Joseph Gray

Seattle based Architecture firm Olson Kundig invited Reilly Donovan and I to create an interactive, projection mapped installation within the VIP Collectors Lounge they produced for Design Miami/Basel 2015 in Basel, Switzerland. Design Miami is the sister fair of Art Basel focusing on primarily interior design, art jewelry and architecture, the exclusive lounge area serves as a resting spot for collectors attending the fair.

We arrived in Basel with a few pieces of code sketches and then worked in the environment itself for a week prior to the fair opening so that the piece could be optimized both aesthetically and technically to the temporary fabricated environment that Olson Kundig created. Before hand arrangements were made to install three projectors, driven by one CPU each, to cover three walls in the lounge to immerse visitors in generative light art. This system acted as the paint and plaster of an immersive generative mural.

Custom code written in Processing generated the brick pattern to precisely projection map the physical environment. A calibration mode brought up custom controls to set brick size and spacing in situ, along with four corner pin keystoning allowed us to accurately match the architectural surface.

Three depth cameras were also used to track general movement in the room. This tracking data was then used to subtly offset the brick mappings themselves, creating a sense, often out of the corner of one's eye, that the walls were breathing slightly.

Each brick was coded as a discrete object in our application, an individual brick's transparency was then governed by slightly offset LFOs, creating the cascading pattern. Additional horizontal lines constantly drifted upwards creating the gradient effect. Vertical and horizontal lines traced the surface, also coded as independent objects that controlled their own animation. The entire time scale was slowed to an architectural pace, to create a relaxing, conversational and pensive environment.

A generative art piece written in Processing and GLSL. This piece was premiered at Fremont Studios for the Wunderman/Thompson merger launch party on the Studios' giant projection wall as an ever evolving backdrop and mood setter for the duration of the event.

The piece uses randomness, simplex noise and low frequency oscillators with heavy use of custom coded vertex and fragment shaders written in GLSL. The work can be rendered at any size or duration.

Creative director Jared Lovejoy of Tashkent Park Creative contacted me to provide visuals for this party. Notably Grandmaster Flash did a set at this party.

Reductivism, Schwitters, formalization, Lobachevsky, Euclid's parallel postulate, new geometries; that the consistency of an axiomatic system cannot be proven within that system. Gödel. Endless endlessness. Cantor. Pure indifferent multiplicity. void setup( ){actual = new Actual(virtual);} 'Post-contemporary' bricolage. Differentiation. Dialectics and diametric oppositions. Histories instead of History (Badiou). Entropy, Brownian motion, the clinamen, Meillassoux's 'hyper-chaos'. Machines. Non-organic life. Contingency and incompleteness, the passage of idea and concept through form. Glitch, crunchy fuzz.

Complexity Theory, Vitalism, Kool-Aid, Tang, Consciousness, the Brain and Commodore 64. Litanies. Realist Ontologies. Speculative metaphysics, materialisms and topologies. The scientific color pallet. Interactive technologies, open-source software, isomorphisms, new forms of life and forms of thought. New politics. Ideas of the commons. Diaspora: impossible, coming, interoperable. Try again, fail again, fail better (Beckett). Undecidable propositions. Art and philosophy and moving trains. Also, Quaternions and involution. K holes and Halo. New Rave and aging detritus. Noise. Wii rhetoric and Agambenian inflections. Gaming. The dice throw.

Crystalline Chlorophyll is an interactive digital sculpture. Its surface starts as an icy-crystalline shimmering and is slowly overcome by a verdant-green growth of texture during the course of the exhibition based on the movement of the visitors observing it. By tracking movement in the room it randomly adds a bit of green to the surface using generative pseudo-organic image algorithms. When the sculpture is left alone for a while the mossy layer decays revealing the crystal-like surface again, waiting for the next group of visitors.

The physical sculpture is built from a 3D virtual model using cutouts from it's flattened triangles printed on 11X17″ card stock. The surface of the sculpture is painted with white gesso. The original object was designed in Blender, it's facets were unfolded using the “unfold” python script. The unfolded meshes are then exported as .svg UV maps. More information on the technique of going from 3D model to papercraft can be found in this tutorial.

Two ceiling mounted video projectors project from opposite sides onto the sculptural surface. The images are corrected for distortion by mapping textures to a 3D model of the real-world object, utilizing techniques also found in video game technology.

