_playGnd by Nick Briz

Nick Briz launched few weeks ago an excellent and fun platform to learn and play with webGL, it is called  _playGnd, a perfect introduction to webGL and its possibilities working through animated threedimensional objects on the web. I find this project very interesting, specially for those ones who are not into programming and could think that webGL it's too complex.  

The _playGnd has three simple sections which Nick has explained very well through a video tutorial series that introduce you to be in touch and generate threedimensional environments easily using pre-programmed functions and by copying and pasting and modifying codes from different libraries. These are the 3 sections, explained into the post; the [1] graphix[toCode] interface, the [2] realtime editor, && the [3] sketches archive. See more;

[1] graphix[toCode] interface
http://threejsplaygnd.brangerbriz.net/gui/

"Software is the medium that is not a medium. [...] Code is never viewed as it is. Instead code must be compiled, interpreted, parsed, and otherwise driven into hiding by still larger globs of code. Hence the principle of obfuscation." - Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (2012)

"In this first section you generate code for basic three.js geometry using a GUI (graphical user interface). Traditionally GUI’s ‘obfuscate’ code. In the interest of making things more accessible they hide the code, and as a consequence compromise digital literacy. In the _playGnd the GUI is still concerned with accessibility, but in a way that augments the code rather than obfuscating it." - Nick Briz

[2] threejs [realtime] editor
http://threejsplaygnd.brangerbriz.net/editor/editor.html

"An iPhone is not technology, it's packaging and conventions. [...] Your software choices are like any addiction or religion, they want your loyalty and they want your money and they want you to think like them. [...] it's culture politics masquerading as technology." - Ted Nelson, The Myth of Technology/Computers for Cynics(2012)

Traditionally we don’t tend to think of our tools as being ‘political’, but software isn’t neutral. It reflects and imposes the politix of the folks who create it (some, like Galloway, argue it is itself ideology). The _playGnd is no less political and no less bias than any other digital tool, but it stems from a different ethic (an experimental new-media art ethic). For this reason you’ll notice that the editor is a little bit different from the conventional. First, it’s built into the browser + shares the same space as your sketch, which allows for immediate feedback >> you can experiment, tinker, play in ‘realtime.’ Second, the editor includes a ‘snippets’ menu to encourage copying + pasting + modifying + collaging code. - Nick Briz

[3] sketches archive
http://threejsplaygnd.brangerbriz.net/archive/

after you finish working on a sketch in the editor you can ‘archive_it’, which adds your sketch to the xanalogically inspired archive. You can view all the other sketches saved from the _playGnd in the archives as well as remix (fork + edit your own variation of) any sketch in the archive. - Nick Briz

Credits: _playGnd has been buit on the shoulders of these open source projects: three.js (most importantly), HTML Editor (heavily modified version), CodeMirror, and dat.GUI. Also makes use of AsciiEffect.js ( by zz85 ), CSS3DRenderer.js (by mr doob ), Detector.js (by alteredq + mr doob ), ShaderToon.js (by alteredq + mr doob ), proxy.php (by Abdul Qabiz ), and tween.js (by sole ). Some great help from Branger_Briz. Inspired by the ideas/worx of Katie Salen, Mary Flanagan, Alexander Galloway, Martin Heidegger, Marshall McLuhan, and most importantly Ted Nelson && mr doob.

More info about all the credits and inspiration that Nick took to build this platform is on the bottom of this page.

The following still images are some tests made by different artists for the launching of  _playGnd , click on the images to see them. To check out all the (big already) archive go here.

firstStudy without plane by Emilie Gervais

Moody Vibes by Claudia Maté

Rock/through/2planez by Jenifer Chan

Jeremy Couillard

Programming Pyramids

Jeremy Couillard has been working in his new project "My Time in the Cult of Melting Ancestors" for around a year. Jeremy has created diverse number of pieces, including a great 19 min. video you can watch into the post, several acrylic paintings, and kinetic sculptures which are connected together with the video and are all controlled by a plinth in the center of the exhibition at Louis B James in NY,  a solo show that will be running til next May 31, 2013. See more;

Press release, (an essay on Super Mario):

"A Japanese playing card company, loosely translated as Leave Luck to Heaven, develops a video game based around a new mythology where its participants become two Italian plumber brothers, who, by undergoing a Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey through giant green pipes, are transported to a realm of evil turtle beings and anthropomorphic mushrooms. They discover in themselves god-like powers through plants, fungi and astral guidance, as they travel through realms, or worlds, under, on, and above ground. Dark worlds, day worlds, ice worlds, worlds on treetops, worlds underwater. The brothers can break brick walls with their heads, jump on bullets, walk through walls and go down hidden tubes; they accumulate coins to purchase their reincarnation and climb secret plants hidden in boxes to walk on clouds. In lava-soaked, labyrinthine brick castles they battle giant turtle soldiers in order to rescue a human princess, who is always in another castle and replaced with a mushroom man. They finally find her in the 8th world, after completing something perhaps similar to the Buddhist 8-fold path. 

