Category Archives: Visual Art

Animata : real-time animation software

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Last update : August 14, 2015

Animata is an open source real-time animation software, designed to create animations, interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances. It is controlled by OSC (Open Sound Control) messages and it can easily be controlled from OSC enabled software. There is not much documentation about Animata. There are a few videos that show, with no narration, how to do some basic scene construction.

Animata was developed by Peter Nemeth, Gabor Papp and Bence Samu at Kitchen Budapest (KIBU). Founded in 2007 and powered by Magyar Telekom, KIBU is a space where a multidisciplinary team of designers, technologists, artists, researchers and entrepreneurs are working in a hyper-collaborative environment to create value and push boundaries forward.

In October 2012, Gabor Papp created a Google Group as a forum for interested people in Animata, to replace the old email lists animata-users and animata-developers.

Executables of Animata versions 004 and 003 for Windows and Mac OSX are available at the Animata KIBU website. Some examples and sound-input programs for Windows and for Java can be downloaded at the same website.

The source code can be downloaded from a subversion repository at Google Code. The last committed changes have been done by Gabor Papp on April 22, 2013. A short technical documentation about Animata is available at the KIBU website.

I tried to compile the Animata source code on a Debian Linux development system. Animata requires the fltk package 1.1.x. FLTK, pronounced fulltick, is a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without the bloat and supports 3D graphics via OpenGL and its built-in GLUT emulation. The current FLTK version is 1.3.2, but I didn’t manage to compile the Animata source code with this new version.

To install the FLTK version 1.1.11, I did the following actions :

  • download the file fltk-1.0.11-source.tar.gz from the FLTK website
  • unrar the package
  • navigate to the extracted folder in terminal
  • run the following commands in terminal as root : ./configure, make, make install

The result is shown hereafter :

Animata running in Linux

Animata running in Linux

The linux executable can be downloaded from this website.

 Animata and processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Michael Forrest was the first to extract the playback view from Animata for integration in Processing applications in January 2009. One month later, Zeni forked the program to animatap5. In May 2013, James Britt forked the project from Zeni, revamped and extended the program to AnimataP5-ng. I managed to compile the AnimataP5-ng library with the included rake file. The Animata sketches run fine on Processing 2.1. James Britt posted a comprehensive introduction to AnimataP5-ng on his blog.

Animata Processing 2.1 sketch

Animata Processing 2.1 sketch

Animata on other platforms

Michael Forrest ported the Animata renderer not only to Processing in 2009, but also to the Flash and iPhone platforms. There are no executable files available at these Github websites, only the source code with building files to do your own compilation. A video referring to the iOS project is available on Vimeo, the Flash Tree Artwork of Michael Forrest  can be viewed on his website.

Animata Tree Artwork by Michael Forrest

Animata Tree Artwork by Michael Forrest in Flash

Animata, OSC and Kinect

Controlling Animata with a mouse and doing real-time animations is pretty cool by itself, but Animata really shows its true potential when you control it with OSC. Matti Niinimäki (MÅNSTERI) from Finland was the first to report about his experience with Animata, OSC, Puredata , Max/MSP, Quartz Composer and Kinect. This link shows you all posts of Matti Niinimäki tagged with Animata. OSC Informations provided by Matti Niinimäki have been included in a Wiki embryo usinganimata.wikia.com.

Boris Masis from Russia reported in Februrary 2011 about his Kinect animations with Animata. James Britt wrote in December 2011 about his Kinect Hackings for Artists. He published a note on his Neurogami website about his talk, related to this subject, given at Tiny Army on February 1, 2012. Code for this talk is available at the Neurogami Gitbub website. Yannick Loriot published a tutorial in two parts how to install  OpenNI on Windows for Kinect.

The following list provides links to videos showing animations done with OSC :

OSC Tools

The following OSC tools can be used to control Animata animations :

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

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L’artiste lyonnais Lionel Stocard a invité au vernissage de son exposition “Les téléphones Importables” au PostMusée à Luxembourg le vendredi 12 juillet 2013. Parmi ses 90 ‘téléphones importables’ (importables car trop volumineux et/ou trop lourds) créés par l’artiste, Post Luxembourg montre une sélection de 10 sculptures et 10 tableaux.