The work's software was written in the Processing programming language. The software loads a 3D model of the sculpture, made in Blender, and allows for manual rotation, scaling and positioning of the object so that it can be aligned to the real world object. When the two models align the physical version has a projection-mapped surface that can be treated as though it were a 3D software texture-map. The software generates a real-time texture on the object's surface using camera tracking to seed random image generation. Virtual lighting completes the effect.

Camera tracking is done with a simple difference algorithm. Each channel (RGB) of each pixel of the camera image is tracked for the amonut of change from the previous frame. If the number is above a certain threshold a random number is generated to determine if the associated pixel in the real-time texture map should change. A height map generated in Blender partially determines the probability of a pixel changing from the static “ice-crystal” texture to a “mossy” one. Other influences are neighboring pixels values and the amount of change in the camera pixel.

A simple cube one foot square on each side with one corner cut so that it can stand on end. Moving imagery is projected on all 6 surfaces of the cube. The projected image is a 3D real-time generatively texture-mapped cube.

In occular perspective things farther away appear smaller. Images projected on irregular surfaces will distort, with the portions farther away from the projection source being larger than those closer. An image of an object rendered in the correct perspective when projected on a real object of the same proportions will automatically correct for the projected distortion. The cube demonstrates this phenomenon.

Projected on the surface of the cube are a checkerboard patterns on three faces and a live camera feed on the other three. The checkerboard patterns change density over time, being governed by LFO chains to create a seemingly random and continuous timing. The live camera feed is aimed directly at the cube creating visual feedback and allowing the viewer to interact with the medium.

The work is also a conceptual abstraction commenting on the human obsession with ninety degree angles. It also exists partially to blur the boundaries between the virtual and the real; and to demonstrate the virtual becoming real (i.e. a virtual texture-mapped cube becoming a real texture-mapped cube).

An arcade console that finds your face and puts someone else's face on it, then makes an animated GIF and uploads it to Tumblr.

The console has no hands-on controls or instructions, rather it uses a webcam embedded above the screen to recognize faces. Faces are then captured and stored in a database. On occasion it sees things as being faces that are not actually faces. Previously saved faces are then randomly selected and placed on the current viewers faces. Additionally a set of venue specific iconography is added to the viewers likeness. In the case of the CHPB version these included sparkly unicorn horns and fancy top hats.

The console was designed in Adobe Illustrator and cut on a CNC router and etched with a laser cutter. Electronics include a CRT monitor, mini CPU and webcam. Software was written in processing using a combination of video, OpenCV, GIF and network libraries.

The Daughters of Air is a musical-visual performance evoking fairytales under the sea. The aqueous world is formed with sound, light, costume and sculpture. Non-traditional vocals, utilizing electronic audio effects, create the ethereal narrative sound score. Visualists paint with light, using digital projection, on an environment of organic costume and set pieces.

Daughters of Air is inspired by the notion of “mermaid heaven” a concept that appears in Hans Christian Anderson's original ending to his fairy tale The Little Mermaid. In his vision mermaids, being non-human, do not have a soul, turning to sea foam when they die. The central character in his story does a deed of such unselfish goodness and is so true to her own conviction that she transcends her soullessness gaining eternal life in, presumably, a mermaid heaven.

Music composed for this work by Kelli Frances Corrado and Ivory Smith utilizes live and pre-recorded sounds: effected vocal scores, songs, live sampling, electronic instruments and percussion, and samples from the Antarctic ocean. Samples of natural aquatic sounds, eliciting an otherworldly effect, are processed in the studio and additionally modified live in the performance.

Visuals for this performance are generated live with custom software written in the Processing programming language by Joseph Gray, leaning heavily on the MSAFluid Library. The controller used is the MSARemote, a multi-touch OSC controller for iPhone. Both MSAFluid and MSARemote are the creations of Memo Akten (memo.tv) Two visual performers control the light of two separate projectors whose imagery combine on translucent set pieces visual performers control the light of two separate projectors whose imagery combine on translucent set pieces and costume.

Sponsors:
Initial project funding was provided by On The Boards as part of the festival. Additional support for sets and visuals development was provided by 911 Media Arts Center 911media.org with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts warholfoundation.org

Geo Chroma is an interactive video wall installed in the lobby of Progenics offices at One World Trade in New York, NY. The piece was commissioned by NBBJ Architects and produced by Samuel Stubblefield, a principal at the firm whose group focuses on environmental design.

The piece uses motion tracking of passerby to generate colorful three dimensional geometry that rises and fades over time. Colors and lighting in the piece are modified by the time of day and year, making the work an ever changing response to both its immediate interior environment and the exterior conditions of seasons and hours.

A net art piece depicting the sun infinitely setting into an oceanic horizon. Color palettes are pulled from images found via Google's image search feature. This piece was a runner up in Google's DevArt Competition.

The piece was formerly hosted at http://infinite-sunset.com but is now only a code repository on GitHub: https://github.com/grauwald/Infinite-Sunset

This exhibition is an installation using randomly cross-faded digital drawings projected on sculptural paper surfaces synced with randomized audio tracks played on six speakers. The overall effect creates a unique environment of dynamic color and sound.

mapSculpt is a digital projection-mapped, bas-relief, landscape painting. The physical sculpture is constructed of spandex with a projection screen coating sewn to laser-cut acrylic supports. A ceiling mounted digital projector casts the image of a landscape with the same proportions as the sculpture. The combination of the real world object and virtual model align, physically, to be perceived as a single construct.

The design of mapSculpt utilizes the technique of height-mapping which is found primarily in 3D video games. Height-mapping translates a flat 2D grayscale image into a 3D mesh where the height of each vertex in the mesh is determined by the brightness of the corresponding pixel in the 2D image. Both the physical and virtual components of mapSculpt use a 16x9 pixel image as their blueprint. As a result there are 144 acrylic supports and 144 corresponding vertices in the 3D mesh.

The virtual image is texture-mapped with a perlin noise algorithm modified by the original height map and colored with a woodland palette. There is cutoff, also based on the height map, that determines if a pixel will be rendered with the yellows and sepias found in some pastures as opposed to being set to the color range of a dense forest seen from above. This image is much higher resolution lending a more visually complex surface variation to the low polygon model it is textured onto. A virtual water line is created using undulating translucent planes. Passing virtual lights mimicing a sun and moon rotate around the 3D model.

A suite of custom software is used to both construct and present the piece. This allows for a near infinite variation (improvements) on the same theme and technique. This software is written by the artist using the Processing programming language. This sculpture can be stored in a small box and transported, then set up again with different hardware. Because the software is written in Processing it is also easily portable. The software suite also includes a tool to create the laser paths for fabrication, and the tool for creating the image file and is therefore completely “stand-alone” in terms of creating new variations of the artwork.

24 industrial work lights are hooked up to 6 DMX lighting control dimmer packs. The lights are arranged across the entire floor of a downtown Bellevue Washington construction site. A stand-alone DMX controller is sending an oscillating wave of light fade commands, creating an undulating stripe of light flowing across the width of the building.

This work was a commision from Su Development and the Elements Too building to celebrate the holiday season and enliven the Bellevue skyline during the darkest month of the year. Additional support came from Open Satellite and 911 Media Arts Center.

A hastily created installation furthering the study of video projection augmenting sculptural surfaces. A random collection of used building materials is fashioned into a generic portrait of a city skyline. Bright colors and patterns flash on the various surfaces governed by a series of LFOs.

The piece was inspired after the artists first trip to NYC (and the East Coast US as a whole), and a series of visits to various other N. American cities. The modern skyline is fairly consistent across these cities, begging the question “what is the difference between them in a post-contemporary, communications overloaded, age?”

Seems to mostly be a difference in weather, though in modern travel it is possible to not leave a climate controlled environment whilst globe trotting. Going from the condo, to the taxi, to the airport, to the airplane, to the hotel, to the conference center, to the mall and back again.

The work is also inspired by the New Rave movement that was being carefully constructed as the next “big thing”, primarily in London, NYC and Tokyo. New Rave is a conglomerate of former popular styles, and in a very self-conscious way. It is by definition not meant to be taken seriously. New Rave could be considered a deeply pop-educated extension of rave culture, punk rock and hip-hop. It's distinguishing characteristic is sound and colors that immediately barrage the senses; chiaroscuro on growth hormones.

S34sc4p3 is a multi-media interactive installation that tracks movement outside of the gallery that controls generative wave animations projected onto the sculptural surface suspended in the gallery window. The piece is best observed at night. The custom software was written in the Processing language, a code format designed for artistic applications.

Light_Paper_Noise is similar to the previous work Light_Paper_Sound, except rather than generating new mixes of audio from recordings, it listens to the ambient sound of the room to affect the real-time animation projected on the paper surface.

The piece was created entirely in the gallery within a few days time. Catherine Walworth curated the group exhibition of paