This year’s Ars Electronica festival took place in a massive old tobacco factory, much of it with an art deco feel, and all of it with the strong smells of tobacco still lingering in the air. It made for an interesting event. The enormous available floor area meant that each project and event on show could live and breathe in its own space; projects were generally unencumbered by anything else nearby. This, combined with the labyrinthine structure of the layout and warehouses meant that the overall experience was more like a treasure hunt – you wander around, usually hopelessly lost, down long corridors and empty spaces and then suddenly come across an unexpected gleaming treasure of media art. And then, of course, the challenge of trying to understand what it is you are looking at…

Images of some of the projects on show HERE
More images of Ocean of Light HERE

Ocean of Light moves to the main gallery at the Ars Electronica Centre itself in the next week, where it will be on show until 9th January 2010.

We will be heading out to Linz, Austria, soon to set up Ocean of Light for this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. After the festival, the project will be moved to the Ars Electronica Centre, where it will be shown in the main gallery until the new year. More info here.

Ars Electronica Festival (2-7 September)
Ars Electronica Centre (16 September to January 9th 2011)

Additionally, we are showing Glowing Pathfinder Bugs in Paris at Le Cube (22 September – 3 October), and in New Zealand at New Dowse Gallery, Wellington (6 Nov 2010 – 30 Jan 2011) – more details here.

Ocean of Light received an Honorary Mention at this year’s PRIX FILE LUX, held in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Many many thanks to them, we are delighted by the recognition, especially as so many highly respected and better known projects were in the short list.

Thanks also to all of you who voted for us in the popular vote (though we didn’t quite get that one).

We’re very excited that Ocean of Light has been nominated for Brazil’s FILE PRIX LUX for Interactive Art. It’s an impressive list, with many high profile and excellent projects from across the globe. We would love your support! If you can, please vote for us.

Go here, select PAGE 4, then choose Ocean of Light and follow the instructions.

Kinetica has been good to us.  In addition to the coverage on the BBC and Telegraph mentioned below, we were featured in numerous publications including DigiMag, UK Features, and this from BigShinyThing.

Thanks to James Lane for putting the video together.

ALSO, Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is still finding its way through customs to us, having spent a joyous week or so in Montreal, as part of Technofolies at the Montreal Science Museum. And Bugs is also being shown at Grizedale Forest (Cumbria) as part of Abandon Normal Devices. And we think that yet more outings for the Bugs will be announced soon.

We have just emerged from six days in a black box at the Kinetica Art Fair, nurturing Surface, the first project on the Ocean of Light 3D LED grid. It was an intense period, with apparently some 10,000 people passing through in three days.

Surface is a responsive virtual eco-system that occupies physical space.  It uses a room-sized 3D grid of individually addressable points of light to simulate movement in physical space. The space is dominated by a surface – the boundary between two fluid virtual materials.  The materials are affected by sound – nearby noises create waves that ripple across the surface.  The surface is, however, unstable: the turbulence caused by noise also triggers luminous blasts. Abstract insect-like autonomous agents, aware of their surroundings, also navigate and negotiate the environment and the surface.  The result is a series of interconnected spaces and environments, overlapping physical and virtual spaces that coexist and are aware of each other.

For us, it was also an intense learning experience.  The first outing for the Ocean of Light, a hardware project supported by the Technology Strategy Board, was a litmus test for whether this kind of 3D visuals work on the uninitiated – whether people “get it”. It seems that they do – responses were very positive. We’ve also had a lot of ideas – our own and suggested by others – about future directions and options.

Press coverage included this on BBC News and this on the Daily Telegraph.

The images here are taken from a forthcoming documentary on the project by James Lane – details to follow.

So where does Ocean of Light come from? Through an experimental and playful approach to creating interactive digital installations, we often found ourselves exploring where real and virtual space coexist. We had explored this through multiuser activity and shared experience of audio and visual virtual space (altzero, ghosts), then entering physical space, perceptually through stereoscopy and physically with wearable proximity sensors (come closer) also using stereoscopic cameras to analyze physical movement to navigate virtual space (driftnet,freq2).

Each project led to their own discoveries but until we started working with LEDs in space it seemed like we were making experiences and environments that a user peers into through some kind of portal, or the screen space. Working with the Nova grid (Stealth, Discontinuum) certainly took a leap out of screen space and into the real world in a more determined way. However the close proximity of the LEDs still created a screen like situation as the viewer would be forced to view the work from an external proximity.

The Ocean of Light Grid is part of the evolution of this development process, Designed on the back of all this investigation and experimentation by squidsoup Ocean of Light should enable audio/visual environments to be experienced from within.
Surface is the first artwork to be exhibited using the Ocean of Light hardware. It uses minimal visuals and sound to evoke the essence of character and movement. Autonomous entities engage in a playful dance, negotiating the material properties of a fluid surface. (Posted by Gareth)

We have been working on a new project, Ocean of Light, that seeks out the immersive and affective possibilities of light-based visualisations in three physical dimensions – a recurring theme in our work. The aim this time is that the piece is large enough to be considered an environment rather than an object – a room filled with countless points of light, each one contributing to a dynamic space that surrounds and envelops you.

The hardware uses re-configured video-wall technology to create a walk-through 3D grid of LEDs. The first piece to be shown on the grid (to be premiered at KINETICA Art Fair, February 5-7 2010), combines abstract volumetric visuals with spatialised sound, to suggest an ecosystem of audiovisual entities that inhabit physical space. Visible and audible as they encircle and fly around the room, they dance with each other and together create what is both a fully three dimensional audiovisual environment and a musical composition.

www.oceanoflight.net

The work continues several themes in our work. We started exploring spatialised musical composition in 1999 with Altzero. The compositions became dynamic and agent-based in Driftnet/Fly like a bird. Visualisation in 3D has been used in several projects, using a range of techniques from classic red/cyan glasses to view real time anaglyphic projections (Come Closer, Driftnet, and a version of Ghosts), experiments with autostereoscopy, projection onto 3D objects, and most recently moving our work into physical 3D space. See also The Stealth Project and Discontinuum (projects using visualisation techniques in three physical dimensions using NOVA, a 3D LED grid built by ETHZ).

More images here

Discontinuum and Ghosts were curated by body>data>space for Bains Numeriques 2009.

More information on the project HERE.

Music courtesy of The Necks (excerpt from Townsville)

Discontinuum runs on a NOVA 3D LED cube, produced by ETHZ/Horao GmbH

ETHZ/Horao’s Christoph Stahli has also produced a short document on Stealth – still running in Belfast for ISEA at the Ormeau Baths Gallery: