prosthetic knowledge

The world is an abstract comic 

Abstract Comics (a blog which explores the idea of using the comic panel technique with abstract visuals) has a small collection of images from Google Earth which fits into it’s ideas.

More Here

Gocen 

A developing handheld optical device which can read and play handwritten musical scores in real-time - via DigInfo:

The Gocen is a device which scans and plays handwritten sheet music in real time. It is being developed by a group at the Tokyo Metropolitan University led by Assistant Professor Tetsuaki Baba.

“First, the system looks at the stave, then at the notes, then at the position of the notes, to determine the high notes. In addition, it directly reads words such as piano or guitar. The computer automatically recognizes them, and changes the instrument. Also, for example, if this melody is in F minor, rather than C major, when the system reads the letters Fm, it has the ability to add four flats.”

The sheet music image is analyzed using the OpenCV library in combination with a unique algorithm. While the play head is above a note it will continue to sound that key, and in the case of stringed instruments, if you move it up and down it can make the pitch fluctuate. Also, the size of the notes determines the volume level and it can handle chords as well.

More at DigInfo here

Hands-Free Videophone 

Prototype from Japan worn as glasses, with cameras INSIDE it capture and project real-time facial information onto a 3D avatar - via DigInfo:

NTT Docomo has developed the Hands-Free Videophone, which enables video calls without having to hold the camera. This is part of docomo’s research on creating future glasses-type devices.

The Hands-Free Videophone captures the user’s face with three cameras in each of the left and right sides of the frames. The video sent to the other person is created by combining the pictures with a pre-rendered 3D model of the users face.

“Each camera has 720p resolution, and a fish-eye lens, with a 180-degree field of view. This is the High Definition picture currently being captured in real time. If you look at the face, you can see it’s really distorted, because the fish-eye lens is so close. The distortion is compensated, and the picture is combined with a 3D model of the person in the computer. Currently, priority is given to the part around the eyes. As you can see when the man closes his eyes, the eyelids and the corners of the eyes appear quite realistic. Such a level of realism is hard to achieve with models like CG-based avatars, where parts are overlaid on the face.”

More at DigInfo here

Chris Cunningham: jaqapparatus 

NOWNESS have put together a short video on Chris Cunningham, with some brief background of his work and his new project, ‘jaqapparatus’, an audio-video performance with robotic arms, lasers and projections.

For “jaqapparatus1”, his first installation unveiled last month at the Audi City London high-tech concept store—a shadowy, sci-fi set involving two laser-firing robots locked in what seemed like a brutal mating ritual-cum-war—Cunningham cast two Talos motion-controlled camera rigs as his anthropomorphized protagonists. “Mounted on the robots heads are powerful lasers which they use to attack, repel and communicate with each other,” explains Cunningham, “a kind of duel, a surreal mating display which sees each machine trying to dominate the other.”

Embedded below is the video, or you can watch it at NOWNESS here

Chris Cunningham: jaqapparatus1 on Nowness.com.

Microsonic Landscapes

3D-Printed music visualizations of modern albums. Using Processing, each album’s soundwave was analysed and created a unique visual form. The albums are: Jewels by Einstürzende Neubauten, Another World by Antony and the Johnsons, Pink Moon by Nick Drake, Third by Portishead, and the composition “Für Alina” by Arvo Pärt.

An algorithmic exploration of the music we love. Each album_s soundwave proposes a new spatial and unique journey by transforming sound into matter/space: the hidden into something visible.

More can be found at the project’s website here

McKnight Artist Fellows: Visualizing Artists’ Careers 

Visualizing data from artist’s careers (publications, exhibitions, years etc) into animated information visualizations:

In the 30th year of the McKnight Artist Fellowship program, we wanted to see what the artists had been up to. We used data from résumés to create diagrams showing the professional histories of 120 amazing artists, each one as distinct as the individual artists’ careers.

More Here [Via the highly recommended roomthily]

Tumble Tree

For Tumblr users only … Great Bookmarklet tool to visualize and graph interactions from your individual posts, by dxinteractive (whose GIF above demonstrates it incredibly well):

Introducing Tumble Tree! ~ Check out this thing I made that lets you see how posts are reblogged across Tumblr. It works on the dashboard or on most permalink pages, and you can sproing the branches around, filter notes by comments, save the tree as a picture blah blah blah. I’ve been using and testing it for the last couple of weeks and it’s pretty handy.

