by Victoria Vesna, Alfred Vendl, and Martina Fröschl

Noise Aquarium is dealing with plankton and unnatural noise in the oceans as environmental issue. It spotlights animated 3D-models obtained with scientific imaging techniques of the extremely diverse plankton spectrum. With this project we aim to awaken awareness for biodiversity and introduce a collection of accurate 3D-models as a resource for scientific and artistic research. All participants first had to learn to go beyond their field of expertise and communicate with experts from other subjects. The Noise Aquarium’s emerging presentations will happen in multifaceted ways, as varied places and time add context as project presentation parameters that influence the events.

The image volumes generated by microCT and from serial light microscopical sections were used for segmentation of the entire animal outline and specific features of each animal, such as the alimentary tract. Image segmentation was performed with the 3D software package Amira 6.1. (FEI Visualization Sciences Group, Mérignac Cédex, France) by combining intensity-based and manual segmentation tools. Based on the image segmentation, polygon surface meshes were triangulated. Subsequently the surfaces were smoothed and re- meshed in order to obtain isotropic surfaces triangles. The obtained polygon surface mesh was then imported into Blender 2.78 (Blender Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands), were editing was necessary to reach the final goal of various rendered animations. The laborious processes of preparing the 3D-geometry varies for every organism due to different complexity and deformations of the sample while preparation. The work will premier in Deep Space of Ars Electronica Center Linz for the occasion of Ars Electronica Festival 2017. In contrary to a linear video screening, an interactive installation adds layers of narration. Noise Aquarium offers the audience the possibility to interact with the projection by simple proximity sensors to experience the effects of noise and sound on the organisms at first place and more directly.

Website: http://noiseaquarium.com

by June Kim

I often invisibly switch my eyes and ears off from my surroundings and turn these senses inward. I listen and feel myself. I begin sensing myself as an organic form that I interpret as space[s]. Being and things become spaces. I visualise and sense many single and modular, separated and overlapping organic transformative spaces. Here, I play with my breath and motions to make space[s] bigger and smaller and to reshape them by dragging them in various direction. Indeed constructs a space that immerses spectators in their own narrative through interaction. The floating and mirroring sack implies the manoeuvres of reflecting myself inwards and outwards. Thus, this represent an indeed moment of myself. Rather than focusing on spotting pieces of my body, I acquire this sack, which has constant changing, and deforming images of me, an altered self. It is blurry but unmediated.

Website: http://tomaszbednarz.com

by Anastasia Tyurina

This project investigates how to interpret created scientific images made by the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) of micro-scale drops of water after evaporation and thus turns to scientific photography as an art form. Exploring the idea of ‘interactivity’ for my project, I developed an algorithm which allows viewers to physically interact with my photomicrographs, becoming direct objects of manipulation. Thus, anyone who touches the screen can create, display and experience a ripple effect, which is very similar to the effect we can see and observe when we interact with water surface by touching or disturbing it.

Interacting with the image in this way transforms the work into being something that transcends disciplines – offering a layered meaning; it crosses the boundaries between physical connection and digital code and can enhance the audience’s perception of scientific data, scientific photography, and water, providing them with the opportunity of experiencing digital code.

Website: https://www.behance.net/gallery/30729269/Micro-scale-drops-of-water

Video: https://vimeo.com/206204370

by Mateusz Marpi Marcinowski

An ongoing collaboration between San Francisco based creative coder Marpi and Archan Nair, digital artist from New Delhi, India. An interactive exploration of Archan’s worlds, extended in Virtual Reality into a creative, generative landscape. Combining assets made by Archan Nair with responsive WebGL code, it spans across desktop, mobile (gyroscope based interaction) and Virtual Reality. WebVR based, works with all major devices, best viewed room-scale with HTC Vive.

