Group Meeting References...

Just a couple of references suggested to me from the previous group meeting, some relevant projects here....

Life Writer is an art installation created by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau.

The project is an interactive art installation which consists of an old fashion type writer table and chair and a paper reel attached to the type writer which acts as a projection screen. Users of the installation type in the conventional way on the type writer and the output on the paper projector is a collection of virtual insects that behave and move depending on the inputted text from the user. The letters and words inputted act as a genetic code for the insects.

The insects will eat letters to stay alive and also they reproduce. Their movement speed is also determined by the input text. The user can also interact with the outputted insects by altering the typewriters paper scroll. Below are a few pics and Clip of the Life Writer.

The second reference is entitled "Biomorphic Type" and is a project that uses human responses such including heartrate, breathing, viscosity of the eye, brain activity and muscle activity to enable a typographic that responds to these senses and manipulates the appearance of the type when a user is inputting text whilst connected to the sensory equipment.

There isn't a massive amount of web coverage for this project but some info can be found here:

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~gromala/art.htm#excretia

Below is an example of Biomorphic Type in action.

Group Meeting (1)

Just to update we had our first group meeting today with Gianni and shared current project progress and ideas with each other. Some great ideas shared and likewise useful feedback for additions and changes to current ideas.

Suggestions made to me about my current idea involving using twitter as a form of generative art production tool were a number of ideas that could be used to determine words, phrases etc from twitter to make an art project from. Suggestions such as using the graphic visualisation tool Processing to pull in twitter feeds that could in turn be visualised randomly in one manner or another. Another was to look at the length of words being used rather than specific words or letters as a process of deciding how art forms will be made.

A range of references were suggested also that could be useful in the production and progression of ideas and development of my project. I will post those in a separate post....

Project Idea Update

After I met with Gianni and had time to look over some of the references and advice he had given me, I decided that creating a web based authoring tool and social network for the collaboration of art was going to be a tall order.

I had the idea of still using a social network based website that would allow users to interact and collaborate but I needed to refine the process of production and the reasoning behind it.

The idea is to create a social network based website that uses twitter feeds or similar to create autonomous art. Basically it would work in the sense that users would be able to log into my website using their existing twitter details and from within the website be able to 'tweet' and write updates, but instead of posting them in the normal sense, art would be created from the combination of words or letters that the user types and submits. The art would be created using software called 'Quartz Composer' by Apple. This software allows the creation of animations, graphics etc that can respond to real time data such as audio feeds, xml feeds etc. It is used in the creation of iTunes Visualisers and screensavers.

This process of production would be autonomous in the sense that peoples written tweets would determine the outcome of the art being displayed, but could potentially effect the process in which users tweet and may even write tweets to gain a specific outcome.

Suggested References

During the meeting with Gianni he suggested I looked at a selection of references related to my area of exploration. These included a range of art project websites to specific projects and installations.

The first reference suggested was a website http://www.rhizome.org/ this site contains a vast amount of collaborative projects and art projects that could possibly link to my project idea.

Secondly he suggested checking out former iDat student Adrian Wards Auto Illustrator. A graphic tool application that according to the website signwave:

Auto-Illustrator is an experimental, semi-autonomous, generative software artwork and a fully functional vector graphic design application to sit alongside your existing professional graphic design utilities.

Use it to explore a wide range of generative and procedural techniques in the production of your own graphic designs. Discover how easy it is to produce complex designs in an exciting and challenging environment that questions how contemporary software should behave.

This project shows relevance in the area of my project due to its process of outcome being generative and undetermined. This follows on from what Gianni suggested in the meeting to explore, the area of process and whether I want the outcome of my project to be random or be pre-determined.

The final reference is a project entitled Poetic Generator. http://www.poietic-generator.net/ The idea is a collaborative web based project in which users will be allocated a slot in which they provide art work upon a 20 x 20 pixel window to be randomly added to a number of other users to create an autonomous collaborative art work.

Meeting with Gianni (1)

So after submitting my project proposal I had my first meeting with Gianni. We spoke about what I was wanting to achieve from my project and we both decided that what my initial proposal could be too ambitious in terms of the web based authoring tool for the creation of art. However Gianni went on give me helpful advice in terms of the process of creation. He suggested I think about the process of the project and whether I wanted the creation process to be

1. Random Outcome that allows the user the freedom to create without boundaries
2. Pre-determined outcome that restricts the user to follow rules in order to create a specific outcome.

As well as this Gianni suggested I studied a number of key references as well as the idea of Collaborative Practice and Authorship essentially the key context for the project.

From this session I will go on to investigate alternative more realistic methods of producing user generative and collaborative content for the project.