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Feb 18

The play between code and nature is something that I’m interested in exploring in my work. How does the natural world affect the artificial and when the two join, will we know?

This is a theme I’ve been investigating in my research, personal work and for an interactive piece I’m designing as Artist In Residence at RMIT.

One way to create organic, flowing, generative movement that doesn’t look angular and robotic (although that can be fun too) is to use Perlin Noise, trigonometry or a combination of both. After spending some time researching this is what I’ve come up with.

Download the source here

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Jussi Pasanen
Volkside 18 Feb 2010

Hi Sam,

you may be across these online resources already but they are certainly worth a look:

Organic Information Design by Ben Fry (MIT Media Lab)
http://benfry.com/organic/
http://benfry.com/projects/

Works of Casey Reas (also from MIT Media Lab)
http://reas.com/category.php?section=works

Visual Complexity "A visual exploration on mapping complex networks"
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

Carolin Horn's Anymails "visualization of received emails" that I stumbled across recently is also pretty cool:
http://carohorn.de/anymails/

Good luck with your exploration!

Cheers, Jussi

http://twitter.com/jopas

Sam Keene
DT Digital 18 Feb 2010

Thanks for the links Jussi,

I'm a big fan of visualcomplexity.com/vc

Are you familiar with Edward Tufte's book "Envisioning Information"? He covers the history of data visualisation from Galileo through to modern times. It's a very well written and beautiful book.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

cheers,
Sam

Jussi Pasanen
Volkside 18 Feb 2010

Hi Sam,

regarding Tufte's "Envisioning Information", certainly read _about_ it dozens of times, just never had a chance to lay my eyes on it! I should really go and order a copy and get some of his other books while I'm at it, too.

I had a quick look at your blog and noticed that you work with AS and Papervision3D as well. You might be interested in having a look at one of our experiments from last year called Tweetpond: http://www.tweetpond.com/

Cheers, Jussi
http://twitter.com/jopas

Sam Keene
DT Digital 18 Feb 2010

Hey Jussi,

tweetPond's really cool, I like how it gets darker the deeper you go, what do the shape primitives represent, or are they randomly generated?

If you're interested you can find more of my code experiements with PaperVision, physics and math here:

http://www.future-primitive.net/experiments.html


cheers,

Sam

Jussi Pasanen
Volkside 18 Feb 2010

Hi Sam,

> what do the shape primitives represent, or are they randomly generated?

They are random at the moment, however in the original concept they were used to represent news categories: http://www.tweetpond.com/blog/news-pond/ . There's heaps more that could be done to convey meaning using shapes, colours, location, motion etc.

Some nice work in your interactive experiments!

Cheers, Jussi
http://twitter.com/jopas

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