Generated Crazy I started the day reading a fascinating article on generative interfaces, “Can Algorithms Help Design the Ultimate Gestural Interface?” At first I thought it was about generating, algorithmically, user interfaces — something I’d love to see. What would a UI that was designed by a computer be like?! (I searched, but closest to this was work on robots generating their own spoken language.) But that wasn’t the case. Instead the article was about…
 
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Ok – so at first “codebending” is going to seem like a pretty weird idea and little more than a fun geeky art hack. But it’s way smarter than “just” that. Illucia is a codebending instrument from Paper Kettle that allows the user (performer?) to connect different software programs together and control their interactions. It’s mostly games — like “Soviet Life Sequencer” that combines Tetris with Conway’s

Eye magazine published a fascinating article in 1997, Sound, Code, Image, on how graphic scores can “liberate” music from the five-line grid of traditional music notation. It looked at the work of composers from the 50′s to the 70′s, and their experiments at making musical scores more graphic and expressive. (And just today the Eye Blog did a post on John Cage’s watercolors and drawings.) The range of expressions that emerged from that era were…
 
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I love music visualization and explorations of synesthesia. MOCA’s 2005 amazing exhibition Visual Music, highlighted a wide (and deep) range of work tracing the development of music in the visual arts. For example, one of the show’s featured artists John Whitney (who’s son, by the way, was one my earliest employers), created amazing work which stands among of the pinnacles of early computer animation. There are lots and lots of other fantastic examples (and I’ll…
 
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In 1996 I saw the Mediascape exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo. A collection of digital art, some interactive, it was bold show from a major museum. It received mixed reviews — but one of the pieces there left a lasting impression on me. It was “Piano – As Media Image” by Toshio Iwai. From the exhibition’s catalog: [the piece] combines a real grand piano with virtual images. The player uses a trackball to place luminous…
 
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