Moritz Waldemeyer was interviewed for this weeks BBC Culture Show, giving a tour of his work in his studio.

It was available on the UK only iPlayer, but you can now watch on youtube here.

More from Moritz on Pixelsumo
By Royal Appointment
OK Go Costumes
This happened #1

London based Troika has been commissioned by Artwise Curators to create a signature piece at the entrance of the new British Airways luxury lounges in Heathrow Terminal 5.

“In response, we created ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. We were fascinated by their materiality, by the way they physically flip from one side to the other. The sound they generate is also instantly reminiscent of travel, and we therefore decided to explore their aesthetic potential in ‘Cloud’.”

The project took 8 months in development, manufacturing and installation. Troika was responsible for the concept, design, executive design and engineering, project, production and installation management, and over-viewing all the operations from start to finish.

Manufactured by Mike Smith Studio
Controls by Pharos Architectural Controls
Installation by Alternative Access

It is really fantastic and I recommend you watch the two videos here www.troika.uk.com/cloudvideos.htm

Troika also reveal a lot about the development process behind the project. It really was a gigantic undertaking.

I’m very impressed!

[update 1]

“While Cloud was being assembled, we went on to create the animations. Since the shape is complex and the distribution of the dots is somehow atypical, we needed to create visualisation software to help us imagine what they would look like. The visualisation software has been programmed in-house in Processing, while the main control software was developed by the team at Pharos Controls”.

Troika have been kind enough to send me screenshots of this visualisation & allow me to publish them here and here

More posts on Troika:
Schizoporotica
Datasound
This happened #1

Usman Haque has been commissioned to create Evoke for the Illuminating York festival. You can see the work from on Fri 26 Oct until Sat 3 Nov, from 6-11pm. From the website…

“Evoke is a massive animated 80,000 lumen projection, which will light up the facade of York Minster. The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour.

The cathedral, built to link conceptually earth to the heavens, has been a site for the conveyance of words, dreams and aspirations for hundreds of years. The facade is designed to orient the gazes of passers-by upwards. As an attempt to continue this tradition, the patterns of Evoke are generated in realtime by the words, sounds, music and noises produced collectively by the public, determined by their particular voice characteristics. The colours will skim the surface of the Minster, pour round its features and crevasses, emerging finally near the top of the facade where they will sparkle high overhead.

People with voices of different frequencies, rhythms or cadences will be able to evoke quite different magical patterns upon the surface of the building - a staccato chirping will result in a completely different set of visual effects to a long howl for example, blending old and new to continue animating the facade of the Minster.”

Created using Processing.

I’ll update this post after the event once photos and video emerge of the final work.

As mentioned in a previous post, the documentation of my work at Moving Brands is now online.

An audio responsive installation for the launch of Muon, new speakers from Kef and Ross Lovegrove. Launched at the National Museum of Science and Technology (Leonardo da Vinci), during Salone del Mobile in Milan.

Created in Processing for a 10×5 metre LED floor. My role was in the creative programming of the project at Moving Brands, under the supervision of Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi) and creative direction by David Eveleigh-Evans.

The concept was to create a liquid experience to engage all the senses. Fluid forms would emanate from the position of each speaker, playing with movement and intensity of light in response to audio triggers. A monocromatic and minimal aesthetic compliments the form of the speaker design. During moments of impact during a piece of music, bright light and accents of colour would appear between the fluid forms. The volumetric light created a relationship between the visuals reflected in the curves of the speaker and the movement of shadows in the grand hall space.

Links: Full documentation, including videos and behind the scenes.

Futher documentation on the Moving Brands site & Toxi blog.

Flickr photos: toxi, pixelsumo, eveleighevans, faroekat

Most persistence of vision projects I have seen involve moving a strip of leds fast enough that our eye perceives it to be an image. Make magazine has covered many projects of this type.

Jens Wunderling, a student of the Digital Media Class at UDK Berlin, has created at second glance, an alternative approach to POV. Instead of moving the LEDs, Wunderling has them fixed in position, but plays with saccades (our eyes never look straight, but always make fast tiny movement around an area).

So if you happen to glance past the work, you may notice something unusual. On second glance, if you shake your head, you will be able to clearly see the symbol. Created as a “guerilla messaging device, made to place hidden critical messages within the abundant medial environment in the city”.

