I’ve had a great month of work at FIELD, but due to some unforeseen additions to their schedule, very little time was left for guiding my design internship, so we decided on finding me a new place to continue work. Which was quickly found at the great United Visual Artists studio, who have hosted me for almost a month now and where I’m planned to stay for another two.

UVA is pretty much top of their field. But what field is that exactly? They do architectural, light-, responsive or even interactive installations, but don’t shy generative animation either. They also house James Medcraft, who not only documents their work, but also initiates some extraordinary photography projects. A studio where architects, lighting designers, 3D-animators and programmers roam free is an exciting place to be part of at any time.

Their list of impressive projects is long and diverse-hard to choose from, but the picture from the recent project called “Speed of Light” should invite you to explore their portfolio further.

This was an attempt to create a ‘meta-documentary’, by tracing original nature documentaries using OpenCV and representing the result as a documentary of its own, based on ideas presented in Philip Ball’s popsci book “Critical Mass”. I’ve rendered the images with Processing, and edited afterwards in Final Cut Pro. Although the original camera work & cuts provide most of the dynamics.

Abstract Life from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

Please watch on Vimeo in HD & turn your sound on.

This project was about visualizing periodic bills (like energy, telephone or cable tv) in the future. I was asked to look somewhat ahead and design how such a thing would look in the 2030′s.
From literal to philosophical, I ended up envisioning a world in which every object would have an ‘online’ identity, a digital representation, say– a facebook page. Every physical object would be reduced to its properties, be it value, energy usage, lifetime, color, previous owner, parent class or atom arrangement. A concept quickly getting abstract beyond the point of no return, and I immediately started out visualizing the concept using a structure that would represent ‘the digital genome’ of the real world. A structure that would contain the digital avatars of all physical objects.

For this, I used as placeholder a text, dividing it’s hierarchy into branches of objects. Each node in this structure should represent a physical object, with it’s properties attached. In this case, a chapter of the book “The Dark Tower”, by Stephen King has been chopped up. The text comprises of paragraphs, each paragraph contains sentences, sentences often are compilations of subsentences and all these consist of words. And words of letters.

FIELD is a graphic design studio using generative strategies, led by Marcus Wendt and Vera-Maria Glahn.

We design custom software tools and processes to express an idea across a wide range of media: from print to animation, interactive installations and websites. Our goal is to merge code-based design with established digital content creation methods. And to create room and connection points for a collaborative and iterative process.

Inspired by modern art, nature, science and technology, we aim to create animate images with a life of its own. Generative Processes, Interactive Systems, and Artificial Life are the reference points from which we draw ideas, methods, and mindset into our design process. We believe this FIELD is still largely unexplored, and that there are exciting visual places yet to be discovered in this landscape.

Though FIELD only started last year they’ve already built a really impressive portfolio. Here are some gems that sucked me in.

Interim Camp
I first saw it a year ago when it featured on Processing’s Exhibition page. Prepare for a long journey. Take the time, screw the volume up and watch.
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Dokfest Identity
Real nice concept that combines dynamic data visualization and 3d visuals into a festival’s graphic identity.
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LDN24
Will be seeing this when I get there!

It took three hours to send the image data through sound to the laptop depicted above. The image shows the environment that is hardcoded in the image by the laptop on the table, listening. The colors show recorded sound that’s outside of the spectrum that is used to send the image data. The image has been built up gradually from left to right, top to bottom.

Sound Copy is a collaboration project of Jasper van Loenen, Bart van Haren, Sander Sturing & myself.

Among the participants portrayed are Takayuki Ito, Emily Gobeille, James Acres, Zach and ourselves

I think it’s safe to announce the exhibition of the Dynamics in Color project in the form of a video installation in Science Center NEMO Amsterdam. The installation will record live on the first floor, and project on a single broad screen.

I’m really excited to see it working. I believe Theo Watson said one of the biggest compliments an interactive installation can get is that children start playing with it without the need of an explanation. The environment of NEMO should be ideal to see this tested. Fingers crossed!

Dynamics: Walking from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

The installation will probably be running in April.

