Archives for the Month of June, 2010

Tohu777 – Structure Synth Architectonics

Tohu777 - Structure Synth ArchitectonicsCompositions – Tohu777

The generative art application Structure Synth, developed by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen, was mentioned at Dataisanture back in 2008. Complex iterative structures can be generated using highly condensed code syntax. There’s been a ongoing trend, using the software, to export the structures and render them in Sunflow giving them architectural qualities.

Tohu777’s Flickr series explores Structure Synth’s recursive grammar syntax to create compositions that resemble building facades, complex interiors and welded superstructures. There are also renders of complete building complexes utilising random seeds to generate variations on a theme. Tohu777’s use of random variables within the program is particularly well executed. It allows the generation of complex life-like, and believable, structures that appear to have considered and well thought-out spatial relationships between the many component elements.

The Lost Kingdoms and Scripts of the Lichens

The lost languages and scripts of the LichensLeconara pacifica/Amandinea punctata – Lynette Schimming

‘The cartographers guilds struck a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that vast map was useless…In the deserts of the west, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars, in all the land there is no other relic of the disciplines of geography’.

Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley)

Perhaps part of this map can still be found, or at least relics of it, in the territorial patchwork, created by the different colours and textures of neighbouring lichen colonies. Rhizocarpon Geographicum, or Map Lichen gives a classic appearance of a map or a patchwork field. The adjacent patches are separated and bordered by a black line of spores, and resemble parched desert lands, small groups of islands or even ancient cartography.

The lost languages and scripts of the LichensDetail from Ernst Heackles plate of Lichens from Artforms in Nature

These ultra-survivalist symbionts (they can survive after being exposed to deep space) also tease our pattern recognition capabilities in other curious ways. The so called Graphis Scripta generates small curved lines and glyph-like marks that resembles Asemic Writing. Depending on the species, the lirellae (spore groups) may be linear, branched, star-shaped, or labyrinth-like. The resulting ‘script’ might appear cypher text, and has been used as an aid to scrying. You can view a ‘lichen oracle table’ here, and as with all many kinds of divination techniques using cypher scripts, the bilateral symmetry on some of the glyphs insinuates the appearance of personages or animal figures.

Aside from Graphis Scripta and Rhizocarpon Geographicum there are many other interesting patterns and forms to found in other species of lichen. A small personally curated gallery can be found here and Ernst Haeckles plate of Lichens from Artforms in Nature can be found here.

Telcosystems – 12_Series

Telcosystems - 12_Series
Telcosystems – 12_Series

Telcosystems, formed of a trio of artists based in Holland, have built up a large body of work dealing with digital audiovisual investigations particularly programmatic imaging and spatial sound. Their latest work 12_Series consist of an horizon of flickering monitors, each containing grid-noise patterns with 12 speakers augmenting the changing screen configurations with spatial sound abstractions. Alluding to visualised Morse code, hermetic text and non standard music notation the screen content shifts from one state to another. The screens, appearing to be in mutual communication with one another, switch on and off, and the patterns constantly change their depth of field.

‘Telcosystems use evolutionary models in their algorithms for generating their audiovisual compositions. The complexity in their work emerges out of variation and mutation of rudimentary patterns. Telcosystems conducted research into the experience of spatiality, and place their works between installation, film and sound’

The net result of 12_Series, is a kind of visualised computer intelligence or ‘thinking’ process, and an aesthetics of emergent behaviour. But the intelligence is not complete, its somehow distracted, insinuated by the faltering mechanism of consciousness, the sudden ‘shut-downs’ of individual screens, and then a reconfiguration of its collective memory upon awakening.

The group has published a companion book to the piece, including a DVD and some excellent articles by Arie Altena, Joost Rekveld and Murray Horne.