The female role is played by Storm Garner. Music is by my friend Sawako. Check out her latest album. Thanks to Brian Maniere for his great production work and collaboration. Showing this month at Cinema~Scope, the art event, in Miami.

This is a work that uses the principles of natural selection, operating on colored abstract shapes that breed and consume each other, to produce a visual image.

Each little circle is a color creature with color DNA (red, green and blue), living in an environment in which color is also food. This environment always “favors” (or selects for) one color over others. The environment starts with red as this favored or selected for color.

Circles with more red in their DNA (and which then also appear more red) eat circles whose color is less red. When two circles collide, the red circle sucks away–eats–some of the red of the less-red circle, making the former even more red and the latter even less red. The red circle also grows larger as a result of this meal and the less-red circle grows smaller as a result of being the meal. When circles reach a certain minimum size, they die and disappear.

If two colliding circles are of the same color “species” — in other words when they have similar (though not necessarily exactly similar) color DNA–they breed, producing an offspring with similar but slightly mutated DNA, such that its red may be a bit more or a bit less than that of its parents. Meanwhile, the parents lose a little of their size — the cost of having children.

To Use:

• Hold down mouse to cycle thru colors and choose the favored color
• Move mouse while holding down
• Circles will collide with your creature
• Release mouse to inject creature into the environment
• Shapes closer in shade to the selected color will thrive and breed
• Others will be consumed
• As this happens, watch the work change color toward the selected color

Note: When released, your creature will default to a neutral color (equal parts red, green and blue). However, the color it last showed (red, green or blue) before you released it is the new favored color–the selected for or dominant color in the environment. Watch your creature evolve and devour or be devoured.

Source code | Built with Processing

Studies for an art project.

Documentation of a drawing and video installation presented at Ask the Robot at Chelsea Piers in New York, 2005. Elements of the piece are pencil on paper, while other elements are projected. The piece “progresses” across four panels to tell a story.

Batmakumba is a recording of a collaborative live video performance, developed by Mac McKean, Talita Miranda and Jose Hinestrosa, and performed by Mac and Talita with singer Karina Zeviani.

Visual effects are done in Max-Msp-Jitter and respond to changes in the audio and to the input of the performance team. The song “Batmakumba” (1968, Gilberto Gil e Caetano Veloso) has a sound structure that maps to an inverse pyramid: its textures become increasingly simple and then increasingly complex. We intended to take this hidden structure and employ it in a visual representation of the song, using it both to determine the structure of the video and the texture of the video. In other words, the song structure, the visual texture and the visual structure all reflect the same hidden or implied reverse pyramid. In the second half of the song, we closed the loop of manipulation, altering the audio texture itself so that it responds to the video texture. Most experiments with direct visual-audio interaction allow audio (such beat or volume) to modify or create the work’s visual component. In this case, we have established an audio-visual feedback loop, with each element impacting the other. We go one further sending this feedback loop through a hidden form, the inverse pyramid, which further informs the output. This work gives musical and visual form to non-physical abstractions.

Click here to view the lyrics to the song and commentary in Portuguese.

Shot in the East Village, NYC, in the summer of 2005. Shown at various festivals and events in NYC, London, Miami, etc. Thanks to Tamar Schoenberg (woman), Brian Maniere and Elliott Malkin (camera).

This is a mockup of the proposed video installation piece. It is intended to be projected (using video projector) against a wall in a public space. Posters are projected into wooden poster-style frames. An IR (infrared) sensor is used to detect the presence or absence of viewers. If a viewer approaches the posters after a delay of a couple of seconds the posters begin to play and speak. The subway station fly-thru, modeled in 3-D, is not part of the installation and only represents the kind of environment in which the subway posters would be placed. Additonal mockup from Deptford X festival

Canon Powershot avi and tortured in AfterEffects. My friend Jose’s music.

Shot riding bike using the video feature on my still camera. Music is by a friend’s band, The Skwat.

Web-show pilot developed with Morgan Barnard and featuring Carlen Altman.