Basic geometry, “spatial relationships”:
Specific colors correspond to the the angle of the 20 million lines drawn.

Trigonotype:
The type is constructed out of a lot of translated (co)sines.

Derivatives: dx/dy type
Along each point of the outline of this Helvetica, a line is drawn according to it’s tangent.

See flickr for more renderings..

Last saturday Charlie, Thomas and I were invited to create the visuals to a party hosted by Studio K & Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. DJ’s were provided by the Stedelijk (who knew a museum has dj’s?) and we had decided upon creating sets on the fly by means of combining self written processing sketches & imagery. No vj-software or whatsoever, just two video mixers to make smooth transitions. Apart from one laptop suffering cola-damage, it went fairly well.

Sketches included: audiotypography, visual soundscape ( = sandersketch 2.0), rotating sound, rgb dynamics and audio snow.

Veejaying using only Processing from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

At the TodaysArt festival at the Hague the public library featured an installation we developed along the lines of the festival’s “conflict” theme. During the night hours, we project on the windows an aggressive dreammachine-like flickering.

Since the very moment paper press was invented, type has been a weapon, with paper being the battleground. The recent shift towards digital media has expanded and intensied the written warzone even further.

The audio-visual installation named ‘Typographic Gun’ explores the subjective potential of the written medium. The library becomes the epicenter of a conflict between two opposing texts, opinions or ideals. The subjectivety is hidden behind interpolating typography, alternating at 5 to 20Hz, melting the two channels together, but at the same time generating the conflict by means of anticolors and after image. Any spectator can choose to block out any of the information streams by means of a color filter. And every book that has been loaded into the system produces its own unique soundtrack, converting sentences to a rythm of microtonal sound that add to the conflict experience.

typographic gun from thomas vissen on Vimeo.

Martijn van Boven
Charlie Berendsen
Marie-Anne Huiskamp
Joost de Nooy
Sander Sturing
Thomas te Braake
Tiemen Rapati

Here’s a new rendering of the Space Type experiment.

In collaboration with Architecture History students from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam we were asked to develop a cultural comment on the urban development in the Amsterdam Zuidas. This area, originally meant as an commercial district, was now been made ready for residents. Our projects should be part of the gentrification process.

But all culture aside, I was fascinated by the way nature was treated on the Zuidas. The planners of the Zuidas had given shape to the most modern view on the relationship between man and nature, and I can tell you– it is interesting.

One example that triggered me were the trees on the Zuidplein. Originally, there weren’t any. But as unpleasant drafts developed on the square and in the underground bicycle parking. So trees were to be placed in order to solve this turbulence. Only problem was, that with this underground parking there was no soil to put them in.
And this, then, was solved by installing massive 3 cubic meter concrete flower pots for each tree. The soil in those planters was monitored by sensors wired to a computer that controlled the watering of the pot.

So inspired by this example I pitched the concept of abstracting nature by indexing it on its functionality only.
I teamed up with Sander Sturing from my class, and Martijn van Beek and Niels Bakker from the VU who provided us with the historical context. We started to develop a way of navigating this environment. Artificial and natural objects were indexed on their capacity to fulfill our specific needs and entered into a database. This video documents an installation we used to visualize the concept of abstracting nature by indexing it on its functionality only. An extreme point of view, taken to highlight the level of cultivation the new to be cosmopolis of Amsterdam, the Zuidas, aspires.

Human Nature from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

THE KIOSK showcases the work that was created within the scope of the ‘Typographic Voice’ minor, which ran through the months of september to december 2009 at the ArtEZ Academy of Arts Arnhem. This minor focused on the changing role of the designer, transitioning from maker to author, and assessed the affects current technology has on stable and unstable media, language and communication. Students were encouraged to interact during all phases of the project by ‘open sourcing’ their creative process on the Typographic Voice Blog.

The design of the exhibition was based on this conflict of language, form and medium. It is an attempt to take concepts that are native to the virtual domain and translate them directly to the project space of Onomatopee, displaying the work in such a way existing relationships between pieces become visible. This relational context should result in a visual interaction between the work.

