2010.1 from Kenneth A. Huff on Vimeo. If you can, watch it full-screen, HD on and Scaling off.

The piece is a single-channel, 1920×1080, 24 fps, 25 minutes. Shown above is a 2-minute excerpt.

Here are some stills from the piece. Click on each for a full image.

Update: On the technical side, I used Side Effects Software’s Houdini and Adobe After Effects to create the piece. For the main surface, I used the Houdini Ocean Toolkit by Drew Whitehouse, based on the algorithms of Jerry Tessendorf. A custom shader was applied to the surface and an initial base rendering was created using Houdini’s hardware rendering. The base frames were rendered at 1.5 times final size (2880×1620). Those frames then were finished in After Effects. Total render time for 36,000 frames was approximately 250 hours.

The first, based on 2009.2, was installed in four windows of the offices of the Arts and Humanities Commission, on the second floor, east side of the Smoky Hill Museum, 211 West Iron Avenue.

The four synchronized, proportionally-spaced panels were extracted from a larger image, especially for the site.

The second piece, based on 2007.5, was installed at 107-1/2 Santa Fe Avenue.

In the wee hours of morning on my last day there, I temporarily installed a test of a new work that I started developing while in Salina.

My thanks go out to the staff of the Arts and Humanities Commission for their kind helpfulness and hospitality. Special thanks to Karla Prickett and Josh Morris. Funding for “Street Sites” was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The projections will continue to be shown for the next few weeks, starting at around 8 p.m.

A performance by young musicians from public radio's From the Top.

A wonderful way to end my spring break…a Sunday afternoon performance of a movement from Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25.

Held in the Palm Beach home of one of my collectors (that is 2007.3 showing behind the musicians), the concert was hosted and accompanied by Christopher O’Riley, of public broadcasting’s From the Top. The young musician are Alexandra Switala (violin), John-Henry Crawford (cello) and Robert Switala (viola).

So, I have decided that 2007.3 goes very well with strings…

(That’s Mr. Sean watching from the front row.)

An exhibition of my prints, Kenneth A. Huff: Organic Constructions, is on display at the Telfair Museum of Art’s Jepson Center through 22 February 2010, in Savannah, Georgia. Nine prints from 2000–2005 are being exhibited. Shown above is 2001.1, part of an ongoing series of works based on mathematical knot theory.

A time-based work, 2007.3, shown during the Ars Electronica 2009. The performance-specific, time-based, projection work was created by Kenneth A. Huff at the invitation of the curatorial panel of the festival’s Vom Streben nach ungehörter Musik Große Konzertnacht (Pursuit of the Unheard, The Big Concert Evening). Dennis Russell Davies conducted the Bruckner Orchester Linz in a performance of Alan Havhaness’ Lousadzak (Coming of Light) for piano and strings, Op. 48. Maki Namekawa was the piano soloist. The evening performance took place in the Brucknerhaus, along the Daube River in Linz, Austria on 6 September 2009.

More information on Ken’s participation in the festival can be found in a previous post.

[UPDATE — 11 September 2009]

Here is a short video of the end of the piece from the final rehearsal:

Symphony performance

For this year’s festival, I was invited to create time-based work to accompany a symphonic performance of the piano concerto, Lousadzak (Coming of Light), op. 48 by Alan Hovhaness. Dennis Russell Davis will be conducting the Bruckner Orchester Linz with Maki Namekawa on piano. The performance will take place at the Brucknerhaus on Sunday, 6 September.

Exhibition

2000.16b at Ars Electronica Center. Originally uploaded to flickr by magrolino.

Since 2 January 2009, twenty of my still images and two site-specific, time-based works are being shown in the new Ars Electronica Center Deep Space projection gallery. The showing is currently slated to last at least through 2009. The two time-based works were recreated to take full advantage of the 4K cinematic projectors of Deep Space. My work is one of the inaugural artist installations in the space.

This showing of the still images is the first time, outside of my studio, that people are able to interactively explore the full detail of these works, all of which are digital renderings, up to 20,000 by 12,000 pixels. The works are projected to wrap around a 16 by 9 meter wall and similarly-sized area of the floor. Viewers are able to zoom into the full detail of the pieces. The works range from 1999 to 2007 and are a broad overview of many of the themes I explore, from mathematical knots to Truchet tilings to the concentric line patterns of fingerprints.

Symposium presentation

In connection with the Deep Space exhibition and as part of the festival’s Pixelspaces symposium, I will be giving a presentation about my work on 4 September. I will be talking about the inspiration and ideas behind the pieces, with particular emphasis on scale and detail.

The Ars Electronica Festival runs 3 through 8 September at the Ars Electronica Center and throughout Linz, Austria.

The Deep Space exhibition will run at least through the end of 2009.

Links

Ars Electronica Center

Ars Electronica Festival

Symphony performance

Deep Space exhibition

Pixelspaces symposium presentation

There are some additional photographs of the exhibition in this earlier blog post. I hope to have some photographs and images upon my return from the festival in early September.

I am off to New Orleans for SIGGRAPH 2009. I will be presenting my Encoding with prime factors series during a panel discussion, The State of Aesthetic Computing or Info-Aesthetics, on Monday, 3 August at 3:45 p.m.

This will be my twelfth year contributing to the conference.

I especially am looking forward to the Computer Animation Festival’s Stereoscopic program and, before the conference starts, the 7th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering.

Here is one of my photographs from Singapore that was shown during the stereoscopic imaging presentation. We found this wonderful display of waylang golek puppets in a Singapore store, Mata-Hari. I took the photograph as a stereoscopic pair and it is presented here first as one of the original photographs and second as an anaglyph.

