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Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for iPad

I’d love the potential portability that the iPad brings. I carry a sketchbook and a MacBook Pro, which is more of a brick might I add. And no I don’t have an iPhone Personally I’d like something I can use that’s small, easy to transport and that I can also blog with, which someone did – see Mashable article.

NOTE: Sorry to my tutors: you’ll be receiving a new statement of intent this week. Late, completely revised but achievable.

I haven’t actually read the book Did You Spot The Gorilla by Richard Wiseman yet but I have been intrigued by the video (see this Telegraph article for an explanation). It’s all about discovering those hidden opportunities.

Exactly the same psychological mechanisms that cause people to miss the gorilla also make them miss unexpected but vitally important opportunities in their professional and personal lives.

Anyway, back to my morning. My personal life can be complicated and busy so I’m trying to keep things straightforward these days. Funnily enough a few months ago, ago I was writing a text to a friend asking for some copy for an exhibition we were implementing, I’d wrtitten:

“Keep it short, sweet and simple…just like me ”. I rather liked the sound of this! A great philosophy to follow when I can sometimes over complicate things by trying too hard. In fact it’s my new mantra ‘Keep it Short Sweet and Simple’. I registered the website shortsweetsimple.co.uk and until now it’s sat unused.

So coming full circle and back to the Network Practices module I’ve decided to build upon my existing network of friends, colleagues, artists and social media contacts. I must admit, I also have a slight obsession for social media (which is why it’s so strange I’ve found it difficult to find my inspiration). With Twittering (I have 3 accounts so far and growing), blogging (I write for 4 of them), digging, stumbling, tumbling and flickring. My favourite Twitter feed is currently Mashable – the social media guide.

Using the top #trends found @Twitter I’m going to post a daily theme onto the shortsweetsimple.co.uk website/blog and invite people to create a very short sweet and simple piece of artwork to be uploaded. It could be a drawing, photo, poem, photoshop collage, anything. As long as people respond quickly and simply.

I’m feeling pretty enthused about this gorilla. I hope my tutors feel the same….

Additionally based on my interests in Interaction Design and the User Experience, I have been exploring the Gestalt theories and my research led me to the project ‘Identitat: The Gestalt of Digital Identity’ the bachelor thesis of Jonas Loh and Steffen Fiedler.

“Today almost everybody has at least one digital representation on one of the numerous social communities, like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. We create these profiles to express ourselves, find friendship, connection and gain reputation…We don’t imagine how she or he looks like, but think of specific personal data (images, videos, texts) which we associate with that person instead. ”

In Identitat, sculptures have been produced to express how an analogue snapshot of complex digital identities can be presented. Consumerist (amazon), communication behavior (twitter), interests (delicious) and listening habits (last.fm) were saved in a custom database of eight people in order to produce the data for these sculptures.

Following on from the idea of presenting a digital identity or in the case of this project, digital DNA in an analogous format, my idea would be to represent the data collected in this project and output the visualization as an image suitable for printing onto T-shirts, canvas etc. Thus creating a very unique portrait of a person’s digital life.

Technical Authorship
Using generative code to visualize data sets I plan to experiment using Processing or possibly NodeBox to illustrate peoples responses to a simple questionnaire about their online habits as well as their real-time environment eg the time of day, their location. The image produced would therefore be different everyday.

Resulting images can be printed or saved to be used on T-Shirts, canvas or simply as a profile picture on Facebook or Twitter. I would also like to document the various images via Flickr and I also plan to use networks such as Twitter, Facebook and a blog to promote this project.

Keeping to a questionnaire format and visualising the data keeps the project simple yet effective, with some interesting images, I hope!

Other sites of inspiration:

Fluid Forms, Your Unique Designs – Be creative and help a fluid form to embody and reflect your personality, memories or dreams. Through the emotional involvement you can bring to fluid forms, you can also become the creator of emotionally engaging, personalized and truly unique gifts.

News Knitter – a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data.

Urbansphere Wearables - aims to reflect the mood of the city by utilizing the data streams of social networks as a source of fashion design. As every online inhabitant of the city becomes a part of this production, the project brings online data to the streets, creating an ongoing interaction between the real and the virtual existence of the urban life.

Social Bits – Research on artistic output of social interactions.

ToDo, Interaction Designers – some fantastic projects using generative code for product design “we focus on dialogue, exchange and community through the integration of ideas, interactivity and technology”

Virtual Revolution – Over the last 20 years the web has changed the world, but what, if anything, has it done to us? Take part in a unique experiment to discover the impact the web is having on our brains, and discover which species of web animal you are.

Zygote Interactive Ball with the world for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Closing Ceremony. – this is fresh and unedited footage of the Vancouver 2010 closing ceremony. You can see more like this at Tangible Interaction who create “full-on interactive experiences”.

Our Zygote Interactive Balls at the Olympics from Alex Beim on Vimeo.

Also take a look at ‘Digital Graffiti at the Olympic Village’. I’ve been so excited by this I’ve even created a whole new category to this blog ‘Interactive Artwork’.

Digital Graffiti at the Olympic Village from Alex Beim on Vimeo.

For more on my groups progress in this module check out our ‘Drop Dock Go’ blog.

Frosti from zenbullets on Vimeo.

