The Ars Electronica Center is a long-standing new media art center in Linz, Austria. The Center is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year with the opening of a new facility, also coinciding with Linz being the European Union 2009 Cultural Capital. The center’s annual Ars Electronica Festival is one of the foremost new media art festivals.

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.

I just returned from a five-week visit to Singapore. I was invited by Lucasfilm Animation Singapore to do some training for the apprentices in their Jedi Masters Program. While there, I also gave seminar presentations on my body of work, a behind-the-scenes, technical look at the same, and on stereoscopic imaging (its history, some important technical concepts and the creation of anaglyphic images from photography).

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…

Research for a work-in-progress…

The bottom row is a stereoscopic anaglyph (arguably a redundancy), just in case you have any red/blue glasses about your person.

“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation, I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications”
— Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species
1859
 
(Happy belated birthday, Mr. Darwin.)

Somekindeous vineyflowerous, growing outside our front door. Over the past month or so, this vine has produced over one hundred blooms.