Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

This is the same script as my last video. Each particle on the sphere has a curve drawn to all nearby particles with an extra point in the middle scaled toward the center. This creates a spike at each point. Again the height is determined by the density of particles in a particular area on the sphere. The script uses the OpenGL 3d environment and the video library to capture the rendering. The OpenGL library has some issues working with the video library but renders many layers of transparent objects better.

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This Processing script generates a randomized particle system over a sphere. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days and, although the script has gotten a little messy, I’ve come up with a few interesting things. Each particle is generated from two random rotations and a set radius and contains a second point based on another radius. Initially I was using these points to create curves radiating from each particle, but got a little distracted. In this video the second radius of each point is dynamically calculated based on the density of particles it’s proximity. Lines are drawn between nearby points to create the web effect.

A few snapshots of my dog and some new friends playing by the river. There are a few more on my flickr.

If you are interested in geometric fractals, Context Free Art is a very interesting program it play with. The interface consists of a code area on the right, and a rendering area on the left. The very simple script only contains a few commands, but through recursion can create fantastic fractals.

The script allows you to draw squares, triangles, and circles, and to transform them in a few different ways and color them. You can create custom rules which transform whichever rule they contain. By creating recursive functions like this just about any geometric fractal can be created. Although the program is very limited, I find it very interesting how much can be created only with transformations of three basic shapes. The program also has the ability to export both raster (pixel based) and vector images, which makes it a useful tool for creating shapes and textures, and renders the script live. If you would like to go further with fractal generation, I recommend Processing, but Context Free Art is so simple to learn it’s a fun tool to play around with.

The next step in my Wikipedia project is to create a static map of the entire site (more than 2.5 million pages). I’m not entirely sure how large the image will be, but judging by small scale renders the vector file should be no more than a two or three hundred megabytes. This is huge, but to be honest not as large as I expected. I’m building a new script which will not render any of the pages on the screen and will run autonomously, first getting the data, then organizing it, modifying placement to prevent overlapping text, and finally exporting a PDF file. Hopefully I can build the script to sacrifice time for a lack of power so I can use computers currently available to me.

Dan Shiffman is an incredible programmer, artist, and teacher. He is one of the developers behind Processing and has also build a few useful libraries including the Most Pixels Ever library which allows a Processing application to run on multiple screens. His SMS library allows Processing to gather data from an Apple Macbook’s sudden motion sensor. This little gyroscope is normally used to stop the hard drive if the computer is dropped, but it could be re-purposed for just about anything.

I owe a lot to Dan as his tutorials and example scripts have been a huge help to me as I’ve been learning Processing. If you’re new to the language I highly recommend all the resources he has on his site. He also has a great book on learning processing and plenty of online examples to go with it.

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is a free, collaborative, online encyclopedia. Anyone can edit any article, or add new articles. This might not sound like a great idea, but things are monitored and uncited facts are removed and dubious articles are clearly marked for revision. The system allows for the encyclopedia to grow constantly and to reflect not just information typically included in an encyclopedia, on historical and scholarly subjects. Wikipedia offers information on the most current topics in art, science, music, geography, news, politics, and anything else I’ve ever searched for. It’s easy to attack the site for being unreliable, but it is well monitored and undeniable useful.

As an artist, I find Wikipedia a fantastic subject to work with. I appreciate the site for what it is and working with it I have an excuse to peruse all sorts of information. When working with network visualization Wikipedia is very easy to glean data from. All pages are standardized and even include convenient HTML comments marking off sections of each page. Although this also makes it a very poor analog for the world wide web, which is far from standardized, it is a great starting place and simplifies a lot of tasks. In addition, since the entire site is under an open content license the data is free to use.

My most recent project WikiWeb is a live, interactive, visualization of the site. Another limb of this project will hopefully lead to a static map of the whole site. A few other small visualizations are on their way as well.

Rhizome.org is an online extension of The New Museum in New York. The museum focuses on new media including a variety of digital and interactive arts. Rhizome includes a massive collection of New Media Works from around the world. In addition they have a blog of new works and events. Rhizome provides a much needed place where new media art of any form can be exhibited in a professional setting and utilizes the format familiar to the artists they feature, as opposed to most museums, which are a few decades behind and have no idea or ability to feature works in new, developing media.

Recently WikiWeb was added to their ArtBase. Their online collection of works is worth taking a look at. It contains many interesting interactive works and features many prominent artists.