Website: http://marpi.pl

Video of installation: https://vimeo.com/205969477 & http://demo.marpi.pl/archan/eutow/

VR: https://www.instagram.com/p/BNzhhJMg3bu/

by Mateusz Marpi Marcinowski

Maratropa is an endless personal landscape of tweets. Visualize any Twitter account as an abstract living, breathing city. The structure in the middle, with shape and size dependent on the growth of each following, symbolises religious like objectification, while all everything around is based on their actual ‘followers’. Art fully works in WebVR.

Website: http://maratropa.com

WebVR: https://www.instagram.com/p/BLtawY9AWRL

by Mateusz Marpi Marcinowski

An interactive art installation originally made with Obscura Digital, Binary Garden uses large multi-touch screens with sound reactive 3D noise algorithms. Visitors can connect and interact with it from their phones, without any additional applications. Anybody with a smartphone can connect to the system via a web browser to interact with the display without using an app, Bluetooth or WiFi.  

Website: http://marpi.pl

by John Brumley

Digital alter egos are constructed through the various gestures, data, and objects we release into virtual space. Our own digital labors maintain such beings, and it is only through constant engagement with social media that the elusive memories of our own selves momentarily breach into the feeds of our followers and friends. In Compliant Gait, an invisible creature is given temporary form through the labor of an audience. After connecting to a local wireless network, audience members can use their mobile phones to instantiate digital objects within the hull of the creature. These objects, one by one, fill the hollow shape of the creature’s body, revealing its form as it moves with compliant gait across a barren landscape.

Website: http://johnbrumley.info

Video: https://youtu.be/itdzAy8Vblk

by Yeohyun Ahn and Ge Jin

Being Ignored, is a generative photography using light and computer code. It is an interdisciplinary project crossing boundaries between painting, photography, computer art, and journalism. It aims to recognize the dignity and humanity of those who are homeless. The project was done  in collaboration with Welcome Project at Valparaiso University and four area non-profits supporting the homelessness located in Valparaiso, Indiana.  A computer screen (the “canvas”), displays real time images captured through a web camera that is installed invisibly on the top of the computer screen. As viewers move toward the screen, the web-camera captures the viewer’s portrait and display it on the computer screen. The computer code will eliminate the viewer’s facial expression in order to convey the concept of being ignored.  It has been developed as an application for Android Device in the collaboration with Dr. Ge Jin. 

Website: http://yeoahn.com

by Andrew Denton and Jennifer Nikolai

How does 360 video capture, expose and challenge notions of embodiment?

360 video cameras allow for the moving dancing body to be captured in an embodied manner grasping at perceptions of place, space and scale, otherwise only experienced through live, site performance.  These movement studies experiment with notions of dancers being captured in VR from soloist perspectives later to be matched in post-production with their dancing “partners.” Three dancers in a studio are confined by four 90 degree quadrants of space, divided inside the dance studio. They are then composited together inside a 360-degree composition for playback in multiple formats (VR headset, Web download, panoramic projection). The dancers are guided by creative constraints, and improvisational techniques to construct four different movement studies designed to work individually and together depending on viewer choices.

Presented at: Web3D art gallery 100101010

Producer/Director: Andrew Denton

Producer/Choreographer: Jennifer Nikolai

Dancer Collaborators: Xinia Alderson, Jane Carter, Jennifer Nikolai

Music by: Avoid Avoid [Sonya Waters, Brendan Moran, & Stephen Reay]

Co-researcher: Gregory Bennett

Website: https://aut.academia.edu/ADenton

by Andrew Denton

Flight Pattern, is a series of filmed passenger jet stream or contrails — forming a multiscreen database of a particular type of human presence and movement.  The work seeks to evoke a space of contemplation, uneasiness, and sadness by engaging with the residual and stratified signs of our collective impact on our environment.  Yet the simple compositions also elicit a hypnotic encounter with beauty, which viewers have perplexingly described as hopeful.  Using aesthetic beauty as a critical tool opens encounters with the subject that are not possible in polemic discourse.  In softness, sadness, melancholy and grief are the seeds of hope for an imagined future better than the one that seems to be playing out in front of us.

