Rotundness

There is something really beautiful about making music from noise — whether it's street noise, footsteps, random sounds — and creating something harmonious out of the cacophony. 

Once you open the cork of Re: Sound Bottle by Jun Fujiwara, a BFA student at Tama Art University, it will sample the sounds you make or hear around you. It will then take these sounds and remix them into music — music in a bottle. 

Fujiwara describes the interactive art project:

This is a music medium that can reproduce a recorded voice as music. It makes a database of sound sources that is managed and used as formal and automatic repetitions, and forms a music medium of the day. I felt something missing in the habitual use of music reproduction media, so I thought to create an interactive music medium that changes. By using everyday voices as sources of music, the sounds that are heard all the time every day carry infinite possibilities and help us reaffirm the enjoyment of music. I hope people can experience their own music.

It's a lovely idea to be capturing sounds in a bottle and unleashing them as music out into the world.

There have been some really cool projects and experiments using WebGL, which allows the browser to render hardware-accelerated 3D graphics using your computer's graphics card, requiring no plug-ins. That means we'll be seeing a lot of cool projects using this technology.

One great project is by Fellow Sundance New Frontier Artist Chris Milk (co-creator of the Wilderness Downtown, an absolutely nostalgic and beautiful use of web technology). Milk collaborated with Aaron Koblin and Google's Data Arts Team again to create ROME: 3 Dreams of Black, an interactive film and web-dreamscape in 3D that you can navigate and travel through with 3D imagery exploding around you. The experiment also allows you to contribute your own 3D lanscape to the dreamscape. ROME is a WebGL experiment based on Danger Mouse's song 3 Dreams In Black from their latest concept album Rome. 

When I was in London for the Mozilla Festival last fall, the National Film Board of Canada's (NFB) released the first-ever completely web-native WebGL film One Millionth Tower, which I had the pleasure of seeing. One Millionth Tower allows the audience to explore a 3D world of stories, photos and media, where the interaction with the film is a choose your own adventure within the 3D world they created. 

I discovered a new WebGL experiment that I absolutely fell in love with:Peter Nitsch's ASCII Street View, which is built on Google's Street View and renders the images in real-time using ASCII characters. I think it's brilliant. I played with it a lot and here are some snapshots of some of my homes. Above you'll see my childhood home in Cupertino, California and where I lived in Brooklyn, New York. The last ASCII Street View rendered after I typed in "Pyramids of Giza, Egypt", but I'm not really sure that is in Egypt. It is still a gorgeous desert Street View though. 

Type in your address and enjoy! The Creator's Project describes the experience as though you're "entering the Matrix", which I think is pretty apt.

When photographs become art objects. A series that uses scanning techniques to create distortion on the original form.

Scott Hazard's Photo Construct series.

Via Booooooom:

SCAN.IT is a photography exhibit of digitally scanned images that are not retouched or manipulated. 

Via inhabitat:

Designer, lecturer, curator and writer Gem Barton has created SCAN.IT, an experimental project that considers digital scanning as an alternative to photography.

For the love of all things ROTUND, I introduce to you the latest by Friends With You: Cloudy. An adorable, beautiful animation short exploring the world of clouds really enjoying their role in life. Enjoy!

Well, I fell in love with this project by Paris-based graphic designer Alain Vonck who has created a tribute to the web's wonder years - the Web 1.0 - called RUINS.

I'm a sucker for infographics, especially ones that are as simple and elegant as this one. 

Oceaniaeuropeamericaasiaafrica is a series of infographics highlighting inequalities in the 5 different continents using the Olympic logo. Created by Gustavo Sousa, who explains to Co.Design where he got the idea:

The rings represent healthy competition and union, but we know the world isn’t perfect. Maybe understanding the differences is the first step to try to make things more equal. 

Artist Claudia Rogge creates textures, patterns and tapestries out of humans in her photographs. The choreography, patterns and texture in her photos create surreal visual effects, where the subjects become abstract shapes, lines and curves of this other, larger world she has imagined. 

As a funny (twisted) tribute to the London Olympics 2012, Amael Isnard and Leo Bridle created this animated short of vermin holding their own 'trash olympics' as a way to properly set the record straight.

Bridle explains the inspiration for the film the Atlantic:

It’s hard not to be a bit excited about everything going on in the city, but at the same time we felt detached from the image of London being sent out to the world. The idea of dirty urban animals staging their own ‘trash olympics’ seemed like a great way to show the true spirit of London!

Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's latest work in collaboration with Tate: This Exquisite Forest. It's a beautiful animation-based reinterpretation of the exquisite corpse - you will get lost in all the branching narratives.

On January first, I was walking home on my usual route, when I saw hundreds of Origami swans flying over Maraashli St in Cairo. The swans decorated the entire block, high up on the trees, and they flew over the local Mosque and cafes. It was a surprising and splendid site - which really made my day. This temporary installation transformed Maraashli street into a whimsical origami playground.

So, I was really excited to learn about French artist Mademoiselle Maurice's urban origami installations of abstract shapes in absolutely beautiful and bold spectrums of color.

These gorgeous, colorful bursts of street art are installed in the streets of Vietnam, Hong Kong and her native France.

Mademoiselle Maurice creates geometric shapes out of hundreds of vividly colored origami structures on street walls. The above installation is a tribute to endangered bees using the "Simplicity and geometry of the hexagon, one of the most perfect natural form built by the bees."

For Vietnam, Maurice reinterpreted the star of the national flag, for all the "farmers, students, works, intellectuals, soliders" who fought for independence. 

Maurice says she was inspired to create this series after spending a year in Japan and experiencing the March 11, 2011 explosion of the Fukushima nuclear plant. She wanted to create a tribute to Sadako Sasaki, and all Japanese people and victims of nuclear disasters. 

Sadako Sasaki was a child that lived through the 1945 Hiroshima bombing, and consequently, succumbed to illness. There is a Japanese legend where folding 1,000 cranes, will make your wish come true. Sadako wished to heal from her illness, but died after folding 644 cranes. 

Maurice wanted to revisit this page of history and to create a memorial for victims of violence all over the world by using the international symbol of peace - the origami crane. She says:

The message is hard, but speaking about it in a dark manner wasn’t necessary for me. 

Because, she continues, she believes in the words of Harald Zindler: "The optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought." 

I find her inspiration for the series, the ephemeral nature of the paper she uses, and her body of work extremely moving, whimsical, optimistic and wonderfully beautiful.