An incomplete overview of influential people and events in Digital Arts

Reference


 People

John Maeda

Author of Designing For Simplicity and creator of the codebase “Design By Numbers” which inspired the creators of Processing to grow it.

http://www.maedastudio.com/index.php

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/414828/when-a-good-idea-works/

http://www.aiga.org/medalist-johnmaeda/

Designing For Simplicity

 Casey Reas

http://reas.com

Ben Fry

http://benfry.com

Casey and Ben created processing and built the IDE. And have written books and basically created the whole thing.

Andres Colubri

Anders is a vastly talented individual. He is one of the creators of the processing framework and a talented visual artist in his own right. In addition to is portfolio, Anders maintains the codeanticode  blog; mostly about making interactive graphics and video using processing, opengl, gstreamer, and other languages and frameworks for creative coding. Anders is also part of  Fathom Information Design  an info graphics, interactive, installation outfit.

http://andrescolubri.net/processing-2/

Andreas Schlegel

Andreas Schlegel is a developer with extensive involvement in the development of Processing. Check out his site for beautiful examples of generative art. Andreas is the author of one of the most useful Processing libraries, the titanic ControlP5 GUI toolset.

Andreas co-founded the artist collective syntfarm together with Vladimir Todorovic. Syntfarm explores possibilities at the intersection of art, nature and technology.

http://www.sojamo.de

https://processing.org/exhibition/

Amnon P5

One of the devs on the processing project. Amazing visual work.

Amnon P5

Joshua Davis

Josh Davis is a prolific digital artist and contributor to wired magazine.

The Hype Framework is a library and collection of scripts created by Joshua Davis and the guys at codeandtheory.com. Josh is a giant of generative visuals.

http://www.hypeframework.org/

Reza Ali

Reza creates a range of beautiful images using processing. Did tour visuals for OKGO! Respect.

Reza Ali

Jan Vantomme

Amazing stuff.

http://vormplus.github.io/Timelapse/

Physical Cellular Automata – Time Lapse by Jan Vantomme

Vormplus

Source: Manindra Moharana

Leander Herzog

A visual artist and web developer. His site has a great folio of images generated with processing. He also has a huge repository of work on his flickr page. 

https://leanderherzog.ch

 
Mario Klingemann

I found Mario’s Blog in 2009 and have stalked him ever since. Beautiful generative artwork and talented developer.

Quasimondo

Joanie Lemercier

presents the latest incarnation of his audiovisual mapping project.

Fuji

EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL 

Zach Lieberman

Co-founder of open frameworks, the C++ cousin to processing.

thesystemis

http://agneschang.net/cv.html

Nicholas Negroponte

He is the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, and also founded the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC).

Source: Nicholas Negroponte – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Yugo Nakamura

Yugo is a creative director, designer and engineer exploring various forms of interactive system in digital and networked environment.
Yugo has exhibited and lectured in Asia, U.S.A and Europe. Some artworks from his personal website: yugop.com (http://yugop.com/) have recenly been shown at Center Pompidou (Paris), Kunstlerhaus (Vienna), Design Museum (London). His commercial works have received many international awards including Cannes Lions, OneShow, Clio Award, and NY ADC.

Source: yugop.com – information


Galleries and Code Samples

 

Great site with excellent beginner tutorials and beautiful examples of computer generated art.

Coding for Art

The creative applications network

showcases   digital visualisations and installations. There are a large number of processing based pieces to check out.

CreativeApplications.Net

Processing Cities

An initiative to have processing workshops and seminars in various cities around the world.

Processing Cities

The Free Art Bureau

A non-profit foundation. Some great tutorials on Geomerative, the vector processing library.

http://freeartbureau.org

Rune Madsen

a  NY designer and installation creator. Has a number of example code snippets.

http://www.runemadsen.com


Visualisation People and Places

Data visualisations are increasingly becoming more complex and beautiful with the advent of HTML 5 browsers providing access to your graphics card and fast javascript processing. Developers are also using smartphone and tablet apps as a platform for visualisation.

Here’s a selection of sites and examples to check out :

App Art Awards : A gallery site presenting app visualisations and artworks

Ricardo Cabello – Mr.doob : Ricardo Cabello, know by his alias Mr Doob, has created a large number of beautiful visualisations over the past several years

Chrome Experiment #500 : Chrome experiments continues to showcase cutting edge work by a number of developers

Silk – Interactive Generative Art : Silk has been around for awhile, a great example of the evolution of the web interface and a simple but immersive generative art tool

Clouds Over Cuba : A classic online rich media piece. A modern example of the rich / interactive media genre popular in the 1990s

Inspirograph : beautiful digital spirograph for those who remember it!

 Loop Waveform Visualizer : A sound visualisation utilising three.js  and graphics card through the browser.

Hopalong Orbits Visualizer : Another three.js example

glslsandbox : A great site showing the power of shaders.

 Boil Up : using cinder to generate a realisitc simulation:


Interactive Environment People and Places

László Moholy-Nagy

(1895 – 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. He is regarded as one of the fathers of Lumino kinetic art.

http://moholy-nagy.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Moholy-Nagyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumino_kinetic_art

the oddly named Light Painters World Alliance website has a great article on the history of light painting with some examples of Moholy-Nagy’s work.

http://www.lpwalliance.com/publication/15/

Muriel Cooper

Cooper was a great graphic designer and Co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, the modern powerhouse of creativity and innovation. In 2007, a New York Times article called her “the design heroine you’ve probably never heard of”

 Experiments

SALT and related installations

Source: ART+COM Studios | Communication @en

SK Games

http://www.skgames.com.au

SK are a team of game developers living and working in Perth, Western Australia. We create game experiences; the software, the hardware, and the event.

We are interested in the space around games, as well as the game itself. We create the software and hardware together, designing the physical housing of the game to work best with the gameplay on the screen. We also try to show our games in different events, to expand the perception of games to new and different audiences. Buy one of us a beer and we’ll explain it better.

bush bash

bush bash

media Arts institute

List of Physical Visualizations.

This is a chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts, maintained by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen. Thanks to Fanny Chevalierand our other contributors. Feel free to post a general comment or if you know of another interesting physical visualization, please submit it!

  DESCRIPTION EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL Drawing, projection, sound. 2010    Inspired by the Icelandic volcano, which wreaked travel havoc across Europe in May 2010, Joanie Lemercier presents the latest incarnation of its audiovisual mapping project.

Source: EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL | Joanie Lemercier


  DESCRIPTION EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL Drawing, projection, sound. 2010    Inspired by the Icelandic volcano, which wreaked travel havoc across Europe in May 2010, Joanie Lemercier presents the latest incarnation of its audiovisual mapping project.

Source: EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL | Joanie Lemercier

Bringing together artists, designers and educators to drive a forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture.

Source: Resonate ’15

PopTech is a global network of remarkable people, innovative projects, powerful ideas, and extraordinary conferences that are accelerating positive impact and changing the world.
External Links
http://poptech.org

http://www.fastcompany.com/section/most-creative-people-2015

INFODuring the past 15 years, we’ve been trying to define what OFFF really represents.OFFF has proudly joined artists such as Joshua Davis, Stefan Sagmeister, John Maeda, Neville Brody, Kyle Cooper, The Mill, Digital Kitchen, Ben Fry & Casey Reas, Golan Levin, Chris Milk, Rob Chiu, Julien Vallée, Paula Scher, Rick Poynor, Erik Spiekermann, Dvein, Erik Natzke, Casey Neistat and the list goes on.It is more than just a Festival hosting innovative and international speakers, it is more than a meeting point for all talents around the world to collaborate, it is more than feeding the future.OFFF is a community inviting all those who are eager to learn to participate and get inspired in a three-day journey of conferences, workshops, activities and performances. What is it about exactly? It’s a combination of Offline/Online designers, Motion Designers, Thinkers, Sound Designers, Graphic Designers, Theorists, Developers, Professionals, Students… Putting the titles aside, OFFF is made for the curious.OFFF takes place in Barcelona annually, while it tours the world as OFFF on Tour for the rest of the year. Join us at OFFF Barcelona 2016 in May 26-27-28!Contact: info (at) offf (dot) ws

