Radarboy is a design collective, art project and social experiment started in 1999 by George Gally and Gareth Chisholm. It has appeared under many guises ranging from artist, design studio, social commentator, musician and DJ.
TPT (Tweets per twenty seconds) – possibly a new measure of vanity or scale of interest.
I first took heed of the “xx tweets since you started searching” when watching Obama’s State Of The Union #SOTU, Jan 27 2010. I noticed it previously as a sidenote on other occasions, like when the #iPad was launched. So when the Oscars rolled by on Mar 7 2010, I decided to do some rough tracking of the volume of interest of the broader topic, the Oscars, but also what got people tweeting, which peaked at 3,000 tweets/20sec, for the Best Picture award. By comparison, State Of The Union address averaged 300TPT.
I love this simple and beautiful light art intervention by Luzinterruptus.
“We want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word.
Thus, an urban space conventionally reserved for speed, pollution and noise, for a few hours will become a place of peacefulness, relaxation and coexistence. Illuminated by a soft, diffuse light which makes us feel comfortable, in a pleasant environment, in spite of the chaos which surrounds us. ”
Groundbreaking computer animator Richard “Dr” Baily was a leader in particle based computer animations. He worked on movies such as Tron, Superman Returns, Blade and The Matrix, but he is probably best known for the beautiful animations for the movie Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris.
Bailey referred to what he did as “Sculpting with Light”, rather than animation, something that really resonated with me.
Bailey produced over 60,000 frames of atmospheric planet animation using his own particle system – called SPORE – developed in C++. You can see a few of the planet animations here in the trailer:
Of SPORE Bailey, commented: “[It's] a system that’s sort of a continuum between order and chaos. Some images reside firmly in the world of order, with the particles animated in a fairly straightforward way. Other images that look really twitchy and electric reside in the world of chaos.
Ultimately, the goal was to build a living system that will breed and evolve designs and animations that I would never have dreamed of, and could not produce by any other means.”
Director Rogier van der Zwaag uses wooden blocks and light to create this amazing stop motion video for the band Nobody Beats The Drum. Not mad about the tune. But the video is super inspiring.
White Void have done some cool stuff over the years. I remember noticing them when they brought out their Midi Gun, alternative midi controller.
Here’s some of their projects:
Tone ladder – A ladder equipped with sensors becomes a musical instrument:
Polygon playground – a large scale interactive lounge object featuring a software aided 3D surface projection system covering the object with a seamless 360 degree projection mapping, with motion and proximity sensing:
Anthony McCall was a pioneer of light projection in the 1970s. With the current upsurge in interest in light art, there’s a renewed interest in his work. I think what I love most about his stuff, is that his a lot of his works are experiential – based on projecting simple vector lines, the emphasis placed not on the final destination but rather the journey the light takes to get there. The kind of feeling/experience you get when playing in a lazer.
The sound is pretty bad on this one, so crank up the volume. Anthony McCall: talking about his beautiful Between You and I installation:
Here McCall talks about his “Line Describing a Cone” piece:
Just stumbled on this amazing video of Georgio Moroder playing with a vocoder. So thought I’d do a little tribute.
“I Feel Love”, that he co-wrote with Donna Summer, is his most famous. And was as important at Kraftwerk in building the foundations for house, techno and synthpop.
As some so elegantly put it on You Tube: “Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream were pioneers but it is Giorgio who put the FUNK in electro. Do the kids of today know what debt that is owed to this man.”
Said David Bowie of I Feel Love: “One day in Berlin … [Brian] Eno came running in and said, ‘I have heard the sound of the future.’ … he puts on ‘I Feel Love’, by Donna Summer … He said, ‘This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’ ”
Here’s a great video for one of my fave Moroder tracks – From Here To Eternity. Classic.
Moroder also is an essential part of late 70s and 80s culture, bringing disco and synthpop, synthesizers and computers, and a whole lot of funk to the masses writing and producing a wide range of classic pop songs and working on soundtracks for some of the biggest movies of the decade: Midnight Express, Scarface, Top Gun, Flashdance, Never Ending Story, American Gigolo, to name a few.
Here’s Fly Too High, co-written with Janis Ian.
He worked with Sique Sique Sputnik on their first album, which I’ve always thought was under-rated. “Ah, that was quite an, er, adventure. We had a lot of fun – God, crazy guys, ” he said of the band, in a 1996 interview with Future Music.
Here’s Sique Sique Sputnik, Atari Baby:
Moroder also produced Sparks:
And Blondie, Call Me:
And as a special bonus here’s Moroder with Phil Oakley in Together In Electric Dreams. But check out around 1:02, there appears to be a sound reactive computer animation. And some others later on.
Don’t really love this tune, but like the 8 bit sound reactive stuff:
Finally, I bet you didn’t know that Giorgio Moroder also produced a sports car with automotive engineer Claudio Zampolli – the Cizeta-Moroder V16T. Checkit:
There seems to be a flurry of projection mapping stuff going on recently. It’s interesting to see how the technology is evolving. Here’s some I’ve recently stumbled upon:
ok, this one I’m not so sure about posting, because the graphics are not my cup of tea. And overall it’s pretty cheesy. But I think it’s a significant step up in production values. So skip the parts where the music and vibe starts to do your head in – especially the New Years bit.
Lastly, this ones been floating around the interweb a bit lately, but still cool. It’s from Lumen and OCD:
Binary Waves is a kinetic sculpture that analyses flows of movement in it’s environment – both electromagnetic and physical. The project was developed by Lab[au]
The project reminded me of another great work by Ryota Kuwakubo called Atmos where a field of lights reacted to air movement – creating a light pattern of wind movement.
Unfortunately, it’s quite an old project, so not much information floating around the interweb on it. Would love to see him resurrect it.
I’ve raved about how much I love the work of Carsten Nicolai before. But just discovered his amazing book Grid Index
Grid Index is the first comprehensive visual lexicon of patterns and grid systems. It is an essential reference book for designers, visual artists, architects, researchers and mathematicians. From the simplest grids made up entirely of squares to the most complex irregular ones with infinitely unpredictable patterns of growth, the book itself is a work of art.
All visual information and forms, whether illustration, graphic design, painting or architecture are comprised of two dimensional grids and patterns, much like the way that computer information is made up of zeroes and ones. Based upon years of research, artist and musician Carsten Nicolai has discovered and unlocked the visual code for visual systems into a systematic equation of grids and patterns.
I’ve decided to start release some of the stuff I’ve been working on lately, building up towards my show. I have so many experiments sitting on my hard drive that never see the light of day.
So here we have Sound Reactive Circle 1.
I wanted it to be able to play in the browser, but for some reason couldn’t get it to work, event though I signed the applet. Next time….
You may know that South African Mark Shuttleworth was the first African in space. But what I’m sure you didn’t know, is that the Afronaut is also the first space smuggler. Radarboy gives you the low down on how he did it and what contraband was taken:
Nollywood, the Nigerian Film Industry releases approximately 1000 movies a year. South African photographer Pieter Hugo goes fictional in Nollywood. And Italian filmmaker Franco Sacchi documents how to make a film in eight days. Read more about it on radarboy’s King of Africa.