Every student was asked to select a maximum of three pieces to showcase at the exhibition. These pieces were hence provided with a descriptive text and tagged with several keywords the student defined himself. These keywords (or ‘tags’, as known on the internet) vary from formal characteristics as ‘black & white’ or ‘catalogue’ to more abstract concepts like individuality and language. The extent to which these keywords match ultimately determined the position of each piece in the project space. This results in a spatial distribution of work where physical distance actually resembles the substantive relationship between the typographic pieces.

Visitors of the exhibition can navigate the space by use of the handouts provided at the entrance. Twelve piles correspond to the 12 most popular keywords used to describe the exhibited pieces. Every handout displays all pieces tagged with the respective keyword, and provides for each a description and information on where it is to be found. The visitor’s selection of handouts then determines how he or she explores the work exhibited at the Kiosk. (text: tiemen rapati)

Concept, design & programming:
Charlie Berendsen & Tiemen Rapati
Realization: Leonie Krol, Dominique Banning, Ralf de Graaf, Marjolein Hameleers, Charlie Berendsen & Tiemen Rapati

UPDATE: See photos of the project

The blocks symbolize events that float trough time. The present is represented by the pink surface, through which the events break on their journey from future to past.

Time Surface from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

It’s funny that now I posted this, I wonder at how the events in the video have color when they’re still ahead of time, but lose it when passed through. In a sense it would be more logical that they get their definite shape (color) after they’ve ‘been’, be it not that I developed this as a calendar. In which events have less meaning when they’ve passed. But still something to think about!

The Book-problem probably has stalked every media-conscious interactive/graphic designer at some time. These are the ways I’ve yet dealt with the conversion of books to the digital domain.

1. Homer’s eLiad

Last year I tried to find the best digital form for a specific book. I chose Homer’s Iliad because I figured it would be an interesting s…object, looking at it’s origin. From my old Greek classes I gathered the origin of the ‘book’ to be a product of oral tradition. The book is riddled with artifacts from a story telling tradition and has seen a long history of conversions, transitions or mutations, as I began to think about them. Translation, being interpretations, on which further interpretation is based…
So when I indexed the book on it’s properties to be transferred to the digital medium, the “mutability” of the book, above most else, ought to be preserved. Other values to be taken aboard are the original greek script, and the necessity for translation in order to be interpreted; no-one is native in old-greek.

The digital version created room for an unlimited number of translations, based on the original script and on previously entered translations. Being presented without hierarchy, these should allow for continuing mutations, online.

2. The “Show Off Shelf”

Okay. So now the iPad is here, all books are dead. Ehh.. Well. Maybe not just yet, but a future with a database replacing the bookshelf is definitely thinkable. But when thinking in terms of a bookshelf, how is that thing represented online? How can I brag with my learnings, wisdom? How can I satisfy my hunger to collect? How does this manifest in my (physical) personal space?
I tried answering some of these, creating a room projection that kept several key aspects of the physical book intact; shape, cover and thickness, while using scale to represent my pride on the specific item. Sorting and filtering, at will. Then I lost myself in the actual programming practice and ended up having created a semi-slick, style-accessory for in your living room. Or iPad.

Thanks to Sander Sturing for the neat fitting-script.

Use this flash applet to enter your name and launch the site. (Only in Dutch)

NCDO approached us to create an innovative campaign for the Third Chamber elections, a summit that discusses the Milennium Development Goals. The result was an interactive documentary; a cross-medial website that generates a film based on the user’s actions by dynamically merging individual shots.

It was a challenging, stressful but very fun project that despite the very tight timeframe (one month) had a very satisfying endresult.

We enjoyed devising the concept (with sketches flying around that had ‘choice-trees’ with over a hundred different outcomes..), wild days of filming, meeting true Dutch celebrities and having to retake their shots because we f****d the lighting Manic days of video editing and programming, and of course trying to shortcut testing just to find out that’s a very bad idea.

Meta Perspective from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

My goal was to use the simple rules of perspective (objects in the distance appear to move slower) to create a rhytmic pattern for audio & visuals.

The projection is developed in processing in which a landscape photo is animated into moving slices which speed corresponds to their relative distance to a horizon. At present this creates the experience of watching from a train window.