I’ve just discovered this gorgeous generative art piece ‘Frosti: Deterministic Generative Art’ (music from Bjork) from Zen Bullets aka Matt Pearson, based right here in Brighton. Check out his blog and other sites including 100 abandoned artworks, featuring some processing experiments with source code included. There’s also some articles worth reading too. Very inspiring stuff! But I was wondering when this guy sleeps?

I found this along with some other very useful sites/content from the Brighton New Media site – a resource aimed at people working within Brighton’s new media industry. You can sign up to their email list (which has at times some very random threads but some relevant stuff too!)

Using this blog post, I’ve organised these findings into relevant section to try and organise my thoughts and inspirations on Social Networking in an attempt to solidify my research into a workable idea. Links marked with the * I found to be particularly inspiring for the forthcoming projects.

To communicate the concept, public engagement (collaboration/interactivity), data visualisation and a strong aesthetic using the exploration of colour/colour psychology have become strong themes throughout research. In order to deliver the concept augmented reality, using webcams and mobile devices to interact with the environment both on and offline are fascinating concepts that would definitely warrant further investigation for the Creative Flows project.

Collaboration

Google Chrome Logo

Google Chrome Project - Using people in the real word to submit their Google Chrome Icons to the Google Chrome Project. I like the idea of mixing real with online projects.

Creative Commons License – share, remix, reuse – legally

Wiki – “is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems” Source Wikipedia

Google Wiki is also simple but useful. It’s a browser sidebar that enables you to contribute and read helpful information alongside any web page.

Kollabor8 – (actual website unavailable) is a virtual gallery displaying individual sequences of digital photo-montage, an ever-evolving collaborative work of art. Exploring the transitory nature of internet content and the capacity for spontaneous creative synergy between unassociated artists, the images are displayed sequentially like threads in a forum, automatically archived and viewable as part of the process.

Swarmfest Collaborative Sketch – another collaborative visual canvas for online, distributed design: each week a popular search term is chosen to become the sketch subject. Collaborators can then vote on the opacity of the line submitted by other users.

*Wallright – is a live public painting community platform, that allows several people from around the globe to draw on a physical wall at the same time.

Digital Technology & Environment

Image by Panda Yogourt

Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design – a Wired.co.uk article discussing the effect of digital technologies on the urban environment. I’m specifically interested in using mobile technology in the real world environment and its effect.

The digital revolution did not end up killing our cities, but neither did it leave them unaffected. A layer of networked digital elements has blanketed our environment, blending bits and atoms together in a seamless way. Sensors, cameras and microcontrollers are used ever more extensively to manage city infrastructure, optimise transportation, monitor the environment and run security applications.

*Visualizing Memory in Architecture – “While standing between the two screens, viewers will see themselves along with visual memories of that place. Continuously washing over one another in painterly portraits of individuals and the surrounding environment, these images relate past and present in uncanny ways, creating a non-linear impression of history.”

Augmented Reality

James Aliban has fantastic examples of augmented reality, as well as processing and generative art on his blog. Also check out his Augmatic website for more of his work.

*Motion Trails v01 is particularly inspiring using web cams and Processing.

Motion trails v01 from James Alliban on Vimeo.

BMW – just have a go!

Data Collection

Google Trends – compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time.

Data Visualisation

Hint FM -

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are research scientists in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the “history flow” project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of visualization as a mass medium and the social forms of data analysis it enables.

I particularly like Luscious which is a celebration of colour.

It’s Been Real WWWords Project – Stefanie Posavec explores methods of visually representing text and visualises the differences in writing styles of different authors.

Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz – Social media monitoring and analytics company Viralheat put together this graphic that shows the initial positive response to Google Buzz on Twitter, followed by shifts in opinion based on events in the developing privacy story.

ColorSpinner – ColorSpinner is a web interface to a database of over 3000 words and their associated colors and shades using the Prism algorithm.

The colors algorithm (workname Prism) matches a color palette to any given subject. It retrieves colors for apple (which would result in soft greens, yellows and reds) with the same ease as retrieving colors for jealousy (which would result in bright yellows and sickly greens).

Generative & Interactive Art – 2D & 3D

*Processing - a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts.

Alchemy – a way to explore and experiment with alternative ways of drawing

NodeBox – allows you to create visual output with programming code. The application targets an audience of designers, with an easy set of state commands that is both intuitive and creative.
And Finally…

Another concept I’ve come across is geo-networking. An exciting concept in social networking using digital technology and social media based on real-world patterns to “unleash your digital footstream”. Check out Wrrrl to find out more.

Veronika Schmidt

Following on from various experiments in Flash and Processing to produce some generative art, I’ve discovered another OpenSource program NodeBox.

NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie.

So far, I’ve found the programming language very straight forward. Where Processing uses Java, NodeBox is based on Python. It is apparently described as a ’state machine’ which is supposed to be easier to understand by people with no or limited programming knowledge. For example, once rotate(45) is called, all subsequent shapes, paths, text and images are rotated 45 degrees. Importantly, it’s working for me!

Neon Golden

NodeBox is more limited than Processing which has greater 3D and interactive capabilities but is still capable of visualising data and animation. Aimed essentially at designers, it offers a more intuitive and creative programming environment resulting in some stunning visuals. You can even import your Illustrator vector files and manipulate each curve individually using the NodeBox SVG library. Notably NodeBox is a good environment to learn about the structure of progarmming languages, is free and there are many examples and tutorials to get you started by going to the NodeBox website. (NB to PC users – currently NodeBox is only available on the Mac.)

Color Spinner

Digi Fonts