An installation that I designed and programmed during my internship in Brazil. The concept work is from 3bits.
SyncLost is a multi-user installation for immersion in the history of electronic music. From a complex timeline, rhythms and sub-rhythms merge to create new sounds.
The project’s objective is to create an interface where users can view all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through visual and audible feedback. The choice is individual and leads to a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information.
The actual theme for my master thesis is coming closer to be defined. For now I can tell that my future work path will be something about visualizing books content — very exciting! Having that, I’ve decided to start experimenting on text analysis. As a starting point, the analysis itself was very raw — I limited myself to analyze word frequency in the text.
The text chosen was a very well know Portuguese epic poem — Os Lusíadas. I chose this poem mainly as a provocative towards what it seems a banalized intellectual status among the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Portugal. The result was a collection of 10 static pieces about each of the 10 most frequent words in the poem. All the work was done in Processing, so it wouldn’t be hard to think in some kind of interaction. Although, the main purpose as I stated was to start analyzing text. I wanted to keep the graphical output as simple and elegant as my knowledge allowed.
Os Lusíadas is a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões first printed in 1572.
The poem consists of ten cantos and 1102 stanzas.
At the left are the ten most frequent words in the poem by descending order of occurence.
This piece showcase one of those ten words.
Above is an area that directly represents the frequency of that word in each canto.
Each canto has a corresponding list of the ten most frequent words in that canto sorted by descending order of occurrence.
The length of the vertical lines for each canto represents its extension in number of verses.
The counted words were filtered before presentation by two factors — 1st No word with less than 10 occurrences in the whole poem would be taken into account. 2nd As you can imagine the most common words in Portuguese language weren’t considered like adverbs and pronouns. Some verbs and other words without a specific relevancy for the extrapolation of any concept, weren’t taken into account either.
As you should see, number ten was the magic number chosen for this composition. Each canto is composed by eight verses. The result was exported as pdf too – I’ll get this piece printed for sure!
For a matter of curiosity, here is a previous study that originated the final concept. This study displays each of the 50 most frequent words in Os Lusíadas along with the position of each occurrence in the text. Here are the first 21.
Almost about a month ago I made a small audio reactive composition that tries to attain visual richness through a simple concept like brownian motion. The piece was wrote with a particular soundtrack in mind — Kriespiel by Patrick Wolf. Having that in mind, although the composition reacts to any audio input, its feeling and timing might not be the appropriate ones considering other audio sources.
Due to the complexity of the piece, an offline rendering is required mainly because of the most prominent moments. The composition simply reacts to the energy of several sound frequencies. I used Processing’s sound library Minim. As this library doesn’t have any sort of synchronization mechanism towards Processing’s effective rendering frame rate, the audio was first pre-processed and later fed to another sketch that simply saves each frame of the composition. Audio and video were later mixed outside Processing.
Having said that you are free to scratch, reuse or even rip to pieces the code behind the composition. Please note that the code wasn’t thought for distribution and with that I state it’s buggy, isn’t documented and not very elegant. To use it you’ll have to really look at it. Please let me know about any forks of this composition.
A note about the distribution: you’ll find two sketches. The process_audio takes an audio.mp3 — not distributed — on the data folder and generates a fft.txt of the analyzed sound. Just let it run until de sound finishes. The brown3 sketch takes a fft.txt and starts the rendering! You have already an example fft.txt — A Boy and a Portrait from Yoko Kanno — doesn’t matter really.
Another small note. You could notice that the original Kriespiel video has some flickering. This wasn’t intentional, although it happens to suit very well. The problem — I did some operations that modified structurally (adds and removes) some data structures while at the same time I was drawing shapes corresponding to the elements of those data structures. The solution — always update first all your data structures and after you can draw the shapes! Pretty dumb straightforward.
RANDOM WALK asks this question and presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness.
The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.
This is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi’s verlet springs in Processing. The first idea was to visualize the greatest empires decline. Along with that came the idea of fluid and timeless boundaries, and thus some kind of soft bodies dissolution.
Those are some screenshots displaying the springs in the system. In white we have the springs that form each shape’s skeleton. There are other more robust configurations but as the forces were minimized the shape kept it’s body like behavior. The collisions were implemented using the red springs — center to center connections that repulsed at a minimum distance.
The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. I chose the maritime empires because of their more abrupt and obtuse evolution as the visual emphasis is on their decline. The first idea to represent a territory independence was a mitosis like split — it’s harder to implement than it looks. Each shape tends to retain an area that’s directly proportional to the extent of the occupied territory on a specific year. The datasource is mostly our beloved wikipedia. The split of a territory is often the result of an extent process and it had to be visualized on a specific year. So I chose to pick the dates where it was perceived a de facto independence (e.g. the most of independence declarations prior to the new state’s recognition). Dominions of an empire, were considered part of that empire and thus not independent.
