The idea that an autobiography can not only be of a person but also of data, ideas, concepts or other inanimate objects is of interest to us. We are interested in looking at how certain ideas have prevailed on the web over the years.

The generative book attempts to be a narrative object that elicits such ideas/concepts/identities that have existed on the web for years and that which continue to be produced or appended to by people in present day cyberspace. The book uses an entered word to expand and search for related content on the web. It uses a lexical database to expand the entered word into many more related keywords which are then used to query data from the internet using public APIs and scraping. Some our sources of information are blogs, social networking sites, color directories etc.

The program then graphically lays out the contents into PDF books which can be printed. Every time the program is run it produces a unique book. No one book produced by this program is the same. It renders layouts, spreads, colours, type and other graphic elements depending on a set of relationships built from the queried data.

The Mechanical Art Production Platform, or MAPP, is an art-making platform, consisting of a three-axis drawing machine attached via microcontroller to custom computer software.

MAPP is a platform, and not simply a machine, by virtue of the fact that it was not designed with a specific aesthetic output in mind, but rather as a vehicle for expression capable of various and unexpected artistic results. Thus there is no singular input or output for the machine, but rather a number of choices for the artist to make.

The aesthetic range of MAPP is determined by its three main components: the physical machine, the software that controls the machine, and the drawing media used for each particular piece.

The mechanics of the machine are centered upon the movement of three plexiglass stages (one per axis), attached via a nut and threaded rod to a stepper motor. The attachment of the rod to the motor turns the radial motion of the stepper motor into the linear motion of the stage. The software arrangement translates various forms of user input into commands that, once received by the microcontroller, cause the motors, and thus the stages, to perform specific movements.

While MAPP is currently a single instantiation, it is also the beginning of an attempt at providing an accessible framework to aspiring artists and technologists who wish to work on similar projects in mechanically driven art. The instructions for the physical machine and electronics are adaptations from the open source project reprap.org, and the custom programming work will soon be released as an open-source library for others to use and expand, in the hopes of fostering more inventive projects bridging the worlds of art and machines.

motionLife plays with the concept of how our movements affect the world around us. It shows an artistic representation of the scene in front of it, that constantly oscillates slightly. As the observer moves, the screen explodes in a shower of particles (representing how everything we observe is made up smaller parts), that dance and bounce back into place over time.

Observers can respond to the piece with huge sweeping gestures, keeping the scene in chaotic motion. Alternatively, they can keep very still and make small motions, cause a scene that mirrors reality, but slightly askew.

These painterly images document the love and obsession that people express for their pets … in the form photographs uploaded to the Flickr website. For this project, I collected pictures of dogs, cats, puppies (clearly, a different species than dogs), kittens, hamsters, and bunnies on Flickr.com and generated new images based on the features and colors of the originals. These high resolution images, which share a likeness to Gustav Klimt\’s work, are still images taken from animations made using software programmed C++ using the openFrameworks library.