Source: Info | Offf Let’s Feed The Future

Museum of Digital Art by Digital Arts Association — Kickstarter

Check out Oopology people and places for more on the people that have influenced creative coding and computer science in general
Check out processing people and places for more on the evolution of processing and the people behind it.
Check out Interactive environment people and places for more on the history and current state of interactive installations and environments in general.

Source: The Interaction Design Foundation

Source: The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction » Interaction Design Foundation

Source: Golan Levin (@golan) | Twitter

Source: About | Scanlines

 

 


Projection Mapping People and Places

Projection mapping in Australia is widely known thanks to several years of lighting up our opera house during the Vivid Festival.   Ranging from simple, elegant environmental projections to mind-bendingly complex installations using motion tracking, scale models and yes, even robots (yay), the following examples demonstrate the possibilities of the technique.

This is by no means a complete summary, nor is it  intended to be a ‘best of / amazing’  list.  I have merely collected a few examples that  show a diversity of applications of the technique. The explanations are my own and as such may not be super exactly accurate, but i’m confident i’m in the ballpark. Ahh, caveats, we love you. If you want to know more about projection mapping basics and how to set up a quick projection map, I’ll be posting a separate article soon. If you have examples of your own, send me a link!

Nobumichi Asai, Paul Lacroix, Golan Levin

Omote

This example exploits some heavy computation to deliver geometry mapped animation capable of tracking movement, in real time. Nice.  An IR camera trained onto  the subjects face detects a number of small adhesive ‘points’ applied at specific locations. The camera ‘ sees’ each dot move relative to it’s neighbours, software analyses the moments and calculates a 3D transformation from the data. This allows a real-time rendering engine to  deform and move the geometry of the projected visuals as the subject moves.

 [The] Face is considered as [a mirror] that reflects human soul, a separation between Omote (exterior) and Ura  (interior)…I always considered [face] to be the most delicate yet powerful medium for art.
Nobumichasi Asai

Jonathan Chomko, Matthew Rosier

Shadowing

Here we have the clever use of  relatively simple technology used to create a beautiful experience.   A projector and an infrared camera are mounted on top of a streetlight. As a pedestrian walks past the light, the camera captures their infrared signal (essentially a silhouette). From this data, software works out where the person is walking. The silhouette image is ‘blurred’ to create a shadow effect, then saved. When another person walks by, the software displays the saved shadow, close to the position of the person.

Light Memory enables interaction between people who share a space… traces of those who’ve passed under the streetlights are played throughout the city, re-animating the streets. As you walk under the light, the shadow of the previous visitor walks beside. While you interact, or react, to the shadow, your movements and actions are recorded, becoming the shadow for the next visitor.
Jonathan Chomko, Matthew roiser

Artificial Rome

The Siemens Brand Identity

Artificial Rome, an interactive experience agency, have used projection mapping to create a world that morphs and changes before your very eyes. This example shows the setup of the space, which gives you a great insight into the ‘wiring under the boards’

 

 [The] Face is considered as [a mirror] that reflects human soul, a separation between Omote (exterior) and Ura  (interior)…I always considered [face] to be the most delicate yet powerful medium for art.
Nobumichasi Asai

Tokyo City Symphony

thing

W

Where the above example used a full size stage, this example uses a scale model of the city of tokyo as the projection mapping surface. Love it.

stuff
person

Bot & Dolly

box

Isn’t it  amazing what a bloke can do with a just a few industrial grade manufacturing mechatronic arms and some huge LCD screens? Staggeringly complex, beautiful.

 [The] Face is considered as [a mirror] that reflects human soul, a separation between Omote (exterior) and Ura  (interior)…I always considered [face] to be the most delicate yet powerful medium for art.
Nobumichasi Asai