I had the opportunity to visit and present my work to a number of schools during my time in Singapore, including Egg Story Digital Arts School, the Temasek Design School at Temasek Polytechnic, the School of Interactive and Digital Media at Nanyang Polytechnic, the School of Digital Media and Infocomm Technology and the School of Design at Singapore Polytechnic, Intense Animation Academy and SAE Institute Singapore.

Lucasfilm Animation also sponsored a public lecture at the studio.

Watch for future posts on my adventures in Morocco, Cannes and Singapore…

deep space II (aec). Originally uploaded to flickr by magrolino.

There is another photo here of 2005.1.

Here is 2003.1a and a detail from that print work:

2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

Detail from 2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

And here are some still frames from the animated work, 2007.2a (you can see short excerpts from the piece here and here):

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

The lecture will be at 12:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 January 2009 in the Jepson Center Auditorium. I will be presenting my body of work, focusing on the inspiration and ideas behind the work, with particular emphasis on the two series of works represented by the two pieces above.

While the festival ends on 31 January, the museum currently is scheduled to continue showing my print and animation throughout 2009.

[Personal aside: I am particularly excited to see tonight’s performance by Ben Neill and LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Robots).]

The Ars Electronica center is one of the longest-established centers for new media art, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year. On 2 January 2009, they celebrated the grand opening of a new building and the start of Linz’s year as the European Union Cultural Capital.

In the Center’s new building, Deep Space is a dedicated projection gallery with the capacity to show 4K (3840 by 2160 pixels), stereoscopic, 16 meter by 9 meter projections simultaneously on the wall and floor! With my still images, visitors will be able to zoom in on the full detail of the works, allowing them to explore the works in a way that until now was only possible in my studio. Very exciting.

Through fortuitous circumstance, I was in Linz for a site visit on the day the Deep Space projectors were turned on for the first time and my pieces were the first images to be projected in the space.

Here I am standing in front of a portion of EPF:2003:V:B:5::383(25) with a silly happy grin.

Here is my partner, Sean, acting as human scale in the space and standing in front of a projection of my time-based work, 2007.3. The horizontal red laser line is for projector alignment. Four projectors are being used for the wall and another four for the floor (one of the projectors shut down with in a few minutes of starting up). The bright horizontal and vertical bands are the projector overlaps that had yet to be blended away in the installation. (All of this is from early December, when the new building still was very-much-under-construction.)

In addition to the still images being shown, I prepared site-specific versions of 2006.7 and 2007.3 to be shown in the space. The two time-based works were recreated to take full advantage of the 4K cinematic projectors. Below are reduced stills from 2006.7 (Deep Space) and 2007.3 (Deep Space).

Additional events incorporating my work are being planned throughout the year, including during the Center’s annual Ars Electronica Festival, 3–8 September 2009. I will post details here and on my Events page as soon as they are available.

Links:

Kenneth A. Huff: Selections from Ôr’ganik Constructions in Deep Space

Deep Space

Ars Electronica Center

Ars Electronica Festival

The book is Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. The fun part is that I did not know that I was mentioned in the book. I had purchased it as reference for a programming class I teach and stumbled upon my name weeks later.

I am a long-time fan of both Mr. Reas’s and Mr. Fry’s work. Their efforts to develop the Processing programming language and their individual works are inspiring (example and example). In the book, Mr. Reas writes a bit about my print-based work and the inspiration behind it.

In other book news, Aesthetic Computing has gone paperback:

I created the cover artwork for the book and wrote a chapter about my Encoding with Prime Factors series. (There is some information on the series and process here and some example works are shown here.)

When in New York recently, I also noticed on the bookshelves that Bruce Wand’s Art in the Digital Age is available in softcover. A number of my pieces appear in the book.

In unrelated reference photography, here are a couple of details from buckeye seeds and seed pods:

Back to preparations for Saturday’s installation…

There are six screens, in L-shaped pairs (two screens are obscured from view). The time-based works shown, from left to right, are 2007.3, 2007.6.3 and 2007.4. (These all are very recent works that have not made it onto my web site.) Also on display are fourteen print works:

Shown here are 2001.1, 2003.1a, 2003.2d, 2004.2c and 2000.16b.

As an overarching theme for much of my time-based work, I have been working with the ancient elements. Many ancient philosophies looked to a small group of archetypal elements as a framework for understanding the physical world, explaining patterns and substance in nature. Currently, I am working with the four ancient elements common to Buddhist, Greek and Hindu philosophies — earth, air, fire and water. Here are sample frames from the fire time-based works shown last night:

2007.3, animation, seamless loop; 2007; 1 hour, 20 minutes, high definition (1080 x 1920, 30 fps).

2007.6.3, animation, seamless loop (work in progress); 2007; 2 channels; 1 minute, 15 seconds each; high definition (1080 x 1920, 30 fps).

2007.4, animation, seamless loop (work in progress); 2007; 7 minutes, high definition (1080 x 1920, 30 fps).

The installation also will be in place for the closing party on Saturday, 1 November. Just to keep it interesting, I will be switching out all of the projections…

The New Jersey School of Architecture at NJIT has invited me to present my work as part of their Fall 2008 Lecture Series. I will be giving a broad overview of my body of work, as well as the intent and inspiration behind the work.

The event takes place in Weston Lecture Hall 1.

While I have maintained a blog-ish News section for more than ten years, I recently decided that I wanted to jump on the great blogging band wagon. It is a wonderful format for posting news, but also for sharing the creative process, technical information and a selection of things that inspire.

No promises regarding frequency of updates, content, etc. I will do my best to keep it interesting.

Take care,

—Ken