Mario is the first hero created in the computational realm. At his core he is binary numbers, code, and logic gates. He is electrons travelling through a Ricoh 2A03 8-bit processor. Through all of us he was brought to life by manipulating an early Christian symbol of the cross and two red Japanese suns on a controller hooked up to a minimalist grey box reminiscent of Robert Morris plugged into a glass tube of deflection coils and electron guns. Children sat in dark rooms engaged in the first of many computational cultist rituals under the glow of the cathode containing images of the plumber hero who could be almost telepathically controlled. Soon Mario embarked on a myriad of adventures to new worlds: riding egg-eating baby dragons; battling robed ghosts, naked ghosts, and other increasingly complex enemies. Then Game Boy came out: the first portable computational mythology. Soon after, 

Mario discovered the mathematical third dimension, began jumping through paintings to enter his worlds. He climbed mountains, went to new planets and galaxies, discovered computational gravity, and began to collect crystals along with coins. Mario is an analog for lo-fi spirituality and digital age mysticism. His cosmology is every bit as cryptic as the Popol Vuh, as Vedic rituals or symbolic flesh eating, though from the beginning his story is one we don’t believe but in which we are every bit as invested."

MY TIME IN THE CULT OF MELTING ANCESTORS

Acrylic paintings on panel - 48"x48"

Installation at Louis B James

http://www.louisbjames.com

Floor 1: An installation of paintings, kinetic sculpture and dioramas built around a 20ish minute video that takes place in the space you observe it in. Kinetics react to the video and are all controlled by a plinth in the center.

Floor 2: A beeping meditation room that is activated by pushing a red button. A mandala begins to spin, 6 screens light up and start beeping. The viewer is invited to use the beeps and images for meditation.

Jonathan Cecil

Portrait of Rafah digital print. 46″ x 46″

Jonathan Cecil created between 2008 and 2011 interesting three-dimensional floating cityscapes generated from satellite and aerial imaging data featuring a particular and beautiful aesthetic. 

"Easy access to aerial imagery and geospatial information is changing how we view and interact with our urban environments. I use these resources to investigate geologic and urban structures, particularly in areas of political interest. This series of work uses satellite and aerial imaging data to explore and to critique the illusionary boundary of macro and micro scales through defamiliarization. Images of urban areas are the input for a computational process that produces a high resolution 3D mesh which is rendered with ray tracing software to produce a final image." - Jonathan Cecil. See more;

Chicago Fly
http://jonathancecil.com/chicago-fly/

Los Angeles Spin

http://jonathancecil.com/los-angeles-spin/

Basrah Zoom

http://jonathancecil.com/basrah-zoom/

What we call sculpture at CERMÂ

Ecstasy rmx by Francoise Gamma

CERMÂ presents a new exhibition titled What we call sculpture which focuses on the possibilities of sculpture through the use of digital tools in the context of Internet and the exhibition possibilities of the online medium. It features works by Chris Timms, Francoise Gamma, Kareem Lofty and Manuel Fernandez. Check it out through the interactive and virtual walkthrough, here.

"Since the advent of video games and the Internet, the notion of actual physical space has been complemented by the existence of virtual spaces, built using code and 3D software where graphics you can see on the screen not only occupy a physical space as storage on a hard disk, but through contemplation or interaction with simulated spaces we can perceive aspects as size, material and volume, all typical of traditional sculpture.

From Mario Bros for Nintendo 64 in the entertainment industry, through social networks like Second Life, to come up with new ways in which we perceive the real world using simulators such as Google Earth, the products generated by 3D software tools have changed dramatically shaped the way we relate and understand the real space, so much so, that an architect can now recognize the version of AutoCad with which a building is designed.

What we call sculpture is a collection of works that use sculpture procedures, installation, intervention, etc. as a means of digital experimentation to develop artistic strategies online." - CERMÂ. See more;

New Ruins by Manuel Fernandez

Manuel presents New Ruins. Google Earth Tour, a site specific installation with two parts: A greec doric column model extracted from a 3D Parthenon model,   emapped and installated in the 3D gallery scale space from the ceiling to the floor. And the second part it's New Ruins. Google Earth Tour, a screencapture video documenting the remapping geolocated installations’s project made in Google Earth, in wich the most known ancient ruin models have been remapped and installated in their original places.

