#explodedscreen

He talked about architecture as canvas, not screen. "I'm still fascinated by the fact that you can add a layer of light into any object," he said. "It gives a new perspective onto an object."

Working as a freelance graphic designer gave him time to do some VJing; he was inspired by a giant alien head talking to an audience, at a Legoman concert. He started projection mapping using Flash animations projected onto folded paper. 

Then one day he turned his projector onto his neighbour's house. His paper structures were soon scaled up to wood.  He started using Ableton live to sync with sound, and FFT to analyse sound frequencies. Before the talk he asked me for a minijack-to-minijack cable, and in the video you can see him use a miniature Korg synth to control visuals by using its audio output as an input to vvvv. He moved from clubs to galleries and stage design. 

One of the projects he discussed was a mapping into a church organ in Breda, Netherlands, and he described how the licenses and physicality of the organ strongly linked sound and image. Visuals from the site were combined with lighting.

For mapping, he still finds it easiest to work in the space and simply draw a map in Photoshop. Other tools include the popular 3D Stroke plug-in for After Effects. The key to realistic 3D visuals, he said, is ambient occlusion.

We had a guided tour of the V&A's amazing computer art collection on 6 Feb 2014, as research for our Exploded Screen elective, thanks to curators Douglas Dodds and Melanie Lenz.

Here is one of Ben Laposky's 'Oscillons,' created with an oscilloscope in 1960.

Early computer art was generally printed out using printers or plotters, or photographed from the screen. The first exhibitions were in New York and Stuttgart in 1965. 'Cybernetic Serendipity' was at the ICA in 1968.

In Stuttgart, Max Bense was one of the first to theorise this area, as 'information aesthetics.' A. Michael Noll tried to codify what artists such as Mondrian did. Vera Molnar's 'machine imaginaire' was a process, a way of working. Jean-Pierre Hebert called himself an 'algorist.'

We saw also the work of Ken Knowlton, Stan van der Beek, Barbara Nessim, William Latham, father/son team of Paul & Daniel Brown, inkjet prints of Mark Wilson (above). And D.P. Henry, who made using a bomb sight computer from a Lancaster bomber. William Fetter worked on the ergonomics of the airplane cockpit, then invented the term 'computer graphics'. Herbert Frank used Braille machines to make art. Manfred Mohr is still active, living in New York.

This is a plotter drawing by Frieder Nake.

British painter Harold Cohen lives in California. He invented the Aaron programming language, and theorised some early notions of AI. He printed pieces like the one above on a plotter then hand-painted them, signing them, 'Aaron.'

Malcolm Hughes led the experimental unit at the Slade, and one of the founders of the Systems Group. One of his students, Paul Brown, called this work, using cellular automata, 'systems art,' printing this plotter drawing on translucent paper.

The museum also collects contemporary computer art as well, owning for example one if Thompson & Craighead's Google tea towels. The Casey Reas piece hanging in the Sackler Centre is an only copy, designed for a specific screen size. Reas, one of the brains behind Processing, actually first wrote the code for this piece in pseudo-code - human language - and this piece came with a book. 

RI was set up when a few friends went to NESTA after graduating from RCA. Their Pixel Roller was an InnovationRCA project. It was more of a performance, and so they automated and replicated it. They pitched to NESTA as a creative technology consultancy - to show what is possible with new technologies. 

The Rain Room came from a brief – RI was pitching to agencies. It evolved from their earlier work, and Florian said they were thinking about how to drop an image onto a floor, like paint. It was their first environmental piece, not an object. It's about environments, not the environment as a whole. 

Setup of the Rain Room at Barbican took 14 days. There was a BBC recording studio directly beneath. Water came from a disabled toilet 100m away. 

How do you make people go into a dark room with rain? What attracts people is making something familiar unfamiliar. The Rain Room was done during the financial crash, and at the time Florain noticed a nearby cash machine with a sign: "Too much is never enough." The market, he said is about when what everyone wants becomes interesting; but when too many people want it, it becomes uninteresting. 

No one ever asked about surveillance; everyone asked about the technology. "We don't stop and smell the roses anymore," he said. "We just instagram them." One person's photo of themselves in the Rain Room got more likes than there were visitors to the Rain Room.

For a Royal Opera House commission with Wayne MacGregor, the team thought about why people come to an opera house - to perform for a crowd. Their installation of small mirrors they had to tweak for the right amount of delay, responsiveness and level of detail appropriate to the interaction - if imperfect, it distracts, like spotting an easy prey. A 'lost contact lens' sequence.

Connecting dots = human movement, led to Swarm Study. Each object talks to 6 others. Future Self = Swarm Study with people. They then scaled up Swarm to architectural scale.

A mining area in Germany - buildings created for machines. 

RI gives small ideas to its employees on Monday mornings. Every project has a book.

What's next for RI? Small objects. If you want to design things, he told us, don't produce them yourself. It doesn't matter where an idea comes from; what matters is to stick to it. It's important to go outside - people don't have ideas at their desk. Look at people, not things.