Categories
Art Computing Free Software Generative Art Projects

paintr Rebooted

paintr

I’ve updated paintr for the 2010s. It’s now implemented in node.js running on OpenShift and posting to tumblr.

paintr’s new address is http://paintr-rebooted.tumblr.com/ .

The images are inline svg, which displays well on the main page and in the individual article pages. If you follow the blog (please do!) the images don’t show in the previews on your dashboard. Clicking through displays the images properly.

I’m wary of using proprietary and cloud web services. In this instance the source code and generated art is available, so it could be rehosted easily.

Categories
3D Printing Free Culture Free Software Generative Art Howto Magick

3D Printing Sigils

100px-Sigil.svg

Sigil CC-BY-SA by bwigfield.

In chaos magick, sigils are visual embodiments of intent used to focus and actualize that intent. Within both supernatural and cognitive theories of magic the principle is the same: sigils are foci for attracting the resources (supernatural or mental) required to achieve the desire of the person who has constructed them.

Traditional sigils are drawings, two dimensional graphical forms, created using magic square or letter abstraction techniques. Contemporary mages have constructed hypermedia sigils in various formats, from comic book series to interactive multimedia installations.

Sigils created by creative computer graphics programming software can be printed cheaply using Open Source 3D printers or online 3D printing services. This opens up a new range of techniques for creating and using sigils.

Image copyright 2011 Marius Watz

Image copyright 2011 Marius Watz

The 3D printed art of Marius Watz shows how data can be modelled in aesthetically appealing three dimensional form, and how the challenges of modelling complex arbitrary data can be met while still creating easily printed models. RIG’s experiments in 3D printed models of user data by distorting pre-existing forms Chernoff Face-style to display a as christmas tree decorations. We Can use these approaches and more (such as model mash-ups and extrusion of 2D sigils) to embody the intent of sigils rather than Web 2.0 data or random numbers in 3D printed form.

azathoth_3d_sigil_letters

Image Copyright Joshua Madara 2011.

Joshua Madara’s 3D graphics sigil creator Processing sketch demonstrates the creation of a virtual three dimensional sigil form. The sigil is line-based, to keep its genetic link to magic square-based sigils, and would not be 3D printable in this form. But the lines could be replaced with cylinders or rectangular beams, with the angles of joins between them limited to ensure that they can be printed without support on Open Source 3D printers.

Probability-Lattice-0304-Final-pieces

Image copyright 2011 Marius Watz

Whether Watz’s organic or machinic forms, more object based approaches or something even more abstract, it is easy to see how this can be applied to the construction of sigils. The mapping of letters (or words) to formal properties or objects by software in order to encode them in forms is how 3D printed sigil models can be produced. This adds an extra dimension of reality and relationality between the virtual and the real that affords a corresponding increase in persuasiveness and richness for sigils.

Part of the efficacy of a sigil may come from the mindfulness and concentration involved in manually constructing and chargeing it. If this is the case then having a machine construct the sigil may work against the sigil’s effectiveness. Constructing the code to make the sigil, and watching the mechanical operation of Open Source 3D printers alleviate this. And a better sigil form than could be made by hand will be a better focus, whether produced by magickal or technological means.

Create 3D sigils using creative coding software such as Processing, or in 3D design software such as Blender. Make the software and model files Free Software and Free Culture (GPL the software, BY-SA the models, wherever you can) and empower others to follow in your footsteps. Upload the model to a filesharing site such as Thingiverse. Then print it using an Open Source 3D printer such as a Lulzbot or a 3D printing service such as Shapeways.

A 3D printed sigil can be used as a focus for contemplation, mediation or ritual. It can be placed in work or living space as a reminder and proof of the reality of the objective embodied in the sigil. Or it can be destroyed to release it into the imagination and the world as part of a ritual by burning or by melting using solvents (but beware toxic fumes). Uploading the sigil to a model filesharing site will spread it further into the world as both virtual and, if anyone prints it, as physical form.

Categories
Art Free Culture Free Software Generative Art Projects Satire

Composition Generators

spots

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/art/composition-generators/


Free Brit Art! [description+slogan] by Rob Myers

– Ruth Catlow.

Rob Myers does Damien Hirst (and Agnes Martin, and Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman, and Robert Ryman, and…
– Curt Cloninger.

