Aaron Oldenburg    
Baltimore, USA
http://aaronoldenburg.net  

Project: Cho-Am

Visit the cremation site of Pol Pot as a sleepwalker. Interpret the world your character is inhabiting by their gestures and brief glimpses inside their head. This game does not have an ending until you decide to leave. Game time is connected to the current real time in Cambodia. The real life cremation site of Pol Pot in Cho-Am* is a place of contradictory spiritual and political significance. As a "good-luck" shrine, offerings are continuously left by visitors who hope to have assistance in their prayers from a main architect of the Cambodian auto-genocide. One of these visitors, a Thai businessman, constructed a hand-made spirit house at the site as thanks for Pol Pot appearing in a dream to him and giving him winning lottery numbers. This is a way of dealing with the memory and presence of someone responsible for pain and destruction that is outside of the realm of forgiveness and punishment. The site itself, across from a casino in a small town on the border with Thailand, in the region of Anlong Veng (a previous base of the Khmer Rouge), has very little aside from a tin roof covering a mound of dirt where Pol Pot's ashes used to be, a burn bin, a couple of spirit houses, and a hut near the entrance where a guard (the wife of a former Khmer Rouge general) sits and takes admission payment. It is an otherwise empty area with a powerful history.

tag: videogames

Brian Schrank
Chicago. USA
http://amomentfreefromdarkness.com/

Project: A Moment Free from Darkness 
      

A Moment Free from Darkness is video art game about feeling empathy for a girl sold into sex slavery by her parents. Situations are presented through her subjective experience ranging from the hopeful to the horrific. The game has four acts that represent a cycle that repeats many times everyday of her life. The experience does not flow like a normal game. Each act feels distinct and demands cognitive work from players to thread one moment with the next and understand the game as a narrative whole. The game is played on four platforms sequentially to evoke an increasing sense of immersion through the first three acts (played on mobile, desktop, and Oculus Rift 2, respectively) and a drop off of immersion in a final act of healing and recovery (played on the Apple Watch).

tag: videogames

Hugo Paquete
Portugal
https://about.me/hugo.paquete

Project: Phase Shift

The generative metamedia installation and performance Phase Shift (2016) explores an aesthetic interpretation and contamination between art and science, taking as reference the concept “double slit experiment” developed by the scientist Thomas Young in (1800). Back then he proposed a theory for the understating of light waves that generated interference and diffraction with each other like the sound waves, creating a light wavering pattern in a close relation between sound, matter and light. This concept is used in this project that I present as a reference for the visual constituents of the work integrated as a system of reaction in a chain of events: from image “light frequency and speed”, to computer modular programming “logical constituents”, passing to performative aspects of interaction with technology “indeterminism of the gesture and technology operatively” to the sound properties “emerging and decay of sonic events”. The objective was to approach the light frequency as a possibility to compose a generative sound composition of “non-deterministic music” which is directly linked to the frequency of the image: “light”, “speed” and “interference”, generate together a stochastic set of sonic events mediated through light sensors that trigger automatic events in a disordered module of a reactive diffusion system. Other aspect that was important in the development of this experiment is stimulate the level of the human sonic cognition and perception, the light as a sonic experience mediated and transformed through technology as a material, immanence and event. This experience is present in the limits of the visible territory of the real, as an energy or an electromagnetic field that flows in a continuum state of decay like the sound. The technology and science in this project are used as a metaphysical symbolic system passive to generate an aesthetic experience through the hyper-optical and hyper-sonic technological apparatus of the modern society and technological dispositives.

tag: generative arts

Huseyin Mert Erverdi
Istanbul. Turkey
www.merterverdi.com

Project: Breaking Wave 	   

“Breaking Wave” is a fractal representation of an ocean wave. It stylistically calls attention to the medium of the 19th century painting, specifically to the style of impressionism. However with close observation of the nature of the visual form, texture and color patterns associated with the artwork, it becomes curiously ambiguous as it is not a painting but a process of fractal based mathematical iteration which creates the particular forms, textures and colors as no brush strokes or any kind of filter plugins were used in the process.

