Dr. Woohoo!

The hyper-talented Lee Brimelow and MNR show-n-tell different plug-ins from the present and future of plug-in development for the Creative Suite @ MAX 2009. This is a great video for Flash / Flex developers as well as a primer for designers to see what is possible when you connect-the-dots between code your favorite CS applications.

Celeste Motus, II movimento from dottore on Vimeo.

Continuing on my quest to rid the world of ugly color palettes, I have created a couple of new color palette options – leveraging Adobe Illustrator’s color tools, Kuler and In The Mod: Color Analytic applications – for openFrameworks (OF) and vvvv artists/developers. The incredibly talented defetto (check out his new site at abstractbirds.com) helped push me and developed the vvvv Patches and I received excellent beta testing support from vadim.

There are two types of colors tools that I will share with you: 1) Scripts that run within Illustrator and 2) several stand-alone applications, both of which export the color palettes as XML files in a format that’s compatible with OF and vvvv.

Kuler > Illustrator CS4 > openFrameworks
Illustrator has some incredible tools for editing color palettes as individuals or in groups. Simply create a color group, drop some color swatches in that group and double click it to explore all of your editing options (and/or check out Adobe’s online help for editing colors here). What most people may not realize is that via an ExtendScript – Adobe’s enhanced version of Javascript – can automatically determine how many colors and groups there are in a Swatches Panel and then make additions, changes, deletions or simply retrieve more information about each swatch, e.g., what the RGB values are of each swatch. Combined with the ability to read and write files, we can easily import and export colors to / from whatever formats we want. Unfortunately if we tried this in Photoshop, we would fail because our script wouldn’t be able to tell us how many swatches we have due to self-imposed limitations from Adobe [ I love you guys but come on, I've begged for this for how many years? ].

In the following video, I will walk you through the process of installing the ExtendScript, selecting a group of colors from the Kuler extension in Illlustrator, exporting them and importing them into openFrameworks.

Kuler > Illustrator > openFrameworks from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

This tutorial was built on a Mac using Adobe Illustrator CS4, Xcode and the fat version of openFrameworks v006 with the following addons (ofxTuio, ofxMSAFluid, ofxMSAInteractiveObject, ofxXmlSettings and ofxSimpleGuiToo).

1. ofxMSAFluid
for the kuler > AI > OF integration, as i mentioned previously, i’m using memo’s sweet ofxMSAFluid. the first thing you’ll want to do is follow memo’s instructions on downloading the OF addons for ofxMSAFluid here: memo.tv/ofxmsafluid. once you can build and run that project proceed to the next step.

2. kuler + ai magic
download and unzip the OF and the AI script from here: drwoohoo.com/downloads/Kuler_AI_OF.zip.

3. after completing steps 1 + 2, watch the video again if need be… the script + OF code will make more sense at that point.

Kuler > Adobe Illustrator CS4 > vvvv
For vvvv lovers, download the script that I wrote and vvvv Patches via defetto from here and follow the same process as described in the video up to ~4:30. Further instructions can be found in the download in the ReadMe-Kuler 2 vvvv.pdf.

ITM: Your Images and ITM: Webcam > openFrameworks
As previously mentioned, the second set of color tools for openFrameworks involves two stand-alone applications. The first, In The Mod: Your Images allows you to drag-n-drop images from your computer onto the application which then extrapolates the colors, analyzes and visualizes them and enables you to save then either directly to Illustrator or Photoshop or as XML files for Processing, openFrameworks or vvvv. In The Mod: Webcam supports the color functionality, however it lets you quickly capture colors via the video streaming in from your Webcam.

How do you save the colors from ITM: Your Images or ITM: Webcam to use in vvvv?
After selecting a palette, click on the vvvv icon (it’s black with white copy and says ‘vvvv’ on it), fifth to the left in the bottom-right corner of the application. A save dialog window will open. Select the location you would like to save it.

How do you import the colors into vvvv?
To import the XML color palette (as an xml file that includes the following variables: red, green, blue, frequency, relative frequency, and cumulative relative frequency) into vvvv you will need the following:

1) The latest version of vvvv
2) Download the vvvv Patches from here. Read the file ReadMe-In The Mod 2 vvvv.pdf for step-by-step instructions. As a bonus, there is an Illustrator script and set of instructions (ReadMe-Kuler 2 vvvv.pdf) on how to export color palettes directly from Illustrator.

Data Visualization à la Tufte + Rosling
More than a handful of years ago I was fascinated – and still am – with this concept of creating abstract visualizations of data as art. I imagined a world where our artwork would be intelligent. Adaptive. Semi-autonomous. I imagined an image of a Japanese Cherry Blossom tree hanging in your living room. When the value of any of your stocks changed, the blossoms or body language, if you will, of the tree would change. The language of these visual cues and gestures would be defined beforehand so that the day-to-day experience could be void of any unnecessary data. It would appear to be abstract.

