I have some prints in the upcoming show at APW Gallery in NYC. It runs June 5 – 29, with an opening reception June 5 from 6 – 8pm. Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood. (I won’t be ;)
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Cities and Mathematics
Links on mathematically & artistically modeling cities! Mostly videos!
World Builder – a great short film with dreamy immersive interface ideas
The making of Telematics City. Also:
- MxR Architecture, a tangible augmented reality interface
- Pixel City, procedurally generated nighttime cityscape
- TED talk on fractal patterns in African villages
- NY Times on how cities are like organisms mathematically
Ingredients
As I start building more projects in physical rather than purely digital space, it’s important to find good, cheap, environmentally friendly sources for raw materials. I really miss going to American Science and Surplus in Chicago (possibly the greatest store to ever exist) as a kid. Here are some Bay Area places to find surplus & recycled ingredients.
- SCRAP (San Francisco)
- Urban Ore (Berkeley)
- HSC Electronics (Santa Clara / Santa Rosa)
- Building REsources (San Francisco)
- Weird Stuff (Sunnyvale)
- East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse (Oakland)
- San Jose Scientific (Santa Clara)
- Mythbusters’ Shop ‘Til You Drop episode
Remember, the Maker Faire‘s this weekend in San Mateo – I plan on going Sunday.
Blink
So I inherited a load of LEDs and some basic driver electronics from a friend. They’d been assembled Christmas-light fashion for a Burning Man project, sequenced by Atmega32 microcontrollers. Reverse-engineering their circuitry was straightforward, and an opportunity to learn about Darlington arrays — the ULN2803A chip lets you control a high-current set of lights from a low-current microcontroller.
I like the diffuse look of paper lanterns over the point-light intensity of bare LEDs so I’m playing with different shapes and materials. Most of the work now will be sculptural, and I’ll be going for a ‘luminous origami’ feel.
Illuminated Cities
Projection mapping is a method of painting light onto 3D objects rather than a rectangular screen to give them more life and depth. Create Digital Motion has been covering a lot of recent work, collected under their projection mapping tag. The technique has been taking off like crazy this year thanks to software like the Video projection tools project and patches for vvvv. One of my favorite uses is in the gorgeous film SCINTILLATION created with stop-motion and projection mapping onto orchids.
Back to buildings. I’m digging these because it’s a different kind of augmented reality, one which doesn’t require looking through a video feed. I mentioned previously using decaying cities as canvas; here pictures and information can be superimposed onto large-scale scenery for any number of viewers, and the hardware is becoming increasingly accessible. I’ve seen several light graffiti projects. This performance uses giant arrays of LEDs sequenced and synced with music to turn museum windows into pixels for a light show:
This rendered animation superimposes volumes of digital color onto gray, concrete urban environments (and here’s another).
Pulse
An experiment for learning how to draw shapes in ActionScript.
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Yarn
Check out the Crochet Coral Reef Project and their hyperbolic crochet blog. Margaret Wertheim gave a TED talk on this intersection of geometry, environmentalism and handicrafts. She says about modeling these sea slug & coral shapes, it’s “almost impossible to do it on computers.”
Althea Crome did the remarkable miniature knitting in Coraline – read an interview or watch this feature:
Urban knitting adds a nice coziness to the city, no?
Magnify
Why do I love macro photography? The vast unexplored territory and surprises in an ordinary room, every square inch a landscape; the stillness required when moving a millimeter pushes your subject out of focus; the quiet contemplation inherent in observing at that scale. Nature just looks good up close.
Shooting with my new lens, Tamron’s 90mm, is a joy so far. It’s the (unannounced, unadvertised?) version with an internal motor, so it joins the short list of interesting primes that autofocus on the D40. Nice find. I have photosets up of raindrops in the woods and an art studio, and here are some old favorites.
Kinetic
I love kinetic sculpture. Here’s a collection of my favorite work; Wikipedia has much more.
- MAKE filmed a wonderful artist profile on Reuben Margolin, who builds these floating wooden waves with an amazing sense of lightness. Watch full screen!
- Hoberman Transformable Design creates expanding domes and architectural shells and originally turned me onto transformable (or deployable) structures. Here’s an interview.
- Daniel Piker’s Space Symmetry Structure blog covers, among various spatial curiosities, computer-simulated foldables and rigid origami.
- The Hyposurface – a mesmerizing, undulating, triangulated wall
- Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests – creatures whose wind-powered frames majestically roam the beaches. His mechanics have inspired many others: e.g. cross it with a Segway for the creepy crawler, a car for the mondo spider, and the Arduino for this walker.
- Arthur Ganson – wires, cranks, walking chairs
- Tim Prentice – like blankets, wind, or wiggling microorganisms
- Ben Hopson studies movement in industrial design to give objects personality
Joining the AR Club
Lately I’m gearing up to work on an augmented reality project with Jerry at 7 Billion Friends. We’re scheming ways to blur boundaries between physical and digital spaces using vast urban canvases, the web, and the gadgets in your pocket. Think “gARdens.”
Not familiar with augmented / mixed reality? It’s a combination of computer vision and 3D rendering. Check out GE’s demo, fireworks, a magic trick, a hole in the head and some AR humor. If you have a webcam and print the right marker, you can play with these toys in a browser yourself. Here are notes from my foray into the recently popular Flash / ActionScript tools FLARToolKit & Papervision3D.
Thanks to Saqoosha’s great start-up guide, I had sample code running in no time. You’ll need a webcam (thanks Craigslist!) and markers (tags, codes, fiducials, you know the black & white square images) to track.
Lacking a printer I grabbed a Sharpie and notebook, which worked famously (see right – my very own blue cube) and gives me ideas for totally sweet pop-up books. You’ll find lots of resources for making your own 80mm FLARToolKit markers (image + .pat definition file). I recommend this how-to at Squidder, this online generator, and a PDF-from-numerical-ID generator. I ended up pixeling a few in Photoshop.
Initially I had trouble tracking markers against dark backgrounds (and um don’t use a reflective table) , but improved it by adding a white border and taping them to stiffer cards. Check out this adaptive filter to track tags in less-than-perfect lighting. Detecting multiple targets is straightforward but takes some effort to reliably associate each code with a 3D object.
So that’s a geeky getting-started writeup. I expect later posts to focus on the artful side rather than tools.
