I was really happy to attend a talk with Marius Watz, one of my longtime idol’s, hero’s, persons of interest in the field of digital fabrication 2.0 or whatever we’re calling it now. Marius labels himself as an oldschool media artist (which I can related to not only because I’m getting older myself) but perhaps because I am not of the mindset that using the latest “cutting edge”[ack] technology makes oneself a new media artist. Hype fueled rants aside, “the future is already here its just not uniformly distributied”, as William Gibson proffers.  Mr Watz takes this a step further by graciously providing a link to some of the code he demoed during his ITP talk on one of his sites here. Also of interest are his sites mariuswatz.com, unlekker.net and generatorx.no

Parametric modeling is still an obscure term among anyone but design geeks and architects but give it 3-7 years and you will be seeing 3d printers and laser cutters and the like at your nearest Kinko’s(need to engrave happy birthday mom on a custom iPhone cover in 5 min? click. done). The term parametric modeling is somewhat redundant but essentially its modeling forms as a system of generative rules, controlled by parameters that describe distinct qualities of that form.

When I was a kid, the first thing that attracted me to art was the beauty of its minimal order, found in book of aesthetics and math such as Design and Logic. Now with rapid prototyping and CNC, I realize i can make what was once only possible in this long fabled cyberspace tangible. these parabolic bits extruded into physical space of mazes and sculpture splashed with the softness of color’s mood. I’ve been tinkering with some of Marius’s code and the next steps I’d like to see are in color gradations around the arc, camera nav using BoxD2 and further integration of ControlP5. The real trick is morphing a pretty object into a valid data visualization so the real trick is to how to import CSV data into radians.

Like most visual pieces, this one’s impact is confined to the scale of screen resolution. Further progressions will be of laser cut cardboard (freely available) to section, slice and stack together as recursive patterns on a more sculptural scale.  I want to break free of the confines computer arts been locked into the same way computer graphics where before more sophisiticated graphics cards. Data visualizations existing on many scales but personal, networked and reactive as  wearable fabrications rendered on a laser etched ring or jewelry or CNC milled as a color coded sculpture illuminating environmental, personal social media or other exogenous metrics.

Physical mock-ups coming as soon as I can get into the digifab shop. Until then, some inspiration.

http://workshop.evolutionzone.com/

http://forum.processing.org/topic/announcing-first-release-of-modelbuilder-library

http://code.arc.cmu.edu/

http://www.interactivefabrication.com/projects/

http://mwatz.tumblr.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/watz/

http://www.openscad.org/

Not only code is scav­enged with­out mercy, a whole range of ref­er­ence mate­r­ial on algo­rithms is scoured:

1. The über-reference Paul Bourke. Invalu­able for many geo­met­ric algo­rithms, espe­cially in HEC_IsoSurface.
2. Chris­ter Ericson’s Real-time Col­li­sion Detec­tion for many of the geo­met­ric datas­truc­tures and inter­sec­tion algo­rithms in wblut.geom.
3. Code pro­vided by Jon Squire served as the start­ing point for the basic pla­tonic solid cre­ators in wblut.hemesh.
4. Scloopy‘s ref­er­ence to a paper by Man­dal and Esan proved just the thing I needed for wblut.hemesh.modifiers.HEM_Wireframe.
5. A thou­sand page tome has added its bur­den to my desk: Geo­met­ric Tools for Com­puter Graph­ics by Philip Schnei­der and David Eberly. Its con­tents are increas­ingly imple­mented in He_Mesh’s geo­met­ric back­bone. If He_Mesh turns out to be sta­ble, this book deserves the praise. If not, it’s me that messed up somewhere…
6. David Marec was so gra­cious to pro­vide me with metic­u­lously com­piled ver­tex and con­nec­ti­tiv­ity data for a whole host of poly­he­dra. Not only was the data flaw­less, it was also almost directly usable. A rare for­tune indeed.

Data sculpture representing movement and communication using a cell phone.