Developed using Arduino and Processing, the source code of which is available on his site, and 32 ultrabright LEDs.

Watch video
Development blog

More from Jens Wunderling
loopArena at Cybersonica, Building a multitouch, loopArena multitouch

If you are in Milan for the Salone del Mobile, be sure to put a visit to this on your schedule…

The launch of Muon, an incredible two-metre tall speaker system, in one of the most fascinating locations in Milan, the Sala del Cenacolo. This exhibition is the extraordinary result of the convergence of two masters. The Loudspeakers, made from super-formed aluminium, are remarkable reflective sound sculptures created by the advanced research centre of KEF, the British-based world leader in sound technology and designed by Ross Lovegrove, considered one of the most innovative designers of the 21st century.

I’ve been working with Moving Brands, who have been commissioned to create an architectural scale audio responsive experience for the launch. You really must see this in person if you can. More information on this when I return.

April 19th – 23rd
12.00 noon 9:00 pm
(Invitation only launch on 18th).

Address: Leonardo da Vinci, National Museum of Science and Technology, Sala del Cenacolo – second cloister, Via San Vittore 21 Milano (Area Magenta) Click here for map.

Press release (via Dezeen blog)

I rarely post any motion graphics work, but is so lovely I was too tempted.

Universal Everything have produced this viral ad for the launch of Audi TT in Australia. Their site says “We created a software-based realtime wind tunnel to generate the HD video, an interactive wind-tunnel is currently in development”. It was art directed by Matt Pyke at Universal Everything, who brought in Karsten Schmidt, aka Toxi, to program the visuals using Processing. In his Flickr comments, Karsten explains that the rendering process took 4 hours, and that a making of video is on the way. More on this soon.

Watch video

Flickr images

[update] Karsten has now released some interesting insights and a behind the scenes video into the process, check here.

Between Blinks & Buttons are two projects about the camera as a networked object. Through making their photos public on the internet, individuals create traces of themselves. In addition to their value as a memory, each image contains a multitude of information about the context of its creation. Cameras become context-recorders which create references that go well beyond taking a photo.

Through this metainformation, every image is linked to the precise moment in time when it was taken, making it possible to see what happened simultaneously in the world at that instant. This work tries to focus the user’s imagination on that other, to create narratives that run between one’s own memory and a stranger’s moment which happened to coincide in time.

Blinks is a table-top interactive, where projected photos are scattered on the surface. Placing a glass prism over a photo causes it to refract the light to the sides of the table. The really clever part, is that this light contains projections of other photos taken at exactly the same moment in other locations (the software searches Flickr using the api). The user can browse photos through fragments of time, and also upload their own photos via Bluetooth.

Watch video.

Buttons is camera that takes other peoples photos. Buttons has no optical input, by pressing the button you remember your moment, but it also retrieves the stored moment of others from the internet on Flickr. You then wait for a Flickr user to upload a photo taken at the same time as your moment. Created using a mobile phone, Mobile Processing and custom PHP code. Watch video. Great stuff.

Daniel Shiffman has been hacking a Color Kinetics LED tile and documenting the process.

By packet sniffing the data from Color Kinetics software to the tile enabled Daniel to figure out how it worked. He has now created a Processing library that reads the pixels of the display window, converts them to a 12×12 matrix, and writes them out as UDP packets to the data/power supply for the LEDs.

I imagine that the Color Kinetics software and hardware is closed source, so I hope that if they see this work they will encourage such use of their products.

Video 1, Video 2, Video 3 (requires latest Quicktime player). Photos on Flickr.

Related posts: Lightspace Corporation, DIY disco dancefloor, Kabarets Prophecy.

Ok my last multi-touch post for a while. Jens Wunderling, a student of digital media class UDK Berlin, had also been creating a multi-touch surface for a community noticeboard project.

Jens began his project quite some time ago, but has had to put it on hold to complete other university work. The whole process has been documented on his blog, from buying the right cameras, hooking up the infrared LEDs and vision tracking software.

Whilst there are no examples of interaction techniques, the technology works and Jens has provided all Processing source code, Eyesweb and VVVV patches. If anyone else out there is working on multi-touch interaction, let me know.