Archives for the Month of July, 2012

Hypogean Wildstyle: Dominik Strzelec’s Byzantine Geology

saturation_speculative_appsSaturation [speculative apps 01] – Dominik Strzelec

Dominik Strzelec uses multiple generative processes to create cut-through organic shapes, implying morphological growth and simultaneously, to use his own term, Byzantine geology. Often utilising Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction simulation coefficients to generate volumetric forms, his works such as Saturation [Speculative Apps 01] also benefit from sets of colour palettes that wouldn’t seem out of place in a work of early 80’s NYC Wild-style graffiti.

saturation_speculative_appsSaturation [speculative apps 01] – Dominik Strzelec

By adding ‘floor-slabs’ to the visualisations we are invited to view these forms as speculative architecture – interconnected oscillation chambers and synthetic hypogean systems. His Byzantine Geology sketches proposition ‘architecture being brought back to it’s geological roots. Where structures are made for peer-troglodytes appreciating the Byzantine beauty of digital sedimentation’.

Am Ostbahnhof Berlin HackerspaceAm Ostbahnhof Berlin Hackerspace – Dominik Strzelec

Related posts:

Banded Agates, Sonic Hydrodynamics & the BZ Reaction
Breed – Driessens & Verstappen: Evolutional Diffusion Lattices
The MandelBulb – Daniel White

Lawrence Halprin’s Motations & Ecoscores

Lovejoy Fountain Park – Lawrence HalprinLovejoy Fountain Park – Lawrence Halprin

Interdisciplinary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin used the term Ecoscore to describe a score indicated by features in the natural environment – the path of a river, for example, as it carves through a landscape to create a succession of temporal signifyers. The Ecoscore was a precursor to Halprin’s Motations [movement notations] – diagrammatic representations of movements through time and space using the traditional musical score as a framework.

Ira Keller FountainIra Keller Fountain – Photo: Phil Gilston

Halprin’s open-ended approach using a personalised ideographic system allowed him to design a range of scores to choreograph the movement of elements in urban parks, plazas and cultural centres. The process he used allowed him to create designs for some of the most daring, exploratory, and potentially dangerous (and therefore exciting) public spaces in existence. His Motations were guides for the intended motion of people through space as well as scores for actual moving parts of the architecture itself – such as water in fountains. Essentially Halprin ‘construed landscape architecture as a form of narrative

Motation Drawing – Lawrence HalprinMotation Drawing – Lawrence Halprin

Seminary South Park Fountain ScoreScore for the choreography of water flow in a fountain by Richard Halprin designed for Seminary South Park

‘I saw scores as a way of describing all such processes in all the arts, of marking process visible and thereby designing with process through scores. I saw scores also as a way of communicating these processes over time and space to other people in other places at other moments and as a vehicle to allow many people into the act of creation together, allowing for participation, feedback and communication’ – from The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment.

Freeway Park Seattle – Lawrence HalprinFreeway Park, Seattle – Lawrence Halprin

Halprin’s designs offer an alternative to the current era of dreary passive open spaces where leveled patches of well trimmed grass prevail. Spaces such as The Ira Keller Fountain in Portland offer infinite participatory possibilities of small-scale psychogeographic choreography.

Ira Keller FountainIra Keller Fountain – Photo: Phil Gilston

Ira Keller FountainIra Keller Fountain – Photo: Phil Gilston

‘The space is choreographed for movement with nodes for quiet and contemplation, action and inaction, hard and soft, yin and yang. The second basic approach was to bring into the heart of downtown activities which related in a very real way to the environment of the Portland area – the Columbia River, the Cascade mountains, the streams, rivers and mountain meadows. These symbolic elements are very much a part of Portlanders’ psyche…. Finally these places were for the first time designed to be used to be participatory – NOT just to look at – they say COME IN, not stay off….Visually the Ira Keller Fountain suggests a remembered, stylized, simplified, sense-memory of some wilderness waterfall canyon experience you never quite had.’ – Walt Lockley.

Ira Keller FountainIra Keller Fountain

Further explorations:

Architecture/Dance: Choreographing and inhabiting spaces with Anna and Lawrence Halprin – Peter Merriman [PDF]
In his own words: Lawrence Halprin
Fountain Stage in Manhattan Square Park
Representing Motion: Landscape Urbanism on Notation Systems in Architecture
Notation Systems in Architecture – Premjit Talwar [PDF: 1970s thesis from MIT]

Other notations at Dataisnature:

The Musicality of The Two-Way, Magnetic-Electric Thought-Wave Universe of Walter Russell
Jorinde Voigt – Network Dynamism

Alexandra Roozen – Bitmap Signals & Algorithmic Noise

 Disturb - Alexandra RoozenDisturb – Alexandra Roozen

Alexandra Roozen’s monochromatic drawings mimic bitmap processes, corrupted signals, transmission noise and spatial distributions generated by computer algorithms.