Categories
Art Art Computing Free Software Generative Art Projects

Small Sensoria 1

The electronics

This is the test setup for “Small Sensoria”. It is several LEDs being (mis-used) as light sensors connected to an Arduino. The USB cable connects them to a computer running a Processing sketch that renders the light intensities.

The values can be plotted linearly:

linearOr radially:
radialNext I am going to make the Arduino unit more independent by adding a Bluetooth shield, battery power, and wiring the LEDs up to it.

You can get the Arduino and Processing source code here:

https://gitorious.org/robmyers/small-sensoria

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Art History Free Culture Free Software Generative Art Howto Projects Satire

Psychogeodata (3/3)

cemetary random walk

The examples of Psychogeodata given so far have used properties of the geodata graph and of street names to guide generation of Dérive. There are many more ways that Psychogeodata can be processed, some as simple as those already discussed, some much more complex.

General Strategies

There are some general strategies that most of the following techniques can be used as part of.

  • Joining the two highest or lowest examples of a particular measure.

  • Joining the longest run of the highest or lowest examples of a particular measure.

  • Joining a series of destination waypoints chosen using a particular measure.

The paths constructed using these strategies can also be forced to be non-intersecting, and/or the waypoints re-ordered to find the shortest journey between them.

Mathematics

Other mathematical properties of graphs can produce interesting walks. The length of edges or ways can be used to find sequences of long or short distances.

Machine learning techniques, such as clustering, can arrange nodes spatially or semantically.

Simple left/right choices and fixed or varying degrees can create zig-zag or spiral paths for set distances or until the path self-intersects.

Map Properties

Find long or short street names or street names with the most or fewest words or syllables and find runs of them or use them as waypoints.

Find all the street names on a particular theme (colours, saints’ names, trees) and use them as waypoints to be joined in a walk.

Streets that are particularly straight or crooked can be joined to create rough or smooth paths to follow.

If height information can be added to the geodata graph, node elevation can be used as a property for routing. Join high and low points, flow downhill like water, or find the longest runs of valleys or ridges.

Information about Named entities extracted from street, location and district names from services such as DBPedia or Freebase and used to connect them. Dates, historical locations, historical facts, biographical or scientific information and other properties are available from such services in a machine-readable form.

Routing between peaks and troughs in sociological information such as population, demographics, crime occurrence, ploitical affiliation, property prices can produce a journey through the social landscape.

Locations of Interest

Points of interest in OpenStreetMap’s data are represented by nodes tagged as “historic”, “amenity”, “leisure”, etc. . It is trivial to find these nodes to use as destinations for walks across the geodata graph. They can then be grouped and used as waypoints in a route that will visit every coffee shop in a town, or one of each kind of amenity in alphabetical order, in an open or closed path for example. Making a journey joining each location with a central base will produce a star shape.

Places of worship (or former Woolworth stores can be used to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line using linear regression or the techniques discussed below in “Geometry and Computer Graphics”.

Semantics

The words of poems or song lyrics (less stopwords), matched either directly or through hypernyms using Wordnet, can be searched for in street and location names to use as waypoints in a path. Likewise named entities extracted from stories, news items and historical accounts.

More abstract narratives can be constructed using concepts from The Hero’s Journey.

Nodes found using any other technique can be grouped or sequenced semantically as waypoints using Wordnet hypernym matching.

Isomorphism

Renamed Tube maps, and journeys through one city navigated using a map of another, are examples of using isomorphism in Psychogeography.

Entire city graphs are very unlikely to be isomorphic, and the routes between famous locations will contain only a few streets anyway, so sub-graphs are both easier and more useful for matching. Better geographic correlations between locations can be made by scoring possible matches using the lengths of ways and the angles of junctions. Match accuracy can be varied by changing the tolerances used when scoring.

Simple isomorphism checking can be performed using The NetworkX library’s functions . Projecting points from a subgraph onto a target graph then brute-force searching for matches by varying the matrix used in the projection and scoring each attempt based on how closely the points match . Or Isomorphisms can be bred using genetic algorithms, using degree of isomorphism as the fitness function and proposed subgraphs as the population.

The Social Graph

Another key contemporary application of graph theory is Social Network Analysis. The techniques and tools from both the social science and web 2.0 can be applied directly to geodata graphs.

Or the graphs of people’s social relationships from Facebook, Twitter and other services can mapped onto their local geodata graph using the techniques from “Isomorphism” above, projecting their social space onto their geographic space for them to explore and experience anew.

Geometry and Computer Graphics

Computer geometry and computer graphics or computer vision techniques can be used on the nodes and edges of geodata to find forms.

Shapes can be matched by using them to cull nodes using an insideness test or to find the nearest points to the lines of the shape. Or line/edge intersection can be used. Such matching can be made fuzzy or accurate using the matching techniques in “Isomorphism”.

Simple geometric forms can be found – triangles, squares and quadrilaterals, stars. Cycle bases may be a good source of these. Simple shapes can be found – smiley faces, house shapes, arrows, magical symbols. Sequences of such forms can be joined based on their mathematical properties or on semantics.

For more complex forms, face recognition, object recognition, or OCR algorithms can be used on nodes or edges to find shapes and sequences of shapes.

Classic computer graphics methods such as L-sytems, turtle graphics, Conway’s Game of Life, or Voronoi diagrams can be applied to the Geodata graph in order to produce paths to follow.

Geometric animations or tweens created on or mapped onto the geodata graph can be walked on successive days.

Lived Experience

GPS traces generated by an individual or group can be used to create new journeys relating to personal or shared history and experience. So can individual or shared checkins from social networking services. Passenger level information for mass transport services is the equivalent for stations or airports.

Data streams of personal behaviour such as scrobbles, purchase histories, and tweets can be fetched and processed semantically in order to map them onto geodata. This overlaps with “Isomorphism”, “Semantics”, and “The Social Graph” above.

Sensor Data

Temperature, brightness, sound level, radio wave, radiation, gravity and entropy levels can all be measured or logged and used as weights for pathfinding. Ths brings Psychogeodata into the realm of Psychogeophysics.

Conclusion

This series of posts has made the case for the concept, practicality, and future potential of Psychogeodata. The existing code produces interesting results, and there’s much more that can be added and experienced.

(Part one of this series can be found here, part two can be found here . The source code for the Psychogeodata library can be found here .)

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Art Open Data Free Culture Free Software Generative Art Howto Projects Satire

Psychogeodata (2/3)

derive_sem

Geodata represents maps as graphs of nodes joined by edges (…as points joined by lines). This is a convenient representation for processing by computer software. Other data can be represented in this way, including words and their relationships.

We can map the names of streets into the semantic graph of WordNet using NLTK. We can then establish how similar words are by searching the semantic graph to find how far apart they are. This semantic distance can be used instead of geographic distance when deciding which nodes to choose when pathfinding.

Mapping between these two spaces (or two graphs) is a conceptual mapping, and searching lexicographic space using hypernyms allows abstraction and conceptual slippage to be introduced into what would otherwise be simple pathfinding. This defamiliarizes and conceptually enriches the constructed landscape, two key elements of Psychogeography.

The example above was created by the script derive_sem, which creates random walks between semantically related nodes. It’s easy to see the relationship between the streets it has chosen. You can see the html version of the generated file here, and the script is included with the Psychogeodata project at https://gitorious.org/robmyers/psychogeodata .

(Part one of this series can be found here, part three will cover potential future directions for Psychogeodata.)

Categories
Aesthetics Free Culture Generative Art Projects Satire

Psychogeodata (1/3)

derive

tl;dr Psychogeographic Geodata using OpenStreetMap in Python. Download here.

Psychogeography is a set of techniques for defamiliarizing the landscape, particularly the urban landscape. It is a way of resisting and critiquing the historically, culturally and politically imposed reality of the built environment. Starting with Guy Debord, psychogeography has since followed the rest of the Situationist‘s techniques in being recuperated by society. But as Christine Harold points out in “Ourspace”, this can be redressed by intensifying the strategies of Situationism into new forms.

The town and tube maps used by previous psychogeographers have been replaced in modern experiences of the landscape by Geodata, a mesh of points joined by the lines of streets and accompanied by tagged information describing them for human and machine use. Combining Psychogeography and Geodata gives us Psychogeodata.

derive_degree

Geodata is tied to the logic of Googlization, of making the world rational and tractable for machines within the economy. Its positioning between commerce and consumer makes it ideal raw material for Situationist-inspired ironization. And Geodata, like other forms of information, can be made free. OpenStreetMap is a very successful project that does so.

