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

Stealth installed and running at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, as part of the ISEA 2009 exhibition.  It will run from now until 30 August.

Other images (of Stealth and other projects) here.

The Stealth project is built on the NOVA 3D LED grid (courtesy of ETH / Horao GmbH) and uses 2 monome64 devices.

We had an enjoyable and interesting time at Enghien-les-Bains for the Bains Numeriques festival, where we showed three versions of Ghosts, and new piece Discontinuum.  Many thanks to Emmanuel, Celine and all at body>data>space.

Discontinuum was part re-developed in situ, as the piece was positioned inside the church of St Joseph, and we felt it needed to reflect on and respond to the space more.  Live footage from a hidden webcam was mixed with static imagery taken from the stained glass windows in the church; the brilliant colours of the stained glass becoming reproduced within the NOVA cube.  More documentation soon…

In addition to the usual festival goers, we had a lot of interest from the church-going community – rare access to a completely different audience, whose responses were surprisingly positive (at least once the fact that the piece was a reflection on the place was understood).

Discontinuum has become an evocation of place as well as an exploration of the visual possibilities of extruding live imagery through space and across time.  ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)/horao GmbH (who designed and built the NOVA)  are planning to show a version of Discontinuum in Zurich; evoking another place (or idea) will be an interesting development for the project.

Ghosts worked well inside the Mediatheque George Sand, using a tryptich of plasma screens to good effect, the three screens in various states of legibility, and reacting immediately and simultaneously to text input.

On other fronts, preparations are underway for ISEA 2009.  The exhibition starts on 7th August at Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast, and runs through to the end of the ISEA conference on 30th August.  The Stealth project should be running throughout.

Also looks like we’ll be showing Glowing Pathfinder Bugs at the onedotzero festival (South Bank, London) in September – if you have a design week subscription see this from the mouth of the man himself

Future of Sound (Arnolfini, Bristol), 25 April 2009
Promises to be an interesting day of talks, workshops, installations and performances at Bristol’s Arnolfini.  Details here. 
Freq2 will be shown, and there will be a short talk in the afternoon.

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Soma Museum / Art Centre Nabi (Seoul, South Korea), 30 April – 21 June 2009
A group exhibition featuring various digital interactive artworks aimed primarily at kids.  We are showing Glowing Pathfinder Bugs (its first outing outside of the Portable Pixel Playground), Virtual Puppeteers and Freq2.  The exhibition is called ALICE (“Artistic, Lively, Intelligent, Creative, Eco-friendly kids”).

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Bains Numeriques (Enghiens-les-Bains, Paris), 5-13 June 2009
Ghosts (three types) and the first outing for Discontinuum – an exploration of de/re-constructing webcam imagery over time, using the glorious NOVA 3D LED grid, courtesy of ETHZ/horao.  Bains Numeriques is an annual event that takes place in a suburb of Paris.  Should be fun – Peter Greenaway and Stelarc are both partaking this year.  We were invited by body>data>space .

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ISEA 2009 (Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland), 7-30 August 2009
A second outing for Stealth, first shown last October at the V&A, at ISEA (International Symposium for Electronic Arts).  The piece is both a game and an exploration of 3D visuals in physical space, and also runs on the NOVA.

We tried crossing two beams of light inside a block of aerogel, thinking it might somehow produce a brighter point in 3D space.  It doesn’t.  However, some beguiling effects can be obtained, in 2D and in 3D, using two projections onto a block of aerogel.

Perhaps reminiscent of dappled sunlight and silhouettes of passing strangers, this is actually two projections of Outtake – a version of Ghosts from 2003 – from different angles onto a small block of aerogel.

Also – rendering of the Mac dock into 3 dimensions

Miniature mockup adding realtime shadows

Still of Outtake projected onto aerogel.

Aerogel supplied by Airglass AB

Folly’s Portable Pixel Playground – March 7th – Tullie House, Carlisle.  And more outings to come.

http://www.folly.co.uk/node/1358

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, a playful piece commissioned by Folly, has been shown at several Portable Pixel Playground events in 2008 and 2009.

The bugs analyse the shape (topography) of the sand around them, preferring to move gently downhill.  This means they can be shepherded, enclosed within walls of sand, encouraged to meet each other (at which point strange metamorphoses happen; they merge into larger caterpillars then, if you’re lucky, into butterflies.  If they get frightened, they pop and disappear.

And with kids, this is what happens most often…

http://www.squidsoup.org/bugs

A 3D visual deconstruction of time and space. Work in progress.

A camera feed is passed through physical space over time, creating imagery that contains fragments from a range of times simultaneously. Unlike a 2D image taken over a long duration – which would essentially be a blur – the time is ordered in the third dimension, as if time was flowing in a particular direction.

Seen from ahead, the image is superimposed on itself, similar to its 2D counterpart, but from other angles, the flow of time through space can clearly be seen. And from behind, time slowly fades away into the distance.

The project builds on ideas first implemented in squidsoup’s Freq2 – www.squidsoup.org/freq2

Discontinuum is a Squidsoup project, in collaboration with ETHZ and horao GmbH.

www.squidsoup.org www.nova.ethz.ch www.horao.biz

The website is live at www.squidsoup.org/stealth – it includes this video documentation:

The Stealth Project, a 3 dimensional take on the classic game Connect 4 and inspired by the Cold War Modern exhibition, was premiered on 31 October at the Gamble Room, V&A, London. The project is a Squidsoup collaboration with Horao GmbH / ETHZ and uses the NOVA 3D LED grid.

Flickr slideshow here.

Our latest project, a collaboration with ETH Zurich and horao GmbH and featuring their wonderful NOVA 3D LED grid, will be premiered at the French Connection Friday Late at the V&A museum in London on 31 October 2008.

Planes, missiles and other hardware that deflect or otherwise avoid radar detection were key in the race for world supremacy. Detection avoidance, or stealth technology, was one of many ‘developments’ to emerge from the Cold War.

In the Stealth project, two grids of triggers target and launch missiles across an abstracted 3D space at each other, attempting to avoid radar detection and annihilate the opposition.

However, in contrast to the Mutually Assured Destruction madness of the arms race, the piece acts as a collaborative spatial musical instrument – each ‘missile’ emits sounds based on its relative position and the conditions it encounters along its trajectory.

The Stealth Project developed from research into the creative possibilities of volumetric, or 3D, visualisation techniques. Recent Squidsoup experiments using a Baby NOVA (the physical centrepiece of this project) suggested that this kind of three-dimensional light grid has considerable potential for abstract gaming applications.

Full press release here: stealth-text-final

NOVA links: 1 2 3

The piece also uses 2x Monome 64 devices as control interfaces. These are handmade, beautiful and sustainably built.

The unique ecology of Blackpool was augmented yesterday by the addition of a few very rare Glowing Pathfinder Bugs. Their presence was noted by many passersby at the Solaris Centre on 28th September, where Folly staged the latest installment of their Portable Pixel Playground tour.

Future Portable Pixel Playgrounds, featuring Glowing Pathfinder Bugs:

18 October (Lanternhouse, Ulverston)
15 November (Carnforth Station)
6 December (Tullie House, Carlisle)
24 January 2009 (St Nicholas Arcades, Lancaster)

And as an afterthought – a glimpse of the magical Blackpool trams at night: