imaginetic

By: crazykaro

May 05 2010

Tags: animata, art, coagula, data, foam, interactivity, landscape, programs, search engine, software, sound, taxonomy

Category: Images & Sounds

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In the last tutorial, we were playing with some programs we could use to create images and sounds: Coagula and Animata. I instantly fell in love with Coagula – it generates sounds from images, transforms colours and shapes into sound. I tried it with some filters, on photographs and paintings, and as it allows you to paint new images in the program itself, I also painted some myself. It is just so much fun to import a picture and see what it sounds like, and it is fascinating to ‘paint’ sounds. As I am a very visual person, I found it much easier to create sounds by actually painting and seeing them than to create or record sounds in a not-visual, only accoustic way. Here are two examples of the sounds I created with Coagula:

Coagula: Picture of an Absinthe advertising
Coagula: Self-painted picture

I was less sucessful with Animata, a really small and free animation program. Though very simple, it is harder to get started and to learn what the program can actually do, I guess it would take some time to watch or read some tutorials to figure that out. I only managed to project an image as a kind of texture onto a threedimensional cluster of triangles (see picture above).

Another exercise in the tutorial was to take a reference from ubuweb.com or rhizome.org and match it according to a certain taxonomy. I took an example from rhizome.org, called NOWHERE (by Ralf Baecker): It is a milling machine in a gallery that creates threedimensional landscapes out of a block of hard foam. But how the landscape looks like is determined by a process where search inquiries on a German search engine are fed into the milling machine. The changing stream of search requests defines the structure of the landscape over a specified amount of time, until the machine is ‘finished’ (13 days).

According to our taxonomy, I would put this artwork in the category installation, and the sub-category noisily visual. Every search request is displayed on a screen behind the machine with a little sound, and the machine makes a lot of noise every time it shapes the foam and moves – which is a kind of created soundtrack. The visuals can be seen both on a screen and in material form (the foam and the machine), and the site is a gallery (the Art Cologne 2006). Regarding the interaction, the taxonomy becomes problematic and simplifying, as (in this case) there are not only the spectators/viewers in the gallery, but basically everyone who uses the search engine becomes part of the art project as the users create the landscape with their search enquiries (even if they may not know it).