ISTA 301 Blog: Visualization

      Ok people I just got my mind blown! You got to see this video!

     Yup that just happened. Its completely real too. No trickery here. Built by Fisher Technical Services, Inc. (FTSI) for the 2010 World Expo it has 1008 150mm spheres all suspended by wire and each controlled individually by micro winches. Its an amazing display of what computers can do to help visualize art. Its a stunning show perfectly performed by thousands of little motors and a very powerful computer. Add some cool lights and a good sound track and you've created a mesmerizing display. I still can't believe how cool it is and I've watched the video 3 times. Although you may have never seen it before its not the only one of its kind. Check out BMW's version in Munich, Germany.

      BMW's version is smaller but they display very recognizable objects, of course beautiful silhouettes of their cars. Both these pieces are amazing works of art that blow my mind. The smooth movements, effortless transitions and overall simplicity of the designs is perfect. I want one in my house! There's also over versions of this kind of 3D visualization. Check out these two videos below:

      Each is an amazing feat by itself. Firs the cube is huge! I've always wanted cool holographic s and this is a kind of pseudo holograms. The second video is a true hologram! I thought I'd never see the day! Its truly amazing to see. Its a dream come true. Even such raw technology makes me very excited. Visualiztion is very important and these creative ways of displaying art boggle my mind and hopefully yours. I hope you enjoyed each piece as much as I did - Laters

ISTA 301 Blog: Interactive Art

      I mentioned that Art today has gone down the drain. Not that it is worse in quality but has less importance in our everyday lives. I believe that this is because going to an art gallery and staring at abstract art works and such is not entertaining for most, me included. How do we fix this problem? Make art more fun and entertaining for people. Easily done with a little thing called interactive art. Its a way that artists can turn the tables on their observers. Instead of the artists doing all the work they let the observer take part in the creation of the work. Its purpose is to engage the observer, bring he/she into the mind set of the artist and share in the experience of the works creation. Enough talk lets look at a couple examples. First the coolest runway you'll ever see:

Next a dance floor that you'll never want to leave:

Or a mirror made out of wood . . . ?

There's so many of these that are awesome I cannot show you them all. I recommend just doing a simple YouTube search for interactive art and watch the endless possibilities. Hope you have a good time - Laters

ISTA 301 Blog: Generative Art

      What happened to Art? Once a interval part of every man, woman or child's life is now put aside for video games, TV and iPhone's. Its an after thought in modern times. Today we build a square building, then fill it with furniture and lastly put a little Art on the walls. Where it should be the other way around. Finding Art that connects to you, build a purpose built structure with meaning and thought to house the Art and furnish it to make it cozy. Its not the only thing we have completely backwards in today's world but I'm not going political. The mentality of taking a process and reversing it is not new and in fact in art there's a ingenious concept that's broken the order of things. Traditional art is conceptualized, perfected in the mind and performed on canvas or sculpture. The result an exact representation of the original idea in the artist mind. So how do we reverse this? A little thing called Generative Art.

     

            Generative Art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an 

            autonomous system. - Trusty Wikipedia

      Yup generative art is art not created by the artist by rather by another being or machine. Instead of an artist creating a concept of the finalized work he/she creates a process to perform an artwork. Often a set of ambiguous steps to be followed by others each time creating a new and clearly different work. One the earliest examples would be Wolfgang Mozart's "Musikalisches Wurfelspiel" work. This is a large set of short melodies that are randomly played together based on a die roll thus creating a new piece of music every time.

      Generative art reverses the roll of artist and observer. Instead of the artist performing the work he/she is now the observer of the performers who then realize the work. Its the old switcharoo. Hundreds of works have been realized in this fashion and each and everyone is unique. A great example is Sol LeWitt's wall drawings below: 

      Very cool stuff. How about this piece?

      Wish it showed the completed work but still very cool. Hope you look for cool works like this in the future -Laters

      

ISTA 301 Blog: Evolutionary Algorithms

      Ever seen a lopsided skyscraper? Neither had until I was introduced to moh architects and evolutionary design concepts. Yup that right evolutionary design. . . what does this mean? Well check out their website HERE. Their idea was to use natural evolution to produce actual structure concepts and in this case skyscrapers. Nature has a pretty good way of making evolution happen. The weak die and the strong survive. Now apply such ideas to architecture and whala. Kinda. Its not as easy as you'd think. You need evolutionary algorithms and a rating system to determine how that algorithm does over time. These systems are often called Fitness scores. For example in the skyscraper situation we would make a rating system based on how strong the build is and whether its going to fall over when a little storm comes through. The process would be something like this. Run the algorithm and take the result. Put it through a storm and if it falls over throw it away and get the next one. When you find a few good ones that survive find the properties that made them survive and add them to the algorithm. Now repeat a couple hundred times. Eventually the goal is to get something that's going to survive the harshest hurricanes and storms. The process will vary depending on algorithm but all evolutionary algorithms require a grading system. For more information check out a trusted Wiki article HERE. For a beginners guide to EA's there's another great resource HERE.
      So whats so cool about these? Well this strategy is an interesting way to create something but often not know what your result will be at the start. Depending on your EA you may get results that you would have never predicted or imagined. Above is a pretty good example. Who would have thought of having a structurally sound skyscraper that was completely bent in the middle? These algorithms also have to great power to find the optimum result very easily for any project. On the Perl Monks website they give these great examples:

• Finding circuit layouts that minimize production costs, using graph representations.
• Modelling biological principles like cooperation, speciation, specialization.
• Finding effective movement strategies for cheap (and dumb) robots.
• Creating classifiers and predictors for data sets, often with neural nets.
• Generating music/art that satisfies certain aesthetic criteria.

Some really great ideas and possibilities can come from this process and its easy to see that it can be applied to a huge variety of fields and problems. It would probably be a good idea to keep EA in the back of your mind if your a true problem solver - Laters

   

ISTA 301 Blog: Probably Cats

      If you haven't figured it out I'm writing some of my blogs for a class project. We're required to write about computational art related topics which is actually pretty cool. For my final project we had to actually create the art ourselves. I teamed up with Nelson Post, Marie Wilcox, Carlos Sanchez and Stephen Roda to create our visionary piece of web art. You can check it out at Probablycats.com and here is a screenshot of it.

Pretty cool right? Here's the low down on the site. Reddit.com is one that I visit on the regular because of all its interesting news and funny pictures. The only problem is that its kind of like craigslist.com where its design is very simplistic and unattractive. Well we decided to fix that and make the viewing enjoyable. Our team put together code to make it happen. First we needed to scrape the website of all its cool pictures. Easy with a little php and hours of time. We designed the website around the images giving it a hip look and easy to navigate feel. All the images are linked back to the original site if you want it from the original source. The photos are not chosen by us but rather Reddit and in actuality imgur.com. Refresh the website and it will refresh with the latest pictures. Enjoy the newest streamline way to view your favorite pictures on the web - Laters

ISTA 301 Blog: Virtual Reality

      Keeping on the theme of cool future technologies lets take a look at the sister of augmented reality, virtual reality. I understand if you think they are the same but in fact they are quite different. Here's the definitions as per trusty Wikipedia:
   
           Augmented Reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment
           whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video,
           graphics or GPS data.

           Virtual Reality (VR) is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate
           physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds.

     So whats the big difference? Augmented reality is the real world with computer outputs overlaid on it where virtual reality is complete immersion in a computer generated world. For example an augmented reality demonstration:

      Very cool right? Now lets look at an example of virtual reality:

     
See the difference? Its pretty cool. There are many projects like these ongoing. The experience is very interesting. The SCAPE project at the University of Arizona supports two users that can exist in the same virtual world but in different places in that virtual world. You can interact with the environment or each other in that environment. A new world within a world. Its like a little bit of inception. Hope it blew you mind a little - Laters

ISTA 301 Blog: Google Glass

      One of my previous posts was about cyborgs and I touched on an amazing piece of technology Google Glass. To me this is one of the coolest concepts I've been exposed to in years. If you didn't see the video last time here it is again:

      If only it were here already. The idea of effortless control over technology demonstrated in the video makes me very excited for the future. We can see that you can video chat (Google Hangout), send and receive text messages, make calls and get turn-by-turn navigation at the blink of an eye. To me its just mind blowing so I've got to dive further into augmented reality. Wondering what Wikipedia's definition of augmented reality is? So am I, so here it is:

            Augmented Reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world 

            environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such 

            as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

      Pretty straight forward and nothing really surprising there. Its a technology that has come along directly with the development of faster computers, cheap cameras and better video graphics. Combine all that with smartphones it has made augmented reality possible in everyone's pocket. Sweet! I don't know about you but I have always wanted cool holographic HUD's like Tony Stark has in Iron Man. There's also plenty of other great examples of augmented reality technology. Digitalbuzz did a great article about some HERE. This new technology has unlimited possibilities in my mind. I'll leave with a cool video of Google Glass being demonstrated live.

-Laters

     

ISTA 301 Blog: Pinterest

      Social media has taken over the modern world. Face to face social interaction is now unneeded. It has enabled us to share our lives with the world in real time. We can post our location, our opinion, what hear or see. One form of social media that has exploded is the micro blogging scene and there are many options. Twitter, Facebook, Picasso, MySpace, YouTube, Google+, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumbler and Pinterest just to name a few. All let you show the world clip-its of your life. There's hundreds of them all offering a outlet to express yourself online. For me I'm just a newbie to the whole scene. I have had a Facebook account for a long time but only recently signed up for a Twitter account (@rlof11) and Blogger. I have enjoyed each but my latest adventure is the Pintrest world. If you haven't joined me and the 25 million other unique visitors a month on Pinterest I'll clue you in on whats going on in this virtual photo sharing world. I just joined a week ago so I'm no expert but where my knowledge fails we can always trust the most reliable web resources out there Wikipedia.
      The simple jist of Pinterest is you post a picture on your virtual pin board. Others can see it and if they think its worthy of adding to their own board they "re-pin it". Simple and very entertaining. People "pin" images of everything. For me I mostly search for those fly outfits, cool gadgets or cool cars. Search for anything and you'll receive a never ending stream of related photos that might "interest" you. Its a great idea and a time killing fun way to explore your own interests.
      Pinterest as a company is an amazing story. They launched in March 2010 and literally two years later became a $1.5 billion dollar company. It was the fastest company to reach that mark in history. Why so popular so quick? I believe its because of its simple design and simple concept. I have spent a small amount of the website and have enjoyed it thoughoutly. So far I have used it to pass samll amounts of time between events or classes. I'm not usually one to jump on these websites but this is one I have enjoyed with the little amount of time I've spent with it. Check it out or follow me if your already a member. Till then - Laters