Sensual Objects by Chris Timms

Sensual objects originated as looped .gifs relating to the sensual space of experience, typically attributed to physical presence.

Hummel head by Kareem Lotfy

Ecstasy rmx by Francoise Gamma

Francoise Gamma presents Ecstasy rmx a digital animated 3D sculpture, inspired by the saturnian night, the medieval poetry and fractals in the social networks.

Exhibition map_

One Good Emperor by Ben Alun-Jones

"There were ‘Five Good Emperors’ of ancient Rome - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. These five men were the most successful of their kind. ‘One Good Emperor’ asks if by mixing and blending their best attributes can we find the greatest Emperor of the Roman Empire?

Using his 3D scanning and remixing tools, Ben Alun-Jones has scanned the busts of these five emperors from the British Museum in London. These scans have then been blended to create different mixes of One Good Emperor. Several attempts to find the perfect mix will be shown and reproduced physically. Many of these classical busts were also reproductions and so the idea of the original can often be distorted. This project questions the notions of value and uniqueness in a world where any object can be scanned, sampled and reproduced, simply by recording the object on video." -  the Works Collective. See more;

This work has been recently shown in Ventura Lambrate Milan as part of the Works Collective.

Spheres 1-20 by Sara Ludy

Last month Sara Ludy had her first solo show in New York at Klaus Gallery, where she presented a 20 min single channel video work titled "Spheres 1-20" which was projected on the gallery wall featuring a rotating fly-through of 3D-generated environments comprised of twenty episodes on a loop.
As Klaus Gallery describes the process of; these “Spheres” are rendered digitally, then projected onto colored paper in Ludy’s studio and recaptured with a digital camera. The resulting high/low-fi picture quality mediates between the virtual and the physical spaces in which the artist works. See more;

"In Spheres 1-20, ambiguous forms float in polygonal landscapes created from snippets sourced from Ludy’s wanderings of the internet, personal photos, and samples of computer-aided-drafting motifs. Taking two-dimensional screen captures and image-mapping them onto three-dimensional rotating forms, Ludy creates her Spheres as virtual architectures that refer to an amorphous and psychological space. Between each 1-minute episode of the video, abrupt cuts shift the focus to new structures while an audible synthesized drone changes pitch with each reveal, similar to the shift found between levels in video gameplay." - Klaus Gallery

Andrew Rutherdale

Andrew Rutherdale_

"Much has been made of the networked nature of media in the context of post-internet art. The production, presentation and dissemination of the art-object are undertaking a radical shift mirroring similar shifts in technology and communication. Artists are harnessing the creative possibilities offered by emergent technologies that play a vital role in shaping social relations in a global hyper-networked era. It is appropriate that within the technologies themselves there is a complex network of relations. At present these relations are synthesized in the general-purpose computer. The mobility of the laptop and the emergence of portable devices with central and graphical processing units increase the potential for synthesized technology. It is these conditions that lead artists to produce networked art-objects that conjoin media and are presented and disseminated through a number of different platforms. The networked art-object inhabits a multiplicity of forms." - Andrew Rutherdale.  See more;

"The Breathers addresses the idea of the body without organs: the undifferentiated, primordial state that underlies reality. A self-organizing structure free from stratification, the body without organs is analogous to the network. The Breathers present structures that are not fully formed or defined, but are in the process of becoming." - Andrew Rutherdale.

Click images to enlarge_

from The Breathers series

from The Breathers series

New Age Demanded .com by Jon Rafman

New Age Demanded (Dripman Stingel), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

Good to see new pieces from the New Age Demanded series by Jon Rafman at www.newagedemanded.com 

"Inspired by classical Greek busts, Jon Rafman uses computer software to digitally render three-dimensional forms. The forms act as the structural surface on which two-dimensional Internet-sourced images are applied. The series is presented as large-scale archival pigment digital prints. Each print is created with its own specific texture and sculptural mutation. Rafman uses historically recognizable works from canonized artists like Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky as the subjects of his appropriations." - Stefan Hancherow. See more;

N.A.D. (Muscleface Franz Marc), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

N.A.D. (Swirlyface Picasso), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

N.A.D. (Bulbous Masson), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

N.A.D. (Ribbed Delaunay), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

New Age Demanded (Pockmarked O'Keeffe), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

New Age Demanded (Swirlyface Oppenheim), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

New Age Demanded (Futurismo Delaunay), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 60x40 inches

N.A.D. (Greenbeanman Signac), 2012 - Archival Pigment Print - 147 x 107cm

NewAgeDemanded.com