there’s a whole world out there

In posting every stage of progress in my Processing sketches recently, I seem to have lost sight of what’s going on elsewhere on the web. As an antidote (yes, the use of the medical term is deliberate), I’ve been researching current and recent examples of digital art.

There’s the forthcoming Futuresonic festival in Manchester from 13 to 16 May 2009, which I plan to visit. Michael Takeo‘s website claims he currently has an installation called Data_sea at Birmingham’s Thinktank, but there’s no mention of it on the Thinktank website. On Everything by Pall Thayer, created with Processing in 2006, indiscriminately draws random material from blogs at blogger.com and images on Flickr. There’s also a lot of interesting material to be found at Furtherfield.

Via Vague Terrain, I’ve discovered Paul Prudence and his dataisnature blog, which has vast quantities of fascinating stuff, particularly generative art. Amongst other work, Paul contributed to Flash Math Creativity. Also via Vague Terrain, I came across Node 08: Forum for Digital Artists, which took place in Franfurt last year, largely using vvvv. You can see some videos of lectures at Node 08 on Vimeo, including an interesting but dry and formal (and incomplete) lecture by Casey Reas (of Processing fame) on the role of software in the visual arts, and the aforementioned Paul Prudence talking about visual music.

There is a fundamental problem with lectures by people who are not polished public speakers which is compounded when they’re filmed, but at least when watching them on the web you can pause as often as you want or need, and the content rewards perseverence (perhaps that should be ‘endurance’).