The theme is Generative Art and Design.

The first project that I will discuss is the Snow Angels to Angelic Forms project by Dominic Harris and Cinimod Studio

http://www.creativeapplications.net/featured/ice-angel-by-dominic-harris-from-snow-angels-to-angelic-forms/

Snow Angels to Angelic Forms

This project consists of an array of lights that trace the sweeped form of a users arms when they mimic the time old tradition of making a snow angel. It is an example of creating form from the union of many points in time and curiously is modeled after an anti-form as snow angels are normally defined to be a region in snow that is vacant of material. I like this project, because it is an example of art based on a fun activity and I like fun activities. I also like arrays of lights and forms defined by a movement in time.

I think that the choice to use colored circles to represent the intensities creates a very aesthetically pleasing effect. I am wondering why the work needs to be restricted to Angels, shouldn’t the user be able to draw anything potentially? I wonder if it would be possible to create a project that allows the user to view an anti-form traced in 3D space, kind of like the Rain Room project by Random International:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1380

abstrakt-abstrakt-zimoun

http://www.generatorx.no/20101218/abstrakt-abstrakt-zimoun/

The (de)generative sculpture.

This is a project that experiments  with an array of 1 dimensional wires in space. Each wire is manipulated by a motor and the individual motors are linked together due to deterministic behavior rules. The behavior rules evolve the wire colony over time such that their form of the wires displays rejection, collusion, and other spatially indicative behaviors.

This work reminds me of lots of work with Genetic algorithms. I like the idea that very simple forms can use deterministic behavior to represent behaviors that might have emotional significance. One problem I find with work of this nature is that due to the length of the array, I am not sure that there are sufficiently many patterns of behavior to justify the length of the piece.

This is the first time for me to be exposed into the term “generative art”, so I’m not sure if the following finds correspond to the theme properly. But at least, I’m sure they have some connections. :)

The first one I want to introduce is called “Collider”, a project that not completed yet. This is a project using physical modeling to interactively generate collisions and evolutions inside simulated collider system.

Here is the most recent progress:

This project appeared as incomplete at Eyeo 2 years ago, and here is the video at that time(generative but without interaction):

It is a really beautiful demo with interesting and creative physics modeling (maybe not completely truth-based). The author has made several similar but smaller projects to simulate possible problems may be met in this project, and he posted most of them in this article. These projects include collision detection, shockwave simulation, star system simulation and so on.

I always think physical modeling in art design is not an easy task, and it becomes even harder to make things not look weird — after all, real world is much more complex than a simulated system. This series of works did a great job.

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Synthesis is a series of workshops about generative systems for visual instruments.

The students in this workshop using Processing, MIDI controller and other hardware device to produce electronic music and using the parameters to generate virtual representation of the music work.

Most of the works are fairly creative and truly demonstrated the motion and progression of music, and I’m quite interested in the mapping from music to  visual art. I can see some projects using volume to map the motion amplitude, and some might just manually mapped some striking sounds to shake visually.