I don’t wanna call this small experiment of information visualization neither information art. Either way sounds too pretentious — as the visuals are not very sophisticated or elegant, and the way that the information is treated doesn’t enable the extraction of advanced knowledge. Although, it works very well as a ludic narrative. I ultimately found it very joyful. A direct interaction with the timeline could be a future plus!
The most interesting thing is that although not very extent, this data can be worked and displayed in several ways. More work on that, perhaps, later.
The article is very interesting from the discussion that led to the urge of creating a manifesto, to the main principles that should direct the information visualization design process.
default to public is a project dealing with the discrepancy between people’s feeling of privacy on the web and the physical world. It consists of an ongoing series of objects and interventions linking the physical world to the online world in unexpected and narrative ways to create awareness for self-exposure.
All works follow a simple, yet powerful principle: Information from the twitter network (standing for information on the web) are displayed in another public environment, the documentation of this process is fed back into the digital public sphere and the authors of the information are notified of that abduction. Two public spheres are temporarily linked, creating repercussions of communication in the digital public sphere, which seems to be regarded as less public than the physical world, although it has a far wider reach than classic media, plus it never expires or is written over.
A very simple, yet almost provocative, piece of conceptual work.
More interesting is the act of bringing the tweets to the paper. The words on tweeter were born on a medium where there is no linearity and no readers — we have users — searching for information, impacient for consumption. The paper traditionally supports a more contemplative and patient reading. Although, the format in which the paper is brought to the physical world seems to embrace the nonlinearity of the web medium, maybe all the user metaphor — as contemplative as reading a tweet in a thin strip of paper can get.
Leonel Moura is a European artist born in Lisbon, Portugal, that works with AI and robotics. He created in 2003 his first swarm of ‘Painting Robots’, able to produce original artworks based on emergent behavior. Since then he has produced several artbots, each time more autonomous and sophisticated. RAP (Robotic Action Painter), 2006 (…) is able to generate highly creative and original art works, to decide when the work is ready and to sign it, which it does with a distinctive signature. ISU (The Poet Robot), 2006, generates random poems, very much in the style of the Lettrist Movement and of Concrete Poetry.
A quick look on ISU’s work — drawing letters and words
ISU is able to draw letters and words and from there generate pictorial compositions. Like in lettrism, which campaign for the use of the letter as the basis of a new art form, ISU generates by itself a series of letters and words that may or may not trigger on the viewer meaning.
The process by which ISU decides the use of a letter or builds a word lays on a complex dynamics between a positive feedback mechanism and a random mode.
ISU is also capable of engravings. Using robots, paintings or engravings can bring evolutionary works to a more tangible world — in that way it feels more natural to name it Evolutionary Art. Noticing the use of the word random for describing the process of those works.
Looking at RAP’s process
RAP (Robotic Action Painter), (…) is an individualist artist and not a swarm, but makes use of the same composition methods based on stigmergy and emergence. This robot is additionally able to determine, by its own means, the moment in which the painting is finished. Previous versions didn’t have this capacity being conditioned by battery discharge or my will to stop the process. RAP’s decision is taken based on the information that it gathers directly from the painting, what produces a considerable variation of time and form, since RAP can decide that the work is complete after a relatively short while (entailing accordingly a low pictorial expression) or can extend the picture construction for a quite long period, making it much more dense and complex. The “secret” of this behavior is in the significant change of the sensors, which passed from two to nine “eyes”, allowing now the reading of local patterns, in addition to color spots. RAP is also my first robot to sign its works.
RAP has a set of sensors to avoid obstacles, to perceive the presence of visitors near the case, to check the paper, and most important to detect color. A total of 9 RGB color sensors, located under the robot body and disposed in a 3 x 3 grid, permanently scans an area of approximately 3 cm2.
RAP will be operating under a Random Mode until a certain amount of color (threshold) is detected. In this mode the robot makes a kind of sketch, randomly drawing a series of lines. The shape, size, direction and color of these lines are also drawn in a randomly way. In this sense it never produces the same lines or the same combination of lines. In the Random Mode in order to generate a truly random number for the seed, RAP gets it from its relative direction measured by an onboard compass. When the color detected exceeds the threshold, RAP changes to a Reactive Mode. It will be drawing on this mode until it finishes the painting, never getting back to the previous mode of operation. Under the Reactive Mode RAP only draws in those parts of the drawing where the color exceeds the given threshold. Therefore it tends to generate color clusters on some areas. Making use of its color sensor grid RAP decides when the work is ready. That happens when a certain pattern is detected with all of the 9 sensors. It then goes to the corner and signs with its own name. After signing, the robot moves to the center of the paper, starts flashing its lights and sends a wireless signal to the paper machine. This machine, installed on the bottom part of the box case, advances the paper roll, feeding the table with a fresh sheet for a new drawing.
Noticing a Random Mode, plus a Reactive Mode. Seems like the combination between a stochastic behavior and a reactive one can reinforce the visual diversity of the paintings, thus conferring a rich personality while setting a constant — and appealing — visual style. Shall we say an artist or a tool ? Either way, there is an artist albeit the sophistication of the tool. For sure.