Claude Strasser CEO Post Luxembourg ; Lionel Stocard, artiste français

Claude Strasser, CEO Post Luxembourg ; Lionel Stocard, artiste français

Après ses études d’architecture intérieure et d’arts plastiques, Lionel Stocard se consacre entièrement à la création plastique et sonore autour de son sujet de prédilection, le rêve. Très inspiré par la musique méditative, c’est au travers de ses toiles, ses sculptures, sa musique et ses installations sonores qu’il s’exprime. Sonorités mouvantes, notes défilantes, les installations de Lionel Stocard visent à bouleverser le mode d’écoute d’une pièce musicale par le déplacement physique des sources sonores dans l’espace.

Vernissage de l'exposition "les téléphones importables " de Lionel Stocard

Vernissage de l’exposition “les téléphones importables ” de Lionel Stocard

À l’heure de la communication à outrance, de l’invasion planétaire du téléphone portable, Lionel Stocard invite à repenser notre rapport à l’objet et sa fonction en créant des téléphones “importables”. Ces machines à communiquer, peintes ou sculptées, lourdes, encombrantes et peu pratiques fonctionnent réellement. Les Importables sont des objets rares dans un monde envahi par la technologie. Du téléphone fixe ils gardent l’électronique, pour le reste ils nous obligent à ne pas quitter l’imaginaire qui nous aide à anticiper et à réfléchir en dehors du prêt à penser.

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

Open Source Films

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Last update : July 9, 2013

Open source films (open-content movies, free-content movies or open movies) are films which are produced and distributed by using free and open-source software methodologies. Their sources are freely available and the licenses used meet the demands of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Cultural Works.

A list of free-content films is available at Wikipedia.

Here are the open source films where the sources are available.

1. Films made by Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation, a non-profit organization, chaired by Ton Roosendaal, responsible for the development of Blender, an open source program for three-dimensional modeling  :

Open source film Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream

This 10 minutes short movie is about complexities of a machine and how the characters deal with this complexity and ambiguity.

Open source film Big Buck Bunny

Big Buck Bunny

This short-animated movie is about three critters that poke fun at other jungle animals including a big rabbit called Big Buck Bunny. Therefore Big Buck starts to seek vengeance for himself and his beloved butterflies.

Open source film Sintel

Sintel

A girl called Sintel is searching for her dragon friend Scales.

Open source film Tears of Steal

Tears of Steel

This open source film is about a group of warriors and scientists, who gathered at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam to stage a crucial event from the past, in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots.

The Blender Institute created also an open video game, called Yo Frankie!, based on the universe and characters of the film Big Buck Bunny.

2. Open source films made by other creators and teams :

The boy who never slept

Boy who never slept

This film is about a 23 year-old writer who has felt in love with a 16 year old school girl.

.re_potemkin

.re_potemkin

This project is a re-build of the 1925 silent movie Battleship Potemkin which is in public domain now.

Oceania

Oceania

A story of two teenagers who deal with their shattered family-life in a small California coastal town.

Sita Sings the Blues

Sita Sings the Blues

This 80-minutes animated feature film has been created by a single person and is based on the renowned Indian Sanskrit epic The Ramayana.

Jathias Wager

Jathias Wager

A science fiction film about a young man living in an isolated community of humans who must make a life changing decision about his future species.

Valkaama

Valkaama

Three young people are searching for a utopian society in northern Finland called Valkaama; a society that is full of harmony, peace and poetry.

More than ten additional open-content films will be released in the next future.

