s q u i d s o u p . o r g

We had a lot of fun at Scopitone. Kid Koala was fantastic, Murcof/AntiVJ on Wednesday also excellent.

A very interesting selection of light-based installations too – AntiVJ (3Destruct), Plane-Scape, Visual System, Hiroaki Umeda and Kit Webster’s Enigmatica in addition to our own Glowing Pathfinder Bugs and Scapes.

Scapes is on show at TENDERPIXEL GALLERY, 10 CECIL COURT, LEICESTER SQUARE, LONDON until 5 MARCH 2011 – please do go and see it. Details and opening times HERE

Scapes is a dynamic and responsive light sculpture in five movements by digital arts group Squidsoup. Each movement is a different take on the combination of realtime sound analysis with volumetric visualisations – creating visuals that occupy physical 3D space purely out of sound. Slow moving dynamic light sculptures evolve from Alexander Rishaug‘s mesmerising ambient soundscapes to evoke an abstract world where time has no meaning.

Promo video here: vimeo.com/15400810 Documentary video coming soon.

More information here: www.tenderpixel.com/squidsoup.html

Selected coverage:
Design Week ::  GlobalNewsBox ::  WhatWhereWhen ::  Aesthetica

Fabian Mohr of Zeit Online posted a quite flattering video about Ocean of Light at the Ars Electronica Festival. He documented a lot of work actually – see HERE for more Ars Electronica Festival 2010 projects recorded by him.

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.

We had fun at this year’s SIGGRAPH in Downtown LA. We showed Glowing Pathfinder Bugs in the Art Gallery – it was interesting to present a sandpit at a heavily tech-led event, and seemed to go down well. We also presented a conference paper on the project, published in a special issue of Leonardo (vol 43, issue 4). And we did an artists’ talk.

More images here, and the project was also covered here by Core77.

Pest Control got’em going at Glastonbury last week. More images here.  Some of the subtleties were missed in the frenetic nighttime of Shangri-La, people generally opted for splatting the bugs rather than nurturing or controlling them, but revellers were intrigued, and certainly seemed to enjoy what they were doing.

Next outing is the Secret Garden Party, in Cambridgeshire (UK) and there is more in the pipeline.

We have also collected our main project videos into a Vimeo channel – see vimeo.com/channels/squidsoup

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.

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

A blast from the past…

Realtime interactive animation of walking underneath a high voltage pylon. The sound is created by four sinewaves, each which has a pitch determined by the distance between the viewer and each of the four feet of the pylon, creating a constantly shifting phase pattern (you probably need headphones or a subwoofer to hear this).

Both sound and visuals are ‘embellished’ with compression artefacts – the sound really is just four soundwaves, and the background of the visuals is a smoothely changing plain colour – both difficult to reproduce with compression.