"New Math" - Recent Algorithmic Art
Andy Lomas, Charles Fairbanks, Tim Quinn, Hollis Cooper, Nathan Selikoff, Milos Rankovic, Thomas Briggs
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art presents an international group exhibit of artists using computer algorithms, math based image generators and custom software for the production of abstract works. The show includes videos of animated algorithmic renderings, architecturally based works, internet generated images, 3D stereoscopes, art based on organic growth, as well as interactive pieces where visitors can create their own images.

Andy Lomas is a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning digital effects supervisor. His Aggregation series explores the complexity of organic form with intricate sculptural shapes generated by computer simulated growth systems. Using his own software to create the forms, biases and changes to environmental rules are used to create an incredible variety of structural shape.

Nathan Selikoff has abandoned the predefined processes of production to more fully explore the computational landscape of mathematics and beauty. He uses custom software to investigate strange attractors - visual representations of chaotic dynamical systems. Fascinated by the diversity and complexity of the raw images that come from simple sets of iterated functions, he enjoys the interplay of technical problem solving and artistic spontaneous interactivity.

Charles Fairbanks calls upon friends for an introduction: their laconic descriptions of the artist-ranging from "meaty" to "abstract dynamo"-lend linguistic thrust to his Googled Self-Portraits. The descriptions become keywords for a program to average the RGB data of the top fifty Google-Images. Determined by linguistic, personal, and virtual connections, the appropriated pictures become glowing color-fields of information while details linger at the threshold of perception.

Hollis Cooper believes virtual environments have opened a new era in the experience of architectural space. Digital representation has produced perspectives that are no longer based on physical space but instead on multiple-user organization and efficiency - a limitless number of vanishing points. She regards these developments optimistically, as a means of expanding our ability to suspend disbelief and project ourselves into the world around us, interacting more actively with and within it.

Tim Quinn is a nationally known Los Angeles sculptor and algorist. He has a long-standing love of recursion, which over the years he has applied to various visual material to produce a visually and conceptually stunning effect. His recent work explores a randomized kaleidoscope effect that defies easy understanding. Applying his own AppleScript Photoshop code to scanned images of his "Sculpey" objects, he achieves a global flattening of 3D space that doesn't flatten locally.

Thomas Briggs is a veteran of the art world with a 20 year history in computer animation production and teaching. As an animator/programmer he was often concerned with the mathematical representation of fluid, lifelike gesture. He realized that this notion could be inverted, that the gesture could be realized from mathematics directly, and used to create drawings which retain some connection to the scratch of pen on paper. He eschews algorithmic, or procedural processes, instead using simple periodic functions evolving over time.

Milos Rankovic received an AHRB Award for Doctoral Study in the Creative and Performing Arts to pursue his study of drawing: Theory and Practice of Handmade Distributed Representation. He offers "Volatile Public Static" a series of automated composites created from images culled from the web through his specialized software. In his doctoral winning words: "a networked component of a computationally collaborative working space. As such, it (metonymically) relates to an ongoing study concerned with the notion of commitment - chronically taken to be incompatible with deferral - and so, a study of the phantoms that still lurk within difference. In fact, as it applies to difference (rather than analysis), deferral is always already resolved in the nervous commitment, as stoppage, as presence, as difference. The computational investment in the art object is, therefore, found to be the most primitive and least oppressive form of investment, for commitment (in this sense, as selectivity, as semipermeability, or semiconductivity; i.e., as nonlinearity) is the essence of computation. While, locally, commitment is indeed resistance to flow?, globally, it facilitates the play?." [ read more ] »
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art - Web site »

May is Electronic Home Improvement & Home Automation month, and Smarthome is celebrating with a variety of events and specials throughout the month.
What is Electronic Home Improvement?
Improving your home involves more than installing a granite countertop or updating your landscaping. Electronic home improvement is far simpler and more cost-effective than construction or appliance replacement, but it can add substantial value to your home. Automate your lighting with simple, affordable, and easy-to-install products. Take advantage of existing wiring to install whole-house audio, surveillance systems, or security. Not sure what you want to do or how to do it? This month, you'll have access to a variety of ideas to help make your home a smart home.
What's in it for you?
This month, Smarthome will be featuring specials and project ideas, all designed to help make your home as smart as it can be. Think you have the smartest home in America? Compare your home with others across the country by submitting your home in our "Smartest Home in America" contest, and you could win a $1000 shopping spree at Smarthome.com! [ read more ] »
Electronic Home Improvement [ smarthome.com ] »
Win $1,000 Shopping Spree at Smarthome.com Smartest Home Contest
5-1 to 6-15-2006 »

Nostalgia & Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design
New Exhibition at BYU Museum of Art Explores Relationship of Nostalgia and Technology PROVO, Utah — At first glance, the terms “nostalgia” and “technology” make an unlikely, even incompatible combination. Technology invites change. Nostalgia resists. Technology looks to the future. Nostalgia clings to the past. But for centuries, these adversarial ideas have been harmoniously fused together, facilitating an acceptance of change and innovation by appealing to the past. “Nostalgia & Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design,” at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art from Dec. 2, 2005 through May 13, 2006, explores the role of art as a mediator in society’s acceptance and use of new technologies through objects, art, and ephemera representing a selection of domestic technologies. From the scientific instruments that shared shelf space with art objects and taxidermy in the collections of 17th-century nobility to the cabinet radio disguised as period furniture, technology often enters the home with familiar company. “We go about our lives as if nothing could be more natural than to consult Jeeves (the internet butler) for help with homework, to buy faceplates for our cell phones and skins for our IPods, or to step around the trilobite-shaped robot that’s vacuuming our laminate ‘wood’ flooring. We don't give a second thought to the fact that our television is hiding inside a piece of fine furniture or that deceased world leaders, like Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., try to sell us computers. We forget the foreign that has been grafted onto the familiar,” says Marc Olivier, BYU professor and guest curator of the exhibition. [ read more ] >>
BYU Museum of Art web site >>