Different compressed and lossless encoded versions of open-source films are available at Xiph.org. More informations about open source films are provided at the following links :

Cooltext Graphics Generator and Vector Studio

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Cool Text is a free graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need an impressive logo without a lot of design work. Online since 1998, Cooltext servers have rendered over 300 million free images. Cooltext features a free font archive with over 1,200 fonts available and offers also automatic button creation.

image created with Cooltext Graphics Generator

Image created with Cooltext Graphics Generator

Cooltext was founded by Bryan Livingston, a small business owner (Livingston Technologies) and computer programmer living in Lehi, Utah. He is also the author of the now free vector drawing program Vector Studio.

Text (term, word, tag) Clouds

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Examples of tag clouds

A text, term, word or tag cloud, also called a weighted list in visual design, is a representation for text data to show the most prominent terms and their relative prominence. These clouds are typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites. The importance of each tag is shown with font size or color.

When used as website navigation aids, the terms are hyperlinked to items associated with the tag. Compared to conventional navigation, tag clouds can provide visitors with an instant illustration of the main topics, giving a very specific and precise orientation of the site’s content. Examples and good practice for tag clouds, with a gallery, have been published in 2007 by Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of the Smashing Magazine.

There is a number of on-line tools available which help designers to create tag clouds automatically. A few links are listed hereafter :

It’s also easy to generate hand-made tag clouds by creating the required number of css-classes and applying them to the HTML code.

Example :
CSS :

div {text-align:left; font-family:Arial; background-color:white; border: 1px solid silver}
.tag1 {color:red; font-size:12px}
.tag2 {color:blue; font-size:14px}
.tag3 {color:green; font-size:18px}

HTML:

<div>
<a href="url">Term ABC</a>
<a href="url">Term defgh</a>
<a href="url">Term 1234</a>
<a href="url">Term xyz xyz</a>
</div>

Additional informations and tools about tag clouds are available at the following links :

Google Art Project

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The Google Art Project is a unique online art experience, using a combination of various advanced Google technologies and expert information, provided by 151 acclaimed art partners (museums, galleries, …) from across 40 countries.

Google Art Project

Users can

  • explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail
  •  take a virtual tour of a museum or gallery (with Street View images and navigation)
  • build their own collections to share (user gallery)
  • enjoy over 30 000 artworks from sculpture to architecture
  • explore over 150 collections
  • edit, reorder, upload Youtube videos and more in the “My Galleries” section
  • use a dedicated Education section providing simple tools to learn about the artworks featured on the Google Art Project

The Google Art Project was launched on 1 February 2011. Seventeen galleries and museums were included in the launch of the project.

In France, the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2rmf) launched in 2009 the project 3D*COFORM to advance the state-of-the-art in 3D-digitisation and make 3D-documentation an everyday practical choice for digital documentation campaigns in the cultural heritage sector.

LA Re.Play : an exhibition of mobile media art

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LA Re.Play, an exhibition of Mobile Art, took place in Los Angeles, February 22-29, 2012. 

Playing upon the dynamic relations between physical place, digital space, and mobile access via smartphone, the mobile artworks highlighted in the exhibit and the panels adopt elements of location-based performance, mobile gaming, and mobile, networked activism to highlight the embodied performance of hybrid place and the social and collective politics of networked space. LA Re.Play explored art that incorporates cell phones, GPS and other mobile technology, revealing the complex social, political, technological and physiological effects of new mixed reality interactions.

LA.Replay was curated by Hana Iverson, Mimi Sheller and Jeremy Hight.

Open Data

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Opte Project

A hall of fame of data visualization projects is presented at the digital-art section of Leslie’s Artgallery.

50 great examples of data visualization are presented by the Mass Media Group.

New Zealander Richard MacManus published the contribution “Where to Find Open Data on the Web” on his blog ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular technology blogs in the world, known for offering insightful analysis about each day’s Internet industry news.

A list of useful links to open source data sets is given below:

Wikipedia : Art & Culture

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The following Wikipedia portals are useful for the visual and plastic arts :

english français deutsch
Arts Arts
Art contemporain
Culture Culture
Visual Art
Computer Graphics
Graffiti
Photography Photographie
Peinture

The following categories are related to visual and plastic arts :

The major topics are :

The lists are :

WikiProjects are :

WikiMedia associated Visual Arts :