The audio-part still sounds awful, but I’m currently focusing on optimizing the visual part. The illusion of depth is easily achieved, and in addition I shift colors to enhance the ‘eclipsing’ effect that occurs after a while when the slices come back in line. Watch the middle section, when it has completely shifted color, a ‘partial eclipse’ occurs, when it comes back to the initial color (cyan), all colors line up.

Here are some still frames (two partial & one nearing total eclipses) from the project:

The face of the EU from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

It’s simply a collection of 27 points that attract and repel each other (red/white connections), with these relationships gradually changing every second. A skin partially covers the internal hussle, representing europe’s facade to the rest of the world. Built in processing.

Last night I finished work on an interactive visualization of the datasets I collected from COW, containing all data on conflicts that had occurred globally in the past two centuries. The final piece has become an experiment on what amount of information can be put into one graph while remaining informative. The visualization works on two levels, an overview that allows the spotting of trends, and an in-depth look into a particular time frame.

One navigates through the set along a time line that can be controlled by mouse and keyboard.

Though it may succeed in displaying a lot of data, I’m not really satisfied with the overall look of the outcome. It feels like I cramped in too much information, losing control over its shape. Earlier, more abstract sketches displaying just a fraction of the data were much more pretty.

The “global” overview featured in the background/timeline is a visualization of the relative army sizes per country, divided by its population. Relative large armies generally signify a special situation.

This conceptual type is based on the western culture embedded in the typeface Helvetica. Helvetica is a typeface apparently able to fit any brand or product, and this shapeshifting behaviour projected on western consumerism is what provided the base for this conceptual type.

Sellvetica is a typeface that has in theory infinite fonts or variants. As a projection on any consumer product will do. This is the "Philips Senseo" font.

Pictures are taken at a 30 degrees angle from the projection, complete font comprises the full 360 degrees of the consumer product.

See the complete alphabet:

Continuing from the Negative Space post, I proceeded into converting text to a spatial environment. This first experiment adds the previously mentioned ‘impact’ that a word has, in positive or negative context, to the z-axis. This produces a landscape in which words with strong positive connotation form mountains, while negative association results in deep pits.

When we offer people only the reactions to an event, an image forms in their head of what must have happened. This is probably an unique image for everyone, their unique reality, with common factors and differences. Exposing this interpretation can be done by condensing the mental image.

Developed in collaboration with Tineke Dorst

Or with only a few frames delay, we detect motion:

Dynamics: Station from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

While when we upscale the ‘delay’, each color channel represents it’s own timeline; there is virtually no black & white left, as the intensity of the sunshine in the red channel may differ from the other channels, shifting the color balance, resulting in coloring the grass blue…

Dynamics: Birds III from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

The next step was to do this on the fly with live input. This project was written using Max/MSP+Jitter. The installation works live, delay adjustable on the fly, black & white imagery can be cancelled out:

Dynamics: Walking from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

Dynamics: People from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

The project has featured during the ArtEZ Arnhem Exhibition 2008, on KONIJN2000 and in Studio K. Maybe the biggest compliment has been that it was especially well received by junior spectators. UPDATE: The project will feature as a permanent installation at the NEMO Science center!

This is a visualisation of all 1015 English three-letter-words, structured according to their usage in the English language.

I set out to map all the words according to their ‘alikeness’. Words as cat, hat, and bat should be placed on equal distance from each other as they have two letters on two positions in common. I devised a system that would score each word on these properties:

Flash ‘attraction’ tool

But ran into problems when I wanted to place them in respect to each other. I ran the “attraction”-calculator for each word to each other word and used the sum of these values as their “popularity-index”; which describes the uniqueness of the word. A word that has little words that look like it scores low.

Next I calculated the usage of the words as used in the english language, and the usage of the letters they’re built off (their ‘scrabble’-value), and plotted this in a new graph, inspired by star trail photography.
Position near the center marks a non-unique word, speed is determined by the use in the english language, and color is calculated from their ‘scrabble’-value; a red word has a common letter on the first position and two rare on the second and third. A overall light word is composed of common letters.