Edward R. Tufte

During this time period, I discovered Edward Tufte and when I first saw the cover of Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, I was so excited. The image on the cover looked like a cloud formation representing data. To my dismay –which I could be wrong about – the book did not focus on using systems found in nature as visual metaphors for data.

Even if Tufte had explored this area and written about it, I lacked the tools and skills needed to sculpt the data into forms that were familiar, with behaviors that were a little bit peculiar to the uninformed but similar enough to register the differences on more of a subconscious level.

Like most the ideas that intrigue me, I sketch them out in my Moleskine and revisit them at random intervals. It wasn’t until I watched the TED talk entitled “Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen” that I found a common denominator between his wonderful approach to visualizing data and my more abstract variation. Hans was able to exploit the features that Flash provided for him - primarily interactivity + time with the ability to trace the history of the data points (what I like to call the rubber stamp approach to a BitmapData Object) – in order to expose emergent behaviors that were intrinsic within the data. I loved it.

The question then was, what other features within Flash can be used to represent different objects of data? Add to that the features of 3rd party libraries like PaperVision 3d, the Flint Particle system, Box2dFlash, JiglibFlash, etc., and we end up with a spectrum of unique ways to visual data. Obviously, gratuitous designs aside and what the purpose of the visualization is, there probably will only be a small percentage of the spectrum that is worthy.

Color Analytics
I have worked on analyzing and visualizing colors from images and live video streams off and on since 2005, namely within my In The Mod: Color Analytics project. I love searching for beautiful color palettes and creating tools that extrapolate, visualize and enable us (designers + developers) to easily use these color palettes in the tools we are comfortable with. Through the lifespan of the project, the tools have shape-shifted from scripts plug-ins and stand-alone applications that interfaced with After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, Maya, Processing and openFrameworks in one format or another.

For the duration of the project, I have used a 2d HSV color space to visualize the colors, where Hue relates to the x-position and is plotted as ROYGIV, and SV relates to the y-position. The scale of each circle defines the frequency that this particle color occurs in the image, whereas the circle represents a unique color from the entire population of colors sampled from the image. Although there are some issues with this color space, e.g., when red occurs, it randomly decides whether or not it will be on the left or right edges. This becomes a slight issue when I’m calculating the standard deviation +/or weighted mean of a palette, which I’ll typically use in order to find similar color palettes.

Fuelling the Fire, MiniCards Moo.com

However, after seeing the beautiful visualizations generated by this experiment, the slight error was acceptable and the end result was a series of prints and an ongoing and substantially successful run of artwork that I licensed to Moo for MiniCards, Business / Greeting and Postcards. A sample of which is included here with more designs and layouts available after the jump.

As a result of this work, I was recently working on a project for a client that lead me back to exploring different color spaces that I have sketched out through the years in my notebooks. There was one in color space in particular that has called my name ever since I first saw it in my friend Marcos’ work…

Encyclopedia of Life

I recently watched the TED talk by E.O. Wilson on saving life on Earth – before we destroy it – and was inspired specifically by his quest to establish the Encyclopedia of Life. Being a fan of Biomimicry, I was intrigued and I discovered the EOL website is alive and well. Digging deeper into the website, I went to the Technology Partners page and discovered that Adobe Systems was(?) a partner. There was a link that I clicked on and to my surprise, it took me to the work of two of my friends – the incredible Marcos Weskamp and Gever Tulley. Like Marcos’ Newsmap, there is a gorgeous treemap – which is a variation of the “treemap algorithm” that Ben Shneiderman and his team @ the University of Maryland developed – that contains each species of organism on Earth. I particularly loved how Marcos and Gever created layers of treemaps that are loaded as you dig deeper and deeper into the hierarchy of the species.

Colormaps

Havana blue and yellow / Amarillo y azul by Fabio Luis Vio Lyon

From the sketches of new color spaces in my notebook, the inspiration from Marcos, Gever and Ben’s work, and a discussion with my brilliant girlfriend Annette, I found a citation of Ben Shneiderman’s treemap algorithm and a tutorial in… Ben Fry’s excellent Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment book.My first step was to take my color analytics code, enhance it by adding a method to group colors together by finding clusters of colors who are friendly with each other. Without the clustering, we because of the nuances being seemingly similar colors, our Colormap would be divided into thousands if not millions of small rectangles. With my code in place, it then passes these groups to Ben’s magic code to generate a Colormap like the one below.

ColorMap generated in Processing

I was pleased with the results, however, I was intrigued by a conversation I had with Ben about connecting-the-dots between Processing and Maya and was also interested in revisiting some early Abstract Visualization sketches I created where, rather than visualizing the data as a 2d rectangle, I wanted to work in 3d space and effect the form and contents of the cubes that would automatically be generated. To do so, I added wrote a few methods in the Processing code that would automatically generate Maya’s MEL code and then pass that via a socket connection from Processing directly to Maya to execute. Translation: I’m using processing to analyze the colors, create the layout instructions for a 3d treemap and then telling Maya how to build those cubes.

