labs.hapticdata.com » art

Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship

Kyle — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:22:57 +0000

It was announced on Friday, December 18th that I am one of five recipients of the Northern Lights organization’s Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship funded by the Jerome Foundation. Art(ists) on the Verge is administered by Steve Dietz, the founding director of Zero1 San Jose Artists Bienalle and previously the founding director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center. This fellowship is aimed towards those working at the edge of art and technology, predominantly in a public space and this year there is an additional emphasis on networks.

I am looking forward to being a part of such a great program and am very excited to have received this opportunity. For the next nine months, I will be focused on working towards my goal of creating an installation space that encompasses a sense of memory and identity. The fellowship culminates in opportunities to present work at this years SparkFest in October.

Visual synopsis of the five fellows:

Mobile applications, public distribution and Art

Kyle — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:35:07 +0000

Ever since iTunes released its app store for the iPhone, my interest in the artistic possibilities of mobile applications has been on the rise. In my mind, this marked the first time that I could possibly develop a project that could be widely distributed and easily used by people in public spaces. The ability to work with the accelerometer and the multi-touch screen also seemed exciting. My enthusiasm was later curbed, as I learned more about Apple’s NDA (which has been lifted) and considered the disadvantages in having to distribute all applications through the iTunes app store, this still strikes me as a huge bottleneck.

My friend Judson Koehn, designed an iPhone application called Pixi, with Tiny Wonder Studios; here in Minneapolis. From talking to him and the developer Jesse, I heard the hassles and the joys of that sort of development. Limitations in its graphics capabilities, and difficulties getting the application to pass Apple’s review team. Now with version 1.0 released (a very complete 1.0 release), it is an application that I enjoy playing around with and has artistic merit. Pixi is a essentially a digital spirograph, you use your fingers to control variables such as radius, stroke width and color and may others. The features in Pixi make it possible to get a large range of results and you can also load preset “Pixi’s” from a default gallery or “PixiNet.”

Generative Applications like Pixi and the network functionality of applications like Ocarina have some interesting possibilities. Northern Lights published the article Non-”FLOS” Public Space and Aesthetic Invention and use Pixi as an example. The writer mentions using similar applications to control the facade of buildings in a local area, ideas like this really deserve more consideration. I’m still not convinced that there is a mobile phone that offers the ideal platform for these experimental projects, but hopefully there will be.

Vormator book release

Kyle — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:26:26 +0000

In May of 2007 I participated in an experiment titled Vormator: The Elements of Design. The brief was to build an artwork using only the 8 vector shapes that they provide you with. My concept was to use these eight shapes in the development of my Generative Compositional Engine, an application that algorithmically creates artwork based on compositional rules.

After 18 months the book, featuring the work of 80 artists, is now officially released. You can view sample pages and order online at vormator.com.