.
I did not expected to see milieus of interest appear. They reminded me of the rhizomatic structures the philosopher Deleuze was talking about. So for starters I took the book where his concept of the Rhizome first appeared: “A Thousand Plateaus.”
.
Since I am living in Germany I wanted to compare the recommendations given by amazon.de and amazon.com. And another surprise waited. The milieus looked different. The germans are connecting postmodernism with Deleuze, the buyers from amazon.com are thinking more about the french situationist movement.
.

.
Because its fun i tested it again with the awesome book Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. The similarities are the complex theory and network dynamics. But the differences are interesting as well. The english milieus contain politics and collective systems, wheras the germans are more into successful marketing and economics.
.

.
I am looking forward on creating an interactive Processing-Tool, using the awesome Gephi-Toolkit library.

.

A collaboration between onformative.com and Christopher Warnow. See more images at the onformative labs.

.

There are plenty sorting algorithms out there, and each fresh computer scientist has to learn and understand them. They are categorized by how fast they are, or how many memory they use. A sorting algorithm is a strategy to order a random or chaotic set of numbers. The most were invented between 1945 and 1964, in the very early days of computer science.
While a sorting algorithm itself is very techno centric, we are intrigued by possibilities of using the process of sorting as a narrative. It contains the story of something unordered becoming meaningful. Finding references in the chaos. Those who sort and organize might be able guide others.

.

As an experiment, we wanted to investigate in the different visual forms, the process of sorting can have. Each sorting algorithm reveals its particular strategy as a unique pattern. We took a row of pixels of a photograph and sorted the pixels by their color value. Since Processings color object is actually a number, they are perfect to be ordered. It worked well with grays, but revealed an unintuitive sorting of the colors. While they are ordered mathematically, one expects the gradients to be different.

.

In the next step we took each pixelrow from top to bottom, scanning and sorting image. This way a certain rythm of color hues, brightness and darkness is added to the sorting processes. Each animation has a duration if 720 frames, since 720 rows were sorted from top to bottom. We like the idea of translating the image dimension into the time. The next step would be to think about how the image has to look like, to create a certain rythm, and in the end maybe a story.

.

Music: Ranta by Vladislav Delay
Image of the Enchanted Forest: Andrea Andrade

.

.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are mentioning the electro-climate and electrogeography in their inspiring and intelligent book Design Noir. Electromagnetic fields – and therefore data which are carried in them – are interacting with architecture in the same way like weather and airflow does. Are screens the most appropriate way of visualizing and interacting with data? Does location-based-service means opening-a-webiste-at-a-certain-place?

.

Manovich is concerned that “an electronic screen becomes simply a moving billboard or a moving ornament.”. Dunny and Raby are proposing to think about a Hertzian Space instead. “Whereas ‘cyberspace’ is a metaphor that spatialises what happens in computers distributed around the world, Hertzian Space is actual and physical, even though our senses detect only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum”. To design for the Hertzian Space is to work with immateriality.

.

Which form of data and metadata is appropriate in an Hertzian Space? A place in front af a screen, situated in the physical space. Inspired by the work Fictional Radio Spaces by Ingeborg Marie Des Thomas, who tried to illustrate invisible electromagnetic fields, this project shapes fictional data using the photographic technique of procedural lightpainting. The illustrations are moving between technoid hologram and personal handwritten note.

.

This project was a collaboration between the design studio for generative design onformative.com and me.

.

.

.

.

The illustration of the procedural lightpainting technique.

.

.

.

The illustration of the procedural lightpainting technique.

.

.

The work »Procedural Lightpaintings« wants to go the step beyond Augmented Reality and ask, if it is the right direction. In augmented reality, a screen with contextual information is laid onto the real space. The next step would be to go out of the screen, fully into the real space. This is achieved using procedural lightpainting.

.

Classical lightpainting uses longtime exposure of a camera and records light that is exposed to the camera during the exposure. In this series, a projector is used a s a light source. But it is aware of the distance of the projected surface and therefore is able to project different information in space. A hologram-like structures appear. Information is injected into the place, instead of the place being overlayed with it.

.

With pico-beamers being integrated into digital cameras, such a visualization technique is not that far away. It is possible to connect places an information more dircetly, but people have to live with it like with normal objects. The photographs are tracing this aesthetic effect and let the observers judge themselves.

.

The work is part of my bachelor thesis wich can be read here in german for now.

.

.

.

.

.

More at flickr.

.

Created in 2009.
Daniel Franke & Christopher Warnow

.

Music by Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt)
machinefabriek.nu/​

.

The piece is inspired by VR-sculptures, though technically and conceptionally transcending the helmet-like »90ies data-glasses«. The basic thought is to re-organise the relationship between »the viewer and the viewed« whose traditional functions are expanded technologically; the starting point however remains set in »real space«.

.

A portable screen is used to visualise the soundsculpture; a camera attached to the screen collects information of the space surrounding it from markers distributed on adjacent surfaces. The screen becomes a transmitter superimposing a digital layer-the sculpture onto »real space« (the unmanipulated space that greets the naked eye). The process allows the viewer to abandon the passive position of the »merely on-looking« consumer; he is enabled to visually and acoustically intervene with the sculpture, to model and module it. His changing positions and movements affect the visualisations on the screen, rendering an »extended reality« accessible. The sculpture generated is individually linked to each observer and thus singular.

.

The traditionally static and inactive viewer position is replaced by a mobile, navigating and active observer position. The one-way reactive relationship between sender and receiver is abandoned through a feedback channel to the moving image. The sound sculpture interprets a composition by Rutger Zuydervelt, that, parallel to the visual sculpture spreads spatially around the viewer through four loudspeakers. Employing FFT data the generated sculpture changes depending on the position of the user which is calculated by spatially distributed AR-markers. As it is Algorithm-based the sculpture is non-haptic – it is a generated but manipulable projection. Nonetheless the starting point remains set in »real space«: the technology does not attempt to conquer reality through VR, but rather seeks intersection points with the real-space context of the observer. The Laszló Moholy Nagy quote »Colour becomes light, mechanic turns into sculpture« resonates in this work, only here one might rephrase »Colour becomes thought, mechanic turns into narration«.

.

Making of:

.

Photos by Daniel Franke.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The illustration of the procedural lightpainting technique.

.