The Disturb series suggests a simulation of screen static, interference and (white) noise. Perhaps these drawings reveal more about the glitch aesthetic than their digital counterparts do. Here the ‘essence’ of corruption had been captured in its purest form and filtered through the corruption of memory itself.

 Untitled Drawing - Alexandra RoozenUntitled Drawing – Alexandra Roozen

One of Grey - Alexandra RoozenOne of Grey – Alexandra Roozen

The Ruis/Noise etches continue the trajectory of human generated noise into a territory approaching asemic writing. On close inspection arrangements of dots and dashes appear to hammer out a code or secret cypher.

 Stripped Drawing - Alexandra RoozenStripped Drawing – Alexandra Roozen

The Untitled Drawings series employ a meticulously robotic and a subtle shading technique which enhances the notion of depth and curvature. These surface object-arrays provide a greyscale homage to the rhythmic multiform modulation mantras of Victor Vasarely.

Related posts:

Lauren Seiden – Gardens of Noise
XXXY – Scenographic Transfigurations
Telcosystems – 12_Series
Flickr Fruits 11 – Perlin Noise
Richard Lazzara – metaCalligraphic

Millefiori – A Hydromagnetic Chromamatrix

Millefiori - Fabian OefnerMillefiori – Fabian Oefner.

Fabian Oefner’s photographed mixtures of interacting ferro-fluids and watercolours appear as orderly distributed cells of polychromatic pigments – each photo a thumbnail sized liquid light show matrix.

Millefiori - Fabian OefnerMillefiori – Fabian Oefner.

Small drops of the magnetic fluid are added to a glass plate and then coerced into forming a landscape of ferro-fluid peaks by a small circular magnet. Fabian then adds different shades of watercolour to the ferro-fluid to disturb the magnetic fields between suspended iron particles.

Millefiori - Fabian OefnerMillefiori – Fabian Oefner.

Where as most reactions of immiscibility generate patterns of randomness, the ones here contain uniformity similar to those found in reaction-diffusion systems. A fine balance between just enough watercolour and too much creates a critically balanced dynamical process. Magnetism, liquid viscosity and surface tension are a few of many variables in this complex hydromagnetic kinetic system resulting in psychedelic patterns at the edge of spatio-temporal chaos.

Related Posts:

Jonathan McCabe – Biological Mandalas
Nervous States & Thunderbolt Pagodas
Flickr Fruits #15: Liquid Projections
Cymatic-ferrofluid – Robert Hodgin

Selected Tweets #15: Perlin Noise Stone Fields, Fluid Phase Abstractions & Humanizing optimization

Selected tweets from my Twitter stream: @MrPrudence

Polar 2d Perlin Field Giuseppe RandazzoPolar 2d Perlin Field – Giuseppe Randazzo.

Stone Fields – Giuseppe Randazzo. Natural circle packing with stones using analogue Subdivision & Perlin Noise strategies.

Observations – Nik Hanselmann. Simulation of scientific instrumentation/systems theory using GL Shaders & Cinder.

Wonderful Little Creatures – Sean Rogg. Heated liquid (al)chemical sound reactions and disturbances.

Impulse 101 – Anthony Antonellis. Acrylic/Projection work using the 4 foundational characters of 8-bit ASCII.

Electronic realization of Cornelius Cardew’s graphic score, ‘Treatise’ by Shawn Feeney. ‘Sine waves are generated from the black areas of the score.’

Iannis Xenakis – Paul Farrington. Abstract graphic score projection which is then interpreted & performed by Nicholas Kok & Psappha.

Liquid Do - Julia BorovayaLiquid Do – Julia Borovaya

Liquid-Do – Julia Borovaya. Solvation – A Molecular-Dynamic Process. Reacting reagents for fluid phase abstractions and sound generation.

Composing With Process – A series, curated by Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore, which explores generative approaches to audio composition.

Mouvoir les Pourcentages & Riches Heurs des Signes Aller-Retour. Henri Chopin’s typewriter poems which contain optical patterns made from typographic glyphs.

‘Fast Forward: Conversations with Machines’ [from camera obscura to cybernetics] essay by Joost Rekveld.

Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums – Classic article on ‘Counter-computer’ by Stewart Brand from 1972.

Countercomplex posts on algorithmic symphonies [8-bit style] from one line of code.

Recent drawings from Viktor Timofeev. ‘Humanizing optimization & cyber-archeology’.