Taking the inhuman logic of Geodata as the basis for Psychogeography allows us to use Graph Theory to examine the landscape mathematically. Graph Theory is also used in Social Network Analysis, and in discussions of the topology of the internet. It is a powerful mathematical abstraction.

The randomness, unfamiliarity and conceptual slippage that this provides us with can intensify historical strategies of Dérive. In order to do so we need Geodata (from OSM) and software to manipulate and present it. The software that I have written for Psychogeodata is in the Python programming language. It operates on graphs using the http://networkx.lanl.gov/ library. And the output is rendered using the OpenLayers Javascript library.

derive_loop

The first scripts written using the Psychogeodata library concentrate on the mathematics of graph theory. Click on the name of each script to open an example of its output in a new tab or window (which your browser’s popup blocker may warn you about):

(Disclaimer: This software currently generates paths that may or may not be safe or practical to actually follow. Use your discretion and common sense in choosing which ones to actually travel.)

derive – Generates random walks and non-self-intersecting random walks.

derive_degree – Generates journeys between high-and-low-connectivity nodes.

derive_loop – Generates circuitous journeys based on cycle bases

derive_tags – Generates paths between nodes with particular tags.

derive_tags

To download the software and for more information, see:

https://gitorious.org/robmyers/psychogeodata

(Part two of this series will present some scripts based on semantics, part three will cover potential future directions for Psychogeodata.)

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Generative Art Projects Satire

Baldessarinator

5388143519_bd4361200a-balderassinated.jpeg
https://gitorious.org/robmyers/baldessarinator

Produces modified versions of images resembling part of an ouvre.

You’ll need opencv-python installed for this. PIL should already be installed.

[Original image by Tommerton2010 CC-BY https://secure.flickr.com/photos/58842866@N08/5388143519/ ]

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Free Software Generative Art Projects

Streaming Aesthetics: Shape

Streaming Aesthetics: Shapes
Here’s the code for Streaming Aesthectics: Shape . You can compile and run it in Processing.

https://gitorious.org/robmyers/streaming-aesthetics

It follows Twitter to see when people tweet shape names and then draws those shapes, packing them inside each other.

There’s some unused code for more complex shapes, but “star” and “cross” appear in the Twitter firehose more often than geometric shape names.

Next is Streaming Aesthetics: Pattern .

Categories
Art Computing Art History Evie Matthieson Generative Art

[Evie Matthieson] Parallel Space

Parallel Space
Saturday July 5th 1997

Talk outlines and Biographies

Tracey Matthieson

“A number of preoccupations surround my practise within VR such as:

How ideas and concepts might be described through the medium of VR?
The medium’s strengths and weaknesses.
Are there features that belong only to the VR medium? If so what are
they?
The participation and encouragement of the viewer and the control (or
lack) of the artist.
Blurring the edges of real and unreal.
The illusory nature of the medium, and how to respect and yet also
challenge the way we interpret space, place and the objects within them.
Where the translation of elements of literal ‘reality’ are useful and
where they should not be considered.
recoding ideas about real places into virtual ‘landscapes’
To provide an alternative

My projects are a series of experiments looking at the use of VR as
an art medium. relationships in VR of space and place, the illusory
nature of VR.
The revelation of spaces according to the movement of the user. it
focuses on methods to encourage user participation within worlds by
visual methods. My most recent works centre around the creation of a
virtual system that supports and encourages the viewer through a yet
unmade virtual landscape. I designed a system to generate on-the-fly
virtual ‘zones’ around the viewer. The randomness of zones is affected
only by the viewers choice of movement through the work. The viewer
creates their own piece of the work. The system then records the 3D
virtual map generated behind the viewer to leave a sense of constancy
and an individual path they can retrace if they wish. It is expected
that each map will be different.

I am using this work as a vehicle to explore the notions of the
permanent, temporary and transient ‘structures’ within the medium of VR
and also within computer and viewer memory.”

Tracey Matthieson has just finished her part time research MA
at the Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University. She chose to
research existing Virtual Environments and create her own experimental
spaces. Her intention through her experimental work is to offer an
alternative to existing interpretations of the uses of VR. Programming
support for the “catalyst map” system was from Rob Myers.