The new year is now 8 days old and I’m (very) late in the season-greetings tradition… Nevertheless: Happy New Year/Decade! 2009 was amazing and 2010 already looks to be just as exciting.
I’ve thrown together a quick generative piece that has been living in my sketchbook for far too long. It is a simple particle system that is governed by flowing curves that form letters (in this case ‘2010′) - there is a whole range of possible render-mechanisms that could be attached to this and I got a bit sidetracked (which I greatly enjoy!) while doing it.
At first I wanted to generate shapes using continuous curved-lines. First up, a simple circle.
The result is reminiscent of a t-shirt Golan Levin once wore at a talk at the RCA - I think it was the infinity sign rendered in a similar way (might have been a MIT/ACG t-shirt). At least that’s how my memory sees it. I then applied a more advanced shape to the system, a linear flow-path based on the numbers ‘2010′.
At this point, the curves were only there to let me debug/see what was going on, no particles are introduced yet. But it looked nice, so I added more curves.
Still not at the stage of adding particles - which was the original plan - the curves are quite beautiful in themselves, so I added .pdf-exporting and opened the file in illustrator. Pure bliss.
Finally I scrapped the line-rendering and added the particles to the mix - after all, this thing is begging to be moving.
This weekend I shot a mini photo shoot (of good friend and modern dancer, Christian From) using a custom-built ‘ring flash’ which produces some very nice lightning - especially considering it’s a cardboard box covered on the inside with tin foil and the outside with gaffa tape. Build your own from these instructions.
I am in the process of documenting my work from the past year. This is a teaser for one of the projects… Hint: it’s software (built with Processing) and it has to do with the identity of a rather important conference happening in Copenhagen this week. More shortly!
Design By Numbers - or just DBN - was released in the fall of 1999 by the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT led my John Maeda. I was introduced to DBN by Reed Kram as a computing 101 class. A lot of my work today is easily traced back to this 4 week workshop and to this simple programming environment and language aimed purely at visual programming.
In the summer of 2003, Reed Kram introduced me to a new and much more ambitious initiative called Proce55ing (back then in Alpha ver 0043). Ben Fry and Casey Reas - the originators of Processing - studied with Maeda at MIT and had been involved with DBN. Needless to say, Processing made quite an impact and is (now out of beta stage and past 1.0 status) today flourishing both as an open source movement, a teaching tool and one of my weapons of choice for most of my work.
In 2008 I worked with old colleagues at IDEO on a lovely project for (RED). The service was launched late 2008 and is called (RED)WIRE.
“(RED)WIRE is a digital music service, which promises subscribers exclusive music by major artists in exchange for $5 a month to fight AIDS.”
The project has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious INDEX : DESIGN TO IMPROVE LIFE award where the winners will be announced on August 28th. Until then you can click in and cast your vote for the ‘Peoples Choice Award’. Please vote for (RED)WIRE here.
After an insanely busy spring filled with projects I’ll be able to talk about later this year (well, some of them) and the arrival of my daughter (Adda) I am now happily back in business writing graphics code and planning projects for the summer. Here’s a quick custom rendering of Adda wearing mommy’s sunglasses.
Here’s a version rendering the okdeluxe-logo. The renderer is written in Processing, source-code available here.
2008 has been an extremely exciting year - lot’s of work, lot’s of interesting collaborations and projects! As 2008 was the year Ben and Casey released version 1.0 of Processing, the appropriate thing to do is to celebrate this with a year-ending piece wishing everyone a Happy Holiday season!