Western art in the 19th century was characterized by a crisis in representation. Many experienced a strong sense of alienation as they felt they were living in an age distinctively different from previous times and struggled to find new ways of understanding and representing the emerging new world. In the second half of the 19th century, Japanese art offered them, especially the impressionists, a new way of looking at the world, which inspired them to break free of the constraint rules of the academy.

“The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (1831), a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai is probably the most famous image of the era which is a rendering of a large ocean wave where the top breaks off into smaller self-similar fractal like waves; the image vastly inspired impressionism and western modernism. Today we face a similar crisis as the digital revolution alters the way we create art by injecting its own aesthetics. In a sense “Breaking Wave” is a meditation on the aesthetics of new media art through the historical lens of “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” which by itself triggered a profound change in the representation of the world around us, almost two centuries ago.

tag: generative arts

Jockel Liess
London. UK
www.jockelliess.org 

Project: Fluid variations 	   

Fluid variations’ is a meditative audiovisual environment.

Indeterminate in is very nature, the structure of the piece is a terrain of possibilities, and as such has no beginning, end, or in the traditional sense progression. Its temporal arrangement is rather referential to the perception of time as a stream of continual moments, each moment containing the ability of transient contraction and expansion. The fluctuating textures, comprising image and sound, stand in a dualistic correlation of co-existing harmony. Multilayered strands of visual and acoustic transformation exist in momentary autonomy, and are synchronised only in their corresponding behavioural pattern over time.

tag: generative arts

Scordato Julian
Pordenone.  Italy
http://www.julianscordato.com

Project: Cosmophonies

Cosmophonies is a generative work based on the sonification of star data related to the north polar constellations. Sound parameters are defined by certain observation data as well as physical characteristics of stars: sound duration is proportional to the distance from the Earth, amplitude is calculated considering the apparent magnitude, frequency changes randomly according to the spectral class, while spatialization depends on the celestial coordinates. Six temporal dimensions (such as musical tempi) are added in order to activate the stars with a combinatorial system that virtually produces a perpetual change. Listeners may feel lost in a hypnotic space however distant and beyond their grasp.

tag: generative arts

Ken Byers 
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
http://interactionalmedia.com

Project: Non-Cartesian

Full-body motion interactive, 3D tectonic projection and sound.

Body motion interaction with digital new media especially with the rise of new media VR developments, choreographed movement with digital media and artist interactive installations, show the importance of further research into body sense and new interactive technologies. A critical review of body perception theories, from media theorists, discussing the body and technology, informed the theory and experimental practice in this research. Case studies were also made from digital-media artists working in the area of body interactives with VR, interactives, and sound art, who have explored body sense and interaction with technology. These frameworks support this research into proprioception and interaction with 3D surround visuals and sound. Simultaneous body motion interaction with 3D virtual and surround sound were explored in experimental practice with interaction of 8 body-joints, in world space coordinates.

tag: generative arts

Nils Völker
Germany
http://www.nilsvoelker.com/content/16x12/index.html

Project: 16 × 12

The installation is mainly made out of ordinary garbage bags which are selectively inflated and deflated by small fans controlled by a microcontroller.

The plastic bags are inflated and deflated in controlled rhythms, creating wavelike animations across the wall. Although each bag is mounted in a stationary position, the sequences of inflation and deflation create the impression of lively movements. Forms appear from the matrix and disappear back into the surface. In this way shapes and the boundaries of the installation itself start to dissolve.

tag: generative arts

Sergio Mantilla Soler
Bogotá, Colombia

Project: CONVERGENCE - I	 	 	 	 	 	  

Light builds, defines and transforms the perception of space.

This project arises from an interest and fascination with the exploration of light contact surfaces.

This process of construction and transformation of a space from a physical phenomenon such as light, allows you to explore different levels of exploration. Including an approach to geometry, perspective and depth of space.

tag: generative arts