Silhouette of the 3d model

However before the cubes are generated, I have wanted to move towards more organic and smooth forms and on something other than Catmull-Clark subdivisions. My good friend Simon Mehalek introduced me to TopMod, which you might have heard of via Marius + Generator.x as well and with the Python version, I was intrigued with the possibilities of creating the shell of each cube within TopMod via Python code that I asked Processing to generate. This allowed me generatively explore some basic explorations of Sierpinsky and Doo Sabin subdivision routines in TopMod, which in turn exports in a file format compatible with Maya.

Filling the frames

I wrote a few more methods in Processing that would automatically generate Maya’s MEL code and then pass that via a socket connection from Processing directly to Maya to execute. Translation: I’m using Processing to analyze the colors, create the layout instructions for a 3d treemap and then tell Maya how to build, deform and colorize those cubes, and import the TopMod generated frames around them.

Adding color

The floor, psych wall and overhead lighting were manually put in place, however the internal lighting to each cube is automatically placed. There’s no reason why all of the elements code be generated with code… but for this proof-of-concept, I was satisfied with doing it by hand.

Turning on the lights

In the future, although the frame of each cube does not serve a particular purpose other than to please my aesthetic sensibilities – or lack thereof – I would like to use the different properties inherent in the framing to symbolize different data elements. Because the cubes can act as containers / passive colliders, I am also interested in filling them up with liquid and exploring the nDynamic properties as another dimension to add to the visualization toolbox.

Perspective

How does this eventually turn into the intelligent, adaptive and semi-autonomous Japanese Cherry Blossom tree? The technology and know-how are there… it’s just a matter of time.

Dr. Woohoo –> HYPE –> AIR –> Illustrator from Joshua Davis on Vimeo.

Here’s a new HYPE video sneak peek from Dr. Woohoo.

When a great team of people start rallying behind a great concept… you get “make magic” buttons.

Then when you start talking about “multi-user” art creation and the ability for each participant to render the current state of the work in real time in illustrator… the future is looking really sexy.

Especially when it comes to this idea of editions. Editions has always existed as a duplicate of an original… an original that never changes. This presents a great opportunity to create editions… of a current state of an original that is ALWAYS changing… and modified by the public.

hype.joshuadavis.com

Branden Hall, Joshua Davis, Dr. Woohoo, Andy McDonald

Genetic Architectures vol II

Genetic Architectures vol II explores, through theory and practice, how algorithms can sculpt architecture coming from the perspective at ESARQ - UIC (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya) Barcelona. This is not a book where the code is exposed, unfortunately, however with articles from Alberto T. Estavez, Evan Douglis, Francois Roche and the well-thought out and eloquent prose of Karl Chu, I highly recommend it for any artist using code to generate their artwork and who is interested in knowing more about what magic is possible. Here are two ( GenCity | The Floral Obsession | Christina Cogdell’s lecture Metaphor, Ideology, or Process? | Digital-Botanic Architecture II the latest book by Dennis Dollens, the editor of Genetic Architectures vol I, which includes a free pdf version and a lot of Rhino work ) accompanying websites that I think you will enjoy. 

Autogenic Structures on Amazon

After reading the article by Douglis in Genetic Architectures vol II, I was thrilled when I found this new book by him. Beyond the somewhat redundant articles complimenting his contributions and innovative approach to teaching and pushing the boundaries, I found the descriptions and imagery to be the most satisfying. I was also surprised at many times Processing was referred to. I would have rather seen less descriptions about Douglis and more examples of the actual Processing + Rhino code the articles so often referred to.

Algorithmic Architecture on Amazon

Kostas connects the dots between the concepts of modern computational theories that embrace algorithms in what he refers to as algotecture, a precise and extremely detailed exploration into the language of and the code (Maya’s MEL scripts) used to generate said algotecture. It is a fascinating and ambitious attempt to contextualize the evolution of design in architecture, engineering and art that’s worthy of comparison to Karl Chu’s article in Genetic Architectures vol II. I only wish he had included more code for the sections on (Syn) biosis, Periplocus (Complexity) and Stochastic search. For at least some papers relating to this subject matter, you might want to refer to BioThings’s Alisa Andrasek’s list of references found here.

There is one correction I would like to make in relation to the following excerpt from the book:

‘Corporate architectural practices, such as SOM, NBBJ, or RTKL, use the computer simply as an efficiency tool while continuing to develop design through traditional manual means, and prominent avant-garde practices, such as Gehry, Morphosis, or Zaha Hadid, use the computer as a means of marketing and presentation, despite their unsubstantiated claims to the opposite. Occasionally, there are some young architects fresh out of school who may be able to use computational methods in design. Yet the majority of architecture practices, despite their appearance, are still developing ideas through their own human minds or by simplistic NURBS-based formal mongering.’

