May 27, 2010 0
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.
Mar 31, 2010 0
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.
Feb 10, 2010 0
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.
Dec 10, 2009 1
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.
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