Go to tumble-tree.tumblr.com to try it out and install it. I guarantee you probably won’t die!

P.S. Yes this is why I haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks.

Process Watch by Katja Novitskova 

Digital print for one-day art show featuring a collage of infographic data of that day:

On June 27th 2012 I did Hotel Palenque, a curatorial project of Elise Lammer. Hotel Palenque is about inviting an artist to do a one-day show that proposes two conditions: making an A0 print, and deleting the files used to make it.

Process Watch is a digital collage inframed in a outdoor poster display with two key-locks. Collage was made a few hours before the opening out of several types of real-time data from the day of the exhibition: weather reports from various cities around the world, currency exchange rates, stock exchange statistics, commodity prices, satellite footage, Moon phase and location, etc. The data gathered in the form of screenshots from the internet was then assembled in Photoshop. Fundamentally unique occurence of particular weather and economic conditions of the day were further intensified by freehand digital tool use. The print is locked in a frame and will exist as a singular piece - a document to the reality of the moment and a product of the conditions that led to it.

More Here

Female Orgasm in Brodmann Brain Regions 

Visualization of stimulation in the brain with scans taken over a seven minute sequence - via The Visual MD:

The human brain can be separated into regions based on structure and function - vision, audition, body sensation, etc, known as Brodmann’s area map.

This animation shows the functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, brain data of a participant experiencing an orgasm and the corresponding relationships seen within these different regions based on utilization of oxygen levels in the blood. 20 snapshots in time of the fMRI data are taken from a 7 minute sequence. Over the course of the 7 minutes the participant approaches orgasm, reaches orgasm and then enters a quiet period.

Oxygen utilization levels are displayed on a spectrum from dark red (lowest activity) to yellow/white (highest). As can be observed, an orgasm leads to almost the entire brain illuminating yellow, indicating that most brain systems become active at orgasm.

You can see the video at the The Visual MD here [via The Guardian UK]

Airline Food by Signe Emma 

Electron-microscopy images of dissolved salt, birds-eye view. Salt is the important ingredient in airline food as taste alters in flight:

The blandness of airline food has an explanation.
Research shows that people lose their sense of taste when listening to the sort of ‘white noise’ heard inside an aircraft’s cabin.

White noise consists of a random collection of sounds at different frequencies and scientists have demonstrated that it is capable of diminishing the taste of salt.
At low-pressure conditions, higher taste and odour thresholds of flavourings are generally observed.
At 30.000 feet the cabin humidity drops by 15%, and the lowered air pressure forces bodily fluids upwards. With less humidity, people have less moisture in their throat, which slows the transport of odours to the brains smell and taste receptors. That means that if a meal should taste the same up in the air, as on ground it needs 30% of extra salt.

I have created a series of scanning electron micrographs of dissolved salt that appears to be a landscape viewed from an aeroplane in flight.

More Here

The Sound of a Fermi Gamma-ray Burst 

The NASA blog has posted a video, turning the above data-capture graph of ‘a gamma-ray burst, the most energetic explosions in the universe’ (above) into a piece of music:

What does the universe look like at high energies? Thanks to the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), we can extend our sense of sight to “see” the universe in gamma rays. But humans not only have a sense of sight, we also have a sense of sound. If we could listen to the high-energy universe, what would we hear? What does the universe sound like?

… In translating the gamma-ray measurements into musical notes we assigned the photons to be “played” by different instruments (harp, cello, or piano) based on the probabilities that they came from the burst. This particular conversion is a fairly simple one; We built this on work done by other members of the LAT team (Luca Baldini and Alex Drlica-Wagner) who explored converting our data into music in different ways.

In the beginning of the song, before the burst starts, the harp plucks out a few lonely notes. After about half a minute, the piano joins in on top of the harp background, and the notes begin to pile on more and more rapidly. The cello enters the scene as the burst begins in earnest.

More Here

Covers

Chrome browser-only online experiment uses a selection of album covers and turns them into real-time audio visualizations:

Css3 / JS albums artworks with realtime music analytics thanks to beatdetektor.js 

There are only a few at the moment, with more being worked on. You can try it out for yourself here

Graffiti & Street Art Flowchart Timeline by Pantheon Projects