I have personally seen the computational design work created at Zaha’s firm and they have a firm grasp of using code to hijack and sculpt their commercial tools of choice. One needs to look no further than the work from Shajay who works in the Code | Design group at ZH. To be fair, this book was published in 2006, so it’s possible things were different at that point in time.

On a side note, Kostas was generous enough to provide us with the following pdf that explores + provides the code behind generating a 3d Fractal (L-Systems) in Maya using MEL:

Generating a 3d Fractal (L-System) via Maya’s Mel code

cradle to cradle on Amazon

On a path from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms of Nature to Janine Benyous’s talk on Biomimicry in action @ TED, I found cradle to cradle. C2C grabs you from the first page and pulls you into your living room to view the world from the eyes of an Architect and Chemist, McDonough and Braungart, respectively. Examining what chemicals are used and how they effect us, we travel from our living room to the structure of the house and outward through a journey that every person creating objects - from the designer, artist and architect -“ should read. The best part of C2C is when it looks to nature for inspiration in regards to how to build and not just minimize our negative effect on the world, but how to create and contribute with a positive end result.

Here’s a video of a talk that Bill McDonough gave at Bioneers 2000. The value of the 45 minutes it takes to watch this will pay for itself over and over again. It’s simply that good and that important.

——

After finding so much wonderful material on Architecture + Code, it begs the question, are there well-thought out books on Hybrid arts as well?

Glassblowing Chandeliers from bombonia on Vimeo.

“Find out about the many languages and tools available for both designers and developers to customize and automate Creative Suite for integration inlarger workflows.”

Be sure to check out the new Creative Suite Actionscript Wrapper Library (at about 33:30), the replacement for SwitchBoard and PatchPanel.

Flash on the Beach (FOTB) ‘09
As promised, here is a link to my slides + lecture notes. It took longer than expected due to reasons: 1) it was my turn to sit next to the sick, coughing family on the flight back from London, where in turn I was sick for the better part of a week; and 2) I felt I needed to exploit the format of the slides by explicitly adding detailed notes to each one – a luxury that an hour presentation simply does not give you. Be forewarned, the notes are random thoughts and it is in a raw and early stage of research. The insights and conclusions I make might lead you in circles, or you might find a grain of truth that is worthy of further examination.

A YouTube Channel for Intelligent Video Art
As I worked my way through several books on Cybernetic Art, Artificial Life Art and Genetic Art, I created a spreadsheet of the names, titles, urls, etc. of video art that continued to grow and grow and grow. I was able to include only a fraction of the video art within my presentation at FOTB, but I wanted to share the entire list with you.

To my amazement, a large number of quality, avant garde videos are available on YouTube. However, with the exception of the excellent MediaArtTube, most of the videos I found were not easily available, especially from an iPhone / iPod Touch. With that in mind, I would like to share with you a new YouTube channel: In The Mod: Video Art++.

The Vasulka Archives
As much as it pains me to find out that a book I desire is out-of-print and unavailable, a void of greater size is created when the same is true for an important piece of video art. There were numerous times during my research for my presentation that I simply could not find relevant videos online. During a conversation I had with Simon from the Santa Fe Complex, he mentioned the Vasulka’s Archive. It turns out that from the late 60s the Vasulka’s have amassed an enormous collection of tapes, papers, videos, articles or magazines of avant garde related pieces for their archive. The archive consists of artwork from a variety of different artists who would donate their personal collection to the Vasulka’s for various reasons including the fact that they knew the Vasulka’s would take great care with their work.

We are fortunate to have Woody and Steina still with us and it is the perfect time to explore a relationship with a foundation to digitally archive this library so that it can easily be shared with future generations. With that said, if you know of someone with a track record of protecting artwork with the highest amount of integrity as well as funding such an endeavor, please let me know and I will forward their information on to the Vasulkas.

Hiatus
On a side note, I wanted to sincerely thank everyone who attended the conference as well as John and Joe for inviting me back for a 3rd year in a row. I feel at home when I’m in Brighton and I love seeing all of my friends again and celebrating this crazy, wonderful journey that we are on. John + Joe put together a conference that feels more like a functional family getting together to share with each other wonderful ideas. With that said, it is time for me to hibernate for at least a year from the conference circuit and focus my energy on creating artwork using the tools that I have created as well as hijacking existing features and functions from a worthy list of creative and mentally stimulating applications. I look forward to seeing you again at some point in the future, as much as I look forward to creating artwork that I would love to share with you.

All that is solid melts into the air. from Sooz on Vimeo.