Julius von Bismarck did one of the most stunning projects I’ve seen for a long time - the Image Fulgerator. He describes as as follows:

“The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.
In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it.”

See the Image Fulgerator, and very irritated people in action:

via rrrr at vvvv

Arist: Erik Nordenankar
Title: Self Portrait
Technique: GPS-Tracking
Dimensions: 40.076.592m x 40.009.153m

The node08 timetable is out now, and sounds amazing: advanced shader programming, virtual architecture, code your own nodes and more nerdy workshops will be offered. Plus lectures by Casey Reas, Paul Prudence, the VVVV group of course, and many more.
I’m going to give a beginners workshop, together with Katharina Mayrhofer. Workshop language will be English - Austrian or Bavarian just on demand ;)
Tickets avaliable soon, stay tuned.

Have a look at the full timetable here.

or: Ben van Berkel meets meso. Portikus/Frankfurt 2007.

ampop during the setup

In the last month I was part of a really nice project here in Frankfurt. Let’s start with some official words:
“Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence is a combined art and architectural exhibition wherein the different parts in the exhibition are synthesised into a complete whole. The exhibition stages a theatre or space of communication: communication between the visitors and the exhibited works, between the virtual and the real, between the different visitors in the gallery and between the different parts in the exhibition. Throughout its period, the architectural installation will serve as a hub for various events including lectures, art performances, and hosted talks with invited guests, DJ-sessions that are to be broadcast and more.”

Our part was developing a solution for projecting on the piece of architecture, and developing and implementing the interaction. We created a vvvv application which enables us to use the 3dimensional surface for our projections in a very comfortable way, and allows to using more than typical 2d content but also things like volumetric textures and virtual lights. We called it “a case study in augmented architecture”. It is an attempt to create a reactive surface of extraordinary spatial complexity.
The interaction works over the internet - you can try it here (only when the exhibition is opened).
The exhibition ends on January 13th.

Some of my photos made during the setup (that’s why the projections are not fitting perfectly!):

official post at meso.net / official site Portikus / review art-magazin (german) / review transform-magazine (click “interior”)

I just came back from my rainy Sunday museum visit, today I chose the Schirn Kunsthalle again.
“In general we presume that artists make art, but what happens when machines produce art?”, is the question the current exhibition deals with. The answer is of course multi-layered, but in many cases it could be: beauty.

Most impressive digital work is by the Austrian artist Lia: I said if. It’s a quite complex application which allows you to generate own compositions like the one shown above. The best thing is: you can do it online as well!
One of many mentionable machine works is Roxy Paine’s “Scumak No. 2″, which produces random sculptures with melted plastic. Some pics are avaliable at my flickr account. It is by the way controlled by max msp.

It’s definitely worth a visit, and a very good choice if you think about going to a museum with children! The various interaction possibilities led to a lot of amused families around.

As promised, meso relaunched the website: meso - digital interiors
A lot of great humour in the details - as actually expected from people naming nodes after Taxi Driver actors!

It’s always fascinating if a new technology is functioning highly intuitive, that also babies are able to use it. I actually avoided blogging about the iPhone, but watching this 2 year old girl navigating through the interface is really interesting for interaction creators:
Could be a very good viral ad as well, but nevertheless, it simply works.

Oh, it’s set as private now. What you can’t see right now is this 2 year old girl navigating through the menu. She perfectly understands the back button and features such as sliding through photos. She also is able to navigate to the music player when she’s told to do.

reminds me of: 22 month old Wii gamer

Back from a way too short stay in Barcelona, I’m still filled with energy from this lovely city, and especially from the Sonar2007 - the exhibition there was quite impressive!
The installation which surprised me most was “delicate boundaries” from Chris Sugrue (currently working at Eyebeam): A tft screen in a black room shows nothing except white grubs. When (almost) touching it, some grubs are slowly searching their way to the hand and start to detach themselves from the screen and continue walking on the hand (enabled by projections from above). A way to play with technology people really seemed to like a lot.

More short reviews and of course photos coming up in the next couple of days.

Another confirmation that future’s video editing will open up incredible solutions is presented by the University of Washington: Spacetime Fusion
The new idea is using photographs to enhance the depth of information of videos. This opens up some new possibilities, and seems to make some well known routines much easier:

via create digital motion

Dual photography? Not easy to understand…

“Let’s say there’s some hot naked chick standing by a window, except she’s facing away from it so all you can see is her back. She’s watching NBC.
Luckily, you’re the president of NBC. You make a phone call and tell the network to interrupt programming and instead send out a video that illuminates each pixel, one at a time, in order.
While this is going on, you record the wall behind her TV. Your crappy video camera has only a 1×1 pixel resolution, but this doesn’t matter. Do a bunch of math based on your recording, and you can reconstruct an image of what she looks like from the TV’s point of view. If her TV has a 1920×1080 resolution, you get a clear, 1920×1080, hi-res image.
So see? Without this technology, you wouldn’t get to see what her boobs look like.” (raldi at reddit)

The official video shows it up visually, especially at the end. Sounds amazing!