How much of a language is silent? What does it look like when you take the silence out? Can we use code as a tool to answer these questions?
"silenc is a tangible visualization of an interpretation of silent letters within Danish, English and French.
One of the hardest parts about language learning is pronunciation; the less phonetic the alphabet, the harder it is to correctly say the words. A common peculiarity amongst many Western languages is the silent letter. A silent letter is a letter that appears in a particular word, but does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation.
A selection of works by Hans Christian Andersen is used as a common denominator for these 'translations'. All silent letters are set in red text. When viewed with a red light filter, these letters disappear, leaving only the pronounced text.
silenc is based on the concept of the find-and-replace command. This function is applied to a body of text using a database of rules. The silenc database is constructed from hundreds of rules and exceptions composed from known guidelines for 'un'pronunciation. Processing code marks up the silent letters and GREP commands format the text.
silenc is visualized in different ways. In one form of a book, silent letters are marked up in red yet remain in their original position. In another iteration, silent letters are separated from the pronounced text and exhibited on their own pages in the back of the book, the prevalence of silent letters is clearly evident."
(Momo Miyazaki, Manas Karambelkar and Kenneth Aleksander Robertsen)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
cunicode: Digital Fabrication and Additive Manufacturing
"We want everyone on earth to be able to design & make their own things, we dream in an universal access to the production means, and we believe in the popularization of design tools & 3D-Printing to make ideas real.
cunicode is a design studio for 3DPrint & creative fabrication; the way things are made is changing, so, the way things are designed will change as well.
Founded in early 2011 to explore the business opportunities of Additive Manufacturing through design. We design inspiring objects and services to be produced digitally."
(Bernat Cuni)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
onformative a studio for generative design: unnamed soundsculpture
"The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sound sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a Laura Keil, a berlin based dancer to interpret a musical piece - Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek - as closely as possible with the movement of her own body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud), doing so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process.
The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective.
Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the 'alternative worlds' we project and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again.
Using 3 different microsoft kinect cameras the movement of the dancer was recorded into those 3d pointclouds that were synced and exported as one large dataset as Krakatoa particle files to be loaded into 3ds max for further rendering and creation of the 3d scene including the camera movement that is controlled by the audio as well."
(Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub, onformative a studio for generative design)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Syllabus for Information Aesthetics at UIC School of Art and Design
"This studio course investigates the database as cultural form (Manovich, 2001), in the context of data visualization, digital fabrication, and computational aesthetics. Traditionally viewed as a tool for scientific reasoning and data exploration, information visualization has emerged as an artistic practice, propelled by the democratization of data sources and the advancement of computer graphics. The massive amount of data collected and disseminated online constitutes the basis for this course. Participants will be introduced to the basic skills for developing creative projects in two-, three-, and four dimensions, such as indexes, graphs, prints, digitally fabricated objects and maps. Students will also become familiar with the a basic vocabulary to co-create and collaborate with professionals in future contexts.
The course focuses on current standards for web development and mobile applications, including HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, PHP, MySQL, and Processing(.js). Fundamentals in XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and programming are beneficial, but not required. Throughout the course, students are asked to utilize the class blog to collect and share resources, collaboratively collecting interesting data sources towards a final project. A series of presentations, screenings, readings, and discussions will expose students to creative projects and artworks in the context of information visualization. Each student selects a research topic followed by an in-class research presentation (see schedule). Participants will also present their work during class critiques and interdisciplinary workshops to receive qualitative feedback from the instructor(s) and the class."
(Daniel Sauter, University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Art and Design, Fall 2011)
Fig.1 Matt Wizinsky (2011). "Chicago unDensity", University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Joshua Nimoy: representing digital culture in film
"I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded 'equations' is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron."
(Joshua T. Nimoy)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
