The menu for the evening, care of William Werner, polite/persuasion:

For the event I performed a real-time visual set driven by audio. The graphics were generated in real-time using Quartz Composer from within VDMX.

I also designed a poster which features the three of us within the coffee bar identity red.

Paul began with a photograph I found of an old friend, Paul Kaloudis. The image was cleaned up and processed using Photoshop sometime between 1998 and 1999 resulting in the orange, purple and cyan image below.

This image was revived for a screen printing class taught by another good friend and artist, Aaron Terry. The image layers were processed using a procedural network of Core Image filters within Quartz Composer resulting in the main image above. This process produces an image with infinite detail allowing the work to be displayed or printed at any size. The original print is 60″w x 30″h.

Inkstop is a print I produced in 2006. It began as a screengrab from a realtime graphics programming session I conducted along with Jonathan Barnes. The screengrab was taken from a Quartz Composer composition designed to roughly simulate ink in water. The technique uses spheres moving in a 3d environment which are rendered to a texture and then processed using a filter graph consisting mainly of amortized blurs and contrast filters producing the metaball like effect.

I was interested in the screengrab itself as I found that it evoked a face, or more specifically a human skull. I later shaped the image using Photoshop’s liquify filter to enhance the reference with a nod to an untitled project I worked on with Niklaus Schlumpf which was itself shaped into a music video for the band Khanate.

The following image sequence illustrates the image sculpting process from the original screengrab to the final image.

Along with Oliver Delano, of slinc., the display was created by rear-projecting a high definition video feed onto a sixty inch custom translucent glass screen set into Tonic’s facade. The display was used to communicate temporally relevant information such as the evening’s varied performances from sundown to closing.

Throughout the day logotype was displayed with camera based input used to engage the viewer and integrate the piece.

Custom software was created to express the analogue characteristics of the design, ranging from the phosphor burn and scanlines found in conventional CRTs to the rainbow roll effect found at the lead of analogue video cassettes.

The main installation consists of nine screens in the lobby designed to greet visitors with information on current and upcoming exhibits, daily events and retail information. The system was designed in such a way that the fantastic members of the museum’s Digital Media department could create their own shows. Shows range in size from one to nine screens and have arbitrary durations. These shows are scheduled and placed by our software according to user defined positioning constraints and probabilities which determine where a show is placed, how often it will be displayed and on what days it is valid.

Using a set of custom real-time transitions written exclusively for the museum, the system transitions dynamically between shows producing an always new, ever expanding and contracting visual symphony.

The screens project received an Honorable Mention in the Creative Review Annual 2005 as well as being featured in Metropolis Magazine.

Photos courtesy of Frederick Charles/Imaginary Forces