Popularity HD from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

And lastly, one was able to explore this universe of words by typing the words in, hence creating dynamic constellations that deform by the speed of the words:

During the past week I attended the Live Cinema Workshop, produced by RE:VISIE at the National Dutch Film Festival. Martijn van Boven, an abstract filmmaker and composer (and also teacher at the Arnhem Art Academy ArtEZ), supervised the workshop.

Teamed up with Anja Masling, Hetty van der Kloot, Marina Stavrou and Cas van der Pas, we decided to go all analog for a short live performance conceived within 16 hours.
The visuals were created by recording and projecting the reflection of water wrinkles caused by the accompanied sound (live performance of Renoud Netjes, Rosalien Derkinderen and Tara van der Wel), as well as capturing falling droplets hitting the surface by means of a stroboscope.

Live Cinema performance RE:VISIE NFF ’09 from Tara on Vimeo.

Theme of evening’s performance was time, our interpretation and experience of it.

See further images below.

In the context of the Typographic Voice Minor, I’m exploring the spatial properties of type. Starting from the beautiful term ‘Negative Space’, I wanted to explore the ‘space’ certain words consume in our head. Some words just project their meaning, words as “glory”, “love”, “eternity” and “space” itself just sparkle. Other words have been given an cultural/historical charge, like the black pit “Auschwitz” still represents, or the big promise and hope currently condensed in the word ‘Obama’.

I wrote a program in processing that recovered perspective data from a photograph (or video image) by placing the photo in a 3D model. Following this it reverts the perspective, printing out the walls in the image as “actual” wallpaper. The walls seem to have been recreated, but all detail in the furthest tiles is missing.

The original image: a photo of the wall of the 81st st. subway station in New York, captured using a wide angle lens.

Viewed from the ‘original’ standpoint, everything looks normal. The recreated wall and the original photograph look identical.

From the other end it looks rather abstract, as these tiles are made by stretching up a couple of pixels. Almost all detail has been lost, though you can still see the whale…

Rain

Exposing

Faery

Circular

Diva

And one bonus, made with just my iPhone:

Frame

Comparing different statistics of a country to its influence in the EP. This is visualized by a gravity model reflecting this statistic in the mass of the object representing each country. Hence less powerful countries are *influenced* by the bigger ones.

A still from the War Data project, using COW data. I’ve left the country code (red) and conflict number (white) coded as used in the COW set, to illustrate the weirdness of visualizing this kind of data in general. One can cycle through all incidents that occurred in the last two centuries.

As my Information Design teacher puts it, I was suffering from a case of the “circles and lines”… I hope I get better soon…

Veejaying at KONIJN2000 from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

This is an intricate attempt at recreating an image by means of sound. Though it works, and is at times captivating, it fails miserably at creating a new dimension:

Testing: The Sandersketch from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

What it does: it maps the sound frequencies in 255 groups ranging from low (0) to high (255). The volumes of these groups are coupled to the brightness of an image captured by a camera/webcam. Low frequencies are represented by the darker parts of the image, higher frequencies by lighter parts. Every R, G or B component acts independent, tuning in on it’s specific frequency. R, G and B are optically blended by your eye to create new colors that represent the sound/music being recorded. The image you see only represents sound volume, mapped by the image according to the images brightness and corresponding frequencies: without sound nothing is visible. Made with processing 1.0 & the fft library.

The variant that blends colors optically looks good, but might be a bit too abstract to be able to create a link between image, subject & sound.
While the pixel-blended version just can’t escape the 80′s:

Oh well..

Image & Sound: Found Footage from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

A sketch, part of the process of creating a new visual narrative to go along an audio fragment. By analyzing the audio track by means of reduced listening I tried to unlink the associations I had to the different sound, creating freedom to reassign imagery that I found to be fitting giving the nature of the sounds themselves.

Image & Sound: Random TV from Tiemen Rapati on Vimeo.

Sketch exploring how our brain manages to find relationships between image and sound that do not exist.

Every 20 sec the TV switches to a random channel between 1 and 24. Footage lasts one hour. Corresponding audio stream has been shifted for about 2 minutes.