, cartography has been a vital interface to the world. It guides our perceptions of what the world is and steers our actions in it. As our knowledge about the world has changed, so have maps with it (or so we like to think).

In this lecture Julian shows a darker side of map-making, covering various reality-distorting effects innate to the graphic language of cartography and how they can be easily exploited for gain.

Play it. Make it. Sell it.

Are you a real fan of Beirut, or did you just jump on the bandwagon? Lee Byron's Listening History visualisation reveals the truth, mining hundreds of listening hours logged on social music site LastFM for the answers. In a series of large scale posters that are both intuitive as data and beautiful aesthetically, artists are represented by sinuous waves, "cooler colors represent artists who have been listened to for a long period of time while warmer colors represent artists who are more recent in the user's listening habits."


Sell out so your work reaches millions of consumers, or stay the starving artist in relatively obscurity? Kevin Kelly proposes an alternate solution. "A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living." If a little idealistic, Kellys approach seems doable, and all the more so because of recent technology. Need to print your own book? Go to Lulu.com. Don't have a record label? Monetize it on AmieStreet.com. Need to stay in touch with those 1000 fans? MySpace, RSS feeds, blogs, and Flickr are here to help.


An approach Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor knows all too well. After following in the footsteps of Radiohead's 'pay what you want' scheme with side project Saul Williams, Reznor went even further with his own project last week, offering a stepwise model of cost for NIN's latest album. "Fans bought 2,500 copies of the ultradeluxe edition of the new album, Ghosts I-IV, offered at the same time as free tracks and other music packages that begin as low as $5. The most expensive option sold out in three days, and activity on the website crashed its servers."


Fuyuko Akiyoshi sends word of a videogame she's just produced. Zoo Escape stars you as the brave panda who must help the animals to escape. Reach a certain level and you'll need to fight the zoo keeper himself, an evil Ronald McDonald.


Want to make your own videogame? On March 28th you'll have a chance. Over at Window, we're staging a major experimental videogame exhibition, culminating in a "Play It! Make It!" evening in the Window space. You'll have a chance to play 5 or 6 seminal games, including works such as Bill Viola's surreal meditative Night Journey, the UN sponsored political simulation Ayiti, and ground breaking interactive narrative work, Facade. Talented game designer Jeff Nusz from Custom Logic will be coming up from Christchurch to run the Make it section. Arming small teams with a bevy of musical instruments, craft supplies and one computer, their aim will be to crank out a videogame in under 2 hours. That bizaare whale game with coloured pencil art and a casiotone/rap soundtrack you've always dreamt of playing? Bring it to life on March 28th.

Code snippet: Simple sound visualisation

While United Visual Artists produce ambitious, mammoth installations for artists like the Chemical Brothers (shown above), you can respond to music and sound with some simple Flash code.

With the advent of version 9 of the software, Adobe has introduced a spectrograph tool, capable of reading and responding to the various EQ changes in a song. This enables rich feedback - scripts for example could show deep purple for base heavy techno, and a light pink line for a high-pitched opera sonata. Programmers have responded with an array of experiments, sound toys, and visualisers like the ones from this competition on The Flash Blog.

The only problem is that live sound, either from a microphone or the input on a computer, doesn't have this ability. Programmers are restricted to responding to basic volume changes, which although simple, can still be compelling. From a dozen lines of code....

// construct mic object
import flash.events.ActivityEvent;
import flash.events.StatusEvent;
import flash.media.Microphone;
var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();

// setup mic parameters
mic.gain = 60;
mic.rate = 11;
mic.setUseEchoSuppression(true);
mic.setLoopBack(true);
mic.setSilenceLevel(0, 10000);

// respond to mic volume
function showVolume(e:Event):void {
ring.scaleX=mic.activityLevel/100;
ring.scaleY=mic.activityLevel/100;
}

// run this every frame
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, showVolume);

....To more complex examples using extensions such as open-source 3d project Papervision:

Sneak preview of Annie Bradley's "Interpulsator"

Opening on Friday at Window Online and On Site, thought we'd give you a sneak preview of "Interpulsator", a screensaver-based work by Annie Bradley. Coming to life when the system becomes idle, the piece embraces some of the conventions of the medium, while ignoring others - installing itself as traditional software but then 'failing' to save, allowing parts of the screen to burn in because the pixels are never refreshed. Annie provides additional tangents on her show page, ranging from the first digital watch to time-keeping stars (Pulsars) and hardware diagrams of LEDs. Available for PC or Macintosh systems.

Data visualisation: What does guilt look like?

In an age of information overload, a picture carries a thousand words - or stats. From around the net, political artists, environmentally savvy companies and concerned individuals are all making a statement, without uttering a word.


Hotmapping combines thermal imaging flyovers with residential mapping to uncover the highest energy hogs in any area. They recently completed a massive, 30 sq km section for Haringey in the UK, then posted it online, shaming the homeowners of those hot red dots on the map.

Radley Balko (stats) and Lee Laslo (programming) teamed up to reveal a pattern behind the numbers. Piecing together dozens of "isolated" botched police raids, the duo pinned them on a Google Map, complete with a key detailing items like "Death of an innocent", and case-by-case stories linked to local press articles. It's a textbook example of web 2.0 connectedness used for an incisive statement - stats+mapping+news articles - putting hyped but superficial initiatives like Twitter to shame.



Brazilian artist Icaro Doria takes national flags and rethinks them, mapping the area of a certain colour to damning statistics. Burkina Faso's tiny gold star becomes the percentage of children who actually reach maturity. Columbia's dominant yellow stripe representing it's cocaine production overshadows smaller crops like coffee and bananas. At best the stats are simplified. The EU's drastic oil production/consumption ratio is the result of many factors, many of which aren't necessarily negative. At worst, they're exaggerated or false - Somalia's shocking genital mutilation statistic would be difficult to get hard figures on.


Finally, Google's default inclusion of Darfur into it's Google Earth product is an overt political statement. It's 3d engine typically used to show corporate skyscrapers or monuments visualises something much more disturbing - tall purple towers representing numbers of displaced and wounded in the african nation.

Visualising the future: Data as art

The medical professor smiles smugly at the new intern, unable to draw a conclusion from the long string of integers before him. "What's the matter", he questions, "can't see the pattern". He quickly draws a j-curve, signaling a medical emergency in the next few hours for the patient. What's true for the researchers in 1972's "Terminal Man" seems even more vital today. With the ability to generate so much data, how do we make decisions from it?

Tomar Sagi is building a business around one way. His software converts the thousands of hidden mail messages and contacts from Microsoft Outlook into tangible 3d environments - coloured cubes and blocks denoting what's important and what's not in a few seconds. Functional? For some. Beautiful? Definitely not.


A host of recent projects have attempted to prove that doesn't have to be the case. "Shape of Song" highlights the structure of music - from the repetitive hooks of Madonna's pop anthems to the complexity of masterpieces like Chopin's "Mazurka in F# Minor". Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's piece, "We Feel Fine" extracts feelings from blogs with algorithms, then displays them as an exploded universe of painted spheres. As well as providing insight into the unseen, they mediate the complex world of information for us - cloaking thousands of lines of code and data in line, colour, and form.