The result of the elections in Italy (where i half live) is saddening me beyond words.
I cheered up a bit this morning when i discovered that tagr.tv has put the video of Casey Reas’ talk at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna online. Last week i had the pleasure of attending Casey’s lecture at the Node08 festival in Frankfurt. While his talk in Vienna focused on his own work, the Frankfurt audience was blissed with a wonderful presentation that made coding finally understandable to someone like me, was packed with references to wonderful artworks based on code subtleties and provided a glimpse into what his next book will be like. The creator (together with Ben Fry) of processing told me that it took them several years to come up with their Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, so don’t expect the new opus to land on your bookshelf this month.
Image bitforms gallery
I missed Paul Prudence‘s presentation which was apparently fabulous and if you’re curious about Node08, Paul has started to write about the event on his blog. However i caught theverymany‘s very engaging presentation slash performance. I was so sick that day that i took almost no notes but i listened avidly and rescued this gem from their talk:
They worked with architect Alex Haw to develop LightHive, a delicate “luminous architectural surveillance” constellation made of some 1500 LEDs, positioned to recreate the location of every light source in the building of London’s Architectural Association where it was installed last year. Each LED replicates the intensity, colour and direction of the real light sources. They switched on and off and changed in intensity according to light use throughout the school building.
ps. if you’re in Brussels over the coming weeks, come and check out Casey Reas’ work at the Holy Fire exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta and Yves Bernard, the director of iMAL.