A contrail is the ice that forms from the water condensation that is left over from the expulsion of a jet engine – a trace in the sky of a plane passing by.  It is an everyday modern thing, not human, nor animal, just a temporary fleeting object in a cool blue sky.  Yet there is something affective, contemplative and evocative in that thing for me.

Website: https://aut.academia.edu/ADenton

by Rocio von Jungenfeld

zones of flow (ii) is a work-in-progress project which investigates the fluid connections between people, sea and land; the instantaneous but sometimes asynchronous connectivity between things and people as they move in and across digito-tangible environments. The project involves the projection and/or display of moving images of a water surface onto the exhibition space, and the potential display of objects associated with those water-based environments (e.g. buoys, compass). The moving images portraying flows on the surface of bodies of water such as oceans or ponds may be pre-recorded (minimum technical specs) or live-streamed (webcam).

Please see here for collection of visual experiments & public intervention in Azores for ‘zones of flow (i)’

Website: http://rociojungenfeld.tumblr.com/bio

by Elke Evelin Reinhuber

Related to her ongoing research on Counterfactuals in Media Arts, Elke Reinhuber explores how a narrative can be presented in a multi-linear manner, by fragmenting and dissecting it for the audience. The spectator is invited to become the protagonist of the film short and to question the different outcomes of the decisive situation. The plot is based on the popular mythological tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in regard of their key moments, questioning what if the story would have had a different outcome? According to the tale, as Orpheus has been the first human being who visited the underworld and returned alive to the here and now, particular attention is drawn to the display of life-supporting imaging technologies, which merely provide a concept of the physical conditions, but never on a mental or psychological level. Therefore the S3D video presentation consists of several layers, including spatial audio and augmented reality, each of them revealing a different aspect on the situation. At the same time, the display modes force the spectators to turn their heads around and by doing so, being in the same situation as the protagonist of the ancient Greek myth.

Website: http://www.venomenon.com

by Elke Reinhuber, Benjamin Seide, and Ross Adrian Williams

Secret Detours engages the audience with overwhelming vistas in a full spherical presentation, encompassing the viewers from all angles.The movie short is set within a lush Chinese garden, adapted from the great traditions of imperial landscaping – in the Yunnan Garden in the West of Singapore. Four dancers, dressed in the colours of the cardinal directions, examine the spaces, the paths and the detours of the green scenery. The 360° video relates to the experience of being surrounded by mythological creatures and their traces inside the garden. As the beautiful layout of the grounds is composed from a range of intersections with multiple meandering paths to choose from, the omnidirectional video invites similarly to explore the atmosphere between an exquisite selection of trees, shrubs, bushes and pieces of architecture.

Website: https://vimeo.com/elke/detour

by Matthew Martin and Jenna Gavin

A projected media moon installation about interconnecting two entities of massive impact to society; the moon and the online media web. In The Media on the Moon there is an attempt to further connect the two entities by having them strengthen and depend on each other. Conversations (tweets) on the event can be sent and displayed on the installation, causing the appearance of the digital moon to grow. The result is an online organic discussion between strangers, who have all converged around the ever-growing virtual moon.

Website: http://creativematterz.com/sharealittleglow.php

Video: https://vimeo.com/186210774

by Mark Chavez and Ina Conradi Chavez

The shadow of a rose ripples across a field of color. Programmed as an animated pin-screen, The Rose uses six different recordings of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune, creating an audio reactive painting. The work is homage to the animation technique invented and developed by Alexandre Alexeïeff and his wife Claire Parker’s studio in Paris, in 1930’s.  

Website: http://markchavez.guru

Videos: https://vimeo.com/201487444 and https://vimeo.com/218557074

by Jed-Angelo Q. Segovia

Guernica 2.016, is an atmospheric interactive re-imagining of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting. The player controls a predator drone as it hovers over a blasted city, rendered in the jagged, black-and-white style of Picasso’s painting. It is an anti-war statement, inspired by airstrikes against the Syrian city Aleppo.

