The Waffle House

Installation Art by Tulio Pinto

Lives and works in Porto Alegre. Born in Brasilia. Has a degree in visual arts specializing in sculpture UFRGS (2009). Tulio is co-founder and member of the Atelier Subterrânea. From 2006 to 2015, Subterranea produced exhibitions, talkings, workshops, performances, book releases and video exhibitions that brought together artists and audiences.

Pinto’s sculptures play with that subtlety and challenge the viewers understanding of it. In his study of the balance between the delicate and the industrial, Pinto not only seemingly defies physics but also delves into human interaction, strength, and temperament. 

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Orange Sound Project, by Lauretta Vinciarelli, 1999,  Watercolor, graphite, and color ink on paper

UK LIDAR Dataset

The UK Environment Agency has made available for free an 11 terabyte digital scan of the United Kingdom England:

For the last 17 years the Environment Agency has used lasers to map and scan the English landscape from above to help us carry out work such as flood modelling and tracking changing coastal habitats.

This month, for the first time, we are making our LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data available for everyone to use for free. The aim is to help organisations, businesses, and individuals to do everything from manage forests, discover hidden archaeological features, and even create virtual reality worlds for gaming.

All 11 terabytes of our LIDAR data (that’s roughly equivalent to 2,750,000 MP3 songs) will eventually be available through our new Open LIDAR portal under an Open Government Licence, allowing it to be used for any purpose.

We hope that by giving free access to our data businesses and local communities will develop innovative solutions to benefit the environment, grow our thriving rural economy, and boost our world-leading food and farming industry. The possibilities are endless and we hope that making LIDAR data open will be a catalyst for new ideas and innovation.

More Here

In the middle of a small lake in Belgium, a rectangular piece of the water’s surface is mysteriously glowing. This elusive light is the design of Belgian artist duo Karel Burssens and Jeroen Verrecht, aka “88888”, whose works transform specific sites into art. Their otherworldly light installation, “Untitled”, was created for the Horst Art and Music Festival, located on one of the two moats that surround the medieval Horst Castle. 

2015.7.20_14.29.1_frame_0002 Made with code / Processing

18th collection of immersive spaces, dedicated to audiovisual spaces shaped by lights and sound. Check previous collections under the tag “Immersive Audiovisual Environments”.

The pioneer audiovisual spaces Polytopes, by Iánnis Xenákis during the 1960s and 1970s, can be considered the “starting point for many contemporary researches in multimedia performances and immersive environments” (Farbizi, 2014  “Yannis Xenakis’ Polytopes: Cosmogonies in Sound and Architecture” ).

[pic. PARALLELS, Nonotak // N-POLYTONE,  Chris Salter // HYPERJUMP, Tundra] HYPERLINE

“Immersive audio reactive installation exploring electroluminescent technology (EL). 360 meters of EL wires segmented in 30 independent sections. These sections are controlled by an audio reactive setup built in Arduino and Pure Data that splits the audio signal to represent it visually and dynamically in real time.”

By Devicers, 2014. More info here.

HYPERJUMP

“Hyperjump explores the idea, set by this paradoxical combination: the basketball court, representing the physicality, we have from the nature, together with the architecture of the classicism period, the symbol of the human rationality. 25 moving head light beams on a truss stands and a powerful sound system were installed along the hall. While the light sculpture started to move, the electronic light devices came to life, turning into the actors themselves, bringing the light, shut in the strict geometry back, to its unpredictable nature.”

By TUNDRA, 2015. More info, pictures and full credits here.

PARALLELS

“Parallels explores light as a material, but this time the space as a whole becomes their screen.( Reference to Daydream installation series) The boundaries and notion of space, become abstract as the audience crosses the room, but in doing so, the audience also affects the space by breaking the light. This installation is strongly connected to the space in which it takes place; it lives within it. But as soon as the light hits the walls that define the space it reaches its limits and stops reproducing itself. The installation is also inspired by Anthony Mccall’s exploration of light and space.”

By Nonotak, 2015. More info here. A CHANDELIER FOR ONE OF MANY POSSIBLE ENDS

“92 individual light elements each controlled by a Geiger counter. Lights flash in response to the Geiger counters detecting high energy particles of radioactivity from sources both terrestrial and cosmic. Normal levels of environmental radioactivity cause the instillation to flicker randomly. A source of contamination great enough to cause the entire chandelier to remain solidly lit would be fatal to any living thing in the room.”

By Phillip David Stearns, 2014. More info here.

N_POLYTONE - Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis

“N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s- 1970s works named Polytopes (from the Greek ‘poly’, many and ‘topos’, space).”

“N_Polytope is based on the attempt to both re-imagine Xenakis’ work with probabilistic/stochastic systems with new techniques as well as to explore how these techniques can exemplify our own historical moment of extreme instability”.

What makes fireworks colorful?

It’s all thanks to the luminescence of metals. When certain metals are heated (over a flame or in a hot explosion) their electrons jump up to a higher energy state. When those electrons fall back down, they emit specific frequencies of light - and each chemical has a unique emission spectrum.

You can see that the most prominent bands in the spectra above match the firework colors. The colors often burn brighter with the addition of an electron donor like Chlorine (Cl). 

But the metals alone wouldn’t look like much. They need to be excited. Black powder (mostly nitrates like KNO3) provides oxygen for the rapid reduction of charcoal © to create a lot hot expanding gas - the BOOM. That, in turn, provides the energy for luminescence - the AWWWW.

Aluminium has a special role — it emits a bright white light … and makes sparks!

None of This Was Real is a series of oil paintings that portrays fictional scenes of objects randomly generated by a computer program. These objects are a product of code written by the artist and rendered using a global illumination ray tracing engine. They are effectively subjects for still life. But there was never any life – any reality – in the subjects. Everything was virtual and simulated.

The intention with this series is not to make a statement. Instead, I feel they pose a series of questions about the nature of art – specifically computer-generated art. While I find the original series of digital renders beautiful, many would consider those images a lesser art because they were created by a computer program (though it should be noted that a majority of the time executing this project was spent writing and tweaking that computer program). By translating these digital images to a traditional medium used throughout art history, do they become a more valid form of art? Are they inherently better because they were created “by hand”?

Do these paintings fall within the bounds of computer art? Are they still generative art or new media art? Or should they be categorized within the sphere of traditional art? Are these still life paintings, perhaps in the style of representational realism? Will they be identified as abstract art, even though nothing was abstracted? Perhaps this is simply “contemporary art”, a label we now use as sources, processes, and mediums become more diverse and intertwined.

I don’t have an opinion on the matter. For me this series served two main goals. (1) Try to find an intersection between my code-based, generative artwork and my traditional media practice that largely consists of representational figurative work. (2) Improve my color and value acuity through diligent observation and patience in color mixing.

For those interested in the technology behind the scenes, the software was written in Processing (http://processing.org), with the additional help of toxiclibs (http://toxiclibs.org) for geometry creation and Sunflow (http://sunflow.sourceforge.net) for the global illumination rendering engine.

Shard Party June 2015 Mike Creighton

Shard Party was a contribution to the PDX Creative Coders group project called C.A.R.D.S. (http://thecardsproject.com). Ten Portland artists were asked to participate, each creating a series of 150 unique code-generated images. The images were then printed as art trading cards and bundled into packs of 10 (one card from each artist).

This series was written in Processing (http://processing.org), with the additional help of toxiclibs (http://toxiclibs.org) for geometry creation and Sunflow (http://sunflow.sourceforge.net) for the global illumination rendering engine.