Turbulence Commission: Panemoticon by Ali Miharbi and John Priestley [Needs Firefox (16 or later recommended), headphones/speakers, mouse/trackpad]:

We know how you feel. Panemoticon observes your behavior, makes a few inferences about your emotional state, and plays music to match your mood. Your mouse/trackpad use says a lot about your energy level, confidence, and perceived control over your environment. Panemoticon tracks and analyzes these data to create an image of your mood, and then generates music, adjusting properties such as tonality (major/minor), harmonic & rhythmic complexity, tempo, timbre, and proximity. Collective mood is calculated for all Panemoticon users on a given site. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: WoodEar by Peter Traub [Needs download, and Speakers/Headphones]:

Bringing the body of the tree to the network is a natural fit — a tree is a network too: roots sensing and absorbing nutrients, leaves sensing and photosynthesizing sunlight, and phloem and xylem running throughout to carry nutrients across the structure. WoodEar attempts to merge the dynamic qualities of this biological network with the digital network. A series of sensors attached to the tree stream data on the state of its environment — light, temperature, air pressure, and wind. This live data is merged with photos and recordings of the tree’s immediate surroundings into a generative application/installation. By downloading and running the application, anyone can access the live environmental experiences of the tree — one that may be very distant from them, but that still shares the same air, sun, earth, and sky. Continue reading

Please join us for drinks to celebrate the launch of A Collective Memory of Childhood by Michael Szpakowski :: July 28, 2012; 2:00 - 5:00 pm :: Furtherfield Gallery & Social Space, McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ.

Artist and composer Michael Szpakowski has worked with local children and their families to create a generative sound sculpture that invokes the collective memory of childhood, drawing on the memories of Haringey residents from all over the world. Continue reading

“Talking in string, by Chiara Passa, is a generative video installation inspired by the ‘Rotor’, famous Luna Park rotating carousel. Talking in string develops into a cylindrical space around the audience that create the installation itself in real time by sending text messages via Twitter. Also the not present public on site can participate as well by sending messages by their remote Internet locations. The sentences run a recording system are displayed immediately. The texts speedily rotate around the space, changing direction, color, font, and some of them ramble in absence of gravity. The generated phrases, dissolving and wrapping themselves around disoriented people who are watching as texts become ’strings’, no longer readable. These ‘strings’ slowly disappear as light’s bundles surrounding the body of the spectators like colored trails left by comets or as if we were inside of Newton’s disk. Video preview. Images.”

[Image from SBArt4 as Automatic Art and Live Performance Tool] Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Generative & Algorithmic Art, Lanfranco Aceti, Meredith Hoy, and Kris Paulsen (eds) :: Call for Proposals — Deadline: September 15, 2012.

In his essay What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory, Philip Galanter provocatively suggests that “generative art may be as old as art itself.” [1] The programmatic, mathematical patterns that appear in Islamic tile work, Tibetan mandalas, and textiles from around the globe (and particularly from Jacquard’s early 19th century punch card loom) all exhibit the qualities of generative art: they are produced by preset instructions or procedural rules that dictate the forms and structures they might take. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Space Video by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett, with sound by Thomas Aston [Needs Speakers/Headphones]:

Space Video addresses ideas of exploration in relation to inner and outer space. Having noticed that there are shared aesthetic qualities of video imagery that accompany disparate cultural and scientific phenomena including guided meditation, hypnosis, undersea and space exploration by NASA, motivational speaking, powerpoint backgrounds, science fiction, psychedelic drug culture, electronic music, popular spirituality, and computer effects, we have built a generative system that mixes an original non-linear narrative with YouTube videos on these subjects as they are uploaded in real time. These videos often attempt to portray what are ultimately non-visual spaces, producing images that are at once placeholders, images of the transcendental, trippy intergalactic stereotypes, and fields for persuasion. Continue reading

[Earth_To_Disk (aka Flat Earth Society), 2008-2011] Art of Failure :: until March 16, 2012 :: Devotion Gallery, 54 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, NY. Continue reading

R. Luke DuBois describes Hard Data, “a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events.”

RiTa† is an easy-to-use natural language library that provides simple tools for experimenting with generative literature. The philosophy behind the API is to be as simple and intuitive as possible, while still providing adequate flexibility for more advanced users. The download comes in two flavors: 1) the ‘core’ package, containing the jar files and documentation, and 2) the ‘TTS’ package that adds text-to-speech support. Additionally, statistical models for tagging, chunking, and parsing are available for more advanced users (see ‘Stat-Models’). RiTa optionally integrates with Processing and is both free and open-source. Continue reading

Radius Episode 16: My Hard Drive Is Experiencing Some Strange Noises (33:35) — by Gregory Chatonsky — is the sound of a defective hard drive disk picked up by a contact microphone. The acoustic wave is instantly processed by software that repeats and amplifies the sounds creating a resounding echo. It will be transmitted for three consecutive days: November 17, 18, and 19 and one single day on November 30 at 3:00 pm CST.

Gregory Chatonsky (b. Paris, living in Montreal and Paris) holds a multimedia advanced degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a Masters in philosophy from the Sorbonne. Continue reading