Website: https://jedsegovia.itch.io/guernica

by Filip Michalski

Milky Way 3D is interactive 3D map of the Milky Way Galaxy. It shows world from far away, showing us that human everyday worries are not as huge as we see them. For the majority of people exploring the galaxy is impossible – my work gives them an opportunity to see into the Universe without leaving their homes. My project also gives the ability to be in-charge of solar system – You can change planets’ scale, rotation speed, show orbits or turn on constellation mode. MilkyWay 3D is extended to Virtual Reality (VR) what bring brand new experience.

Website: www.filipmichalski.pl/milkyway

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpPXSAsGzUA

by Al-Azmir Ibrahim

Streak captures the vibrancy of an urban city fueled by lights and how the city truly comes alive at night,- a kaleidoscopic alternate reality that plays on the manipulation of light and time. Through the use of long exposure photography, light entering the lens is prolonged and stretched out, giving a sense of movement through time. Drawing inspirations from Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 experimental film ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, streak showcases the dynamic movements of lights illuminating the still night. Streak aims to captivate the viewers and evoke a sense of moving forward with its quick-paced and bright moving lights playing along side with fast paced music by Deep Shoq. The use of different neon-like colours combined with overlaying effects alters the perception and reality of the original image and brings a whole new dimension to time and space.

Website: www.behance.net/visualsbyazmir

Video: https://vimeo.com/219369580 & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgpxHkSKiXM

by Zhang Longfei

The Creature is an experimental and generative video art, which depicts a life cycle of various abstract creatures. With the help of simple chemical reaction in milk, the autonomous chemistry not only creates chaos but also an immersive visual experience, in which the creatures are described as frontal and bilaterally symmetrical faces and evolved from singular to complex form.

Website: www.behance.net/longfei

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUgpC0T1EoQ

by Debbie Ng

FLOW explores inevitable change in an increasingly digital and automated world and what it does for the environment, through the abstract imagery of melting liquids.

Website: www.behance.net/debdabbles

Video: https://vimeo.com/219370356

by Issac Ting

The work reflects on the vanishing of marine life and the slow destruction of creatures that live in the sea due to over fishing and pollution.

Website: www.issac.sg

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD28AmCbCys

by Tan Kwang Boon

Urbanisation invokes the sense of concrete labyrinth, walls after walls, we expand through the finite space to satisfy our indefinite needs. And the walls themselves, cut off our perception of matter after gradually we plunge into a state of denial. Like a parasite entity, we engulf thought the organic space rapidly for ourselves cantered progression. The result may not daunt us now, but there will be nothing left but just memories to preserve.

The visuals were composed form microbe visualisation based on collaboration with the NTU Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKC), along with inking techniques and 3 dimensional renders of artificial pills. A commentary on urban scaling and the spatial relationship between the organic and modern infrastructures Urban Circuitry’s concept is to capture the growth of bacteria/algae, representing that fluid movement into both how cityscapes are developing from the core of civilization and also how organic forms work in such splendid ways.

Video: www.vimeo.com/222921424

by Wong Song Yu

Through a combination of algorithms, scripts and mathematics, fractal art creates appealing visuals that carry emotional and visual depth.

Video: www.vimeo.com/219371863

by Madeline Ngai

This animated data visualisation depicts the varying rhythms of migration. Six nations of interest— Singapore, United States of America, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, South Africa, and American Samoa— were selected from the UN’s latest collection of data on migration flow all over the globe for visual comparisons and contrasts of the trends in movement to and from each country. Using the java language based software Processing, the data was visualised as a pattern with the motif of movement (each individual movement a connection between two countries) at a speed relative to the size of the migration flow. The pull forces attracting migrants to large cities are represented in the pulsing circles centred at each focused nation.

Website: https://www.behance.net/gallery/47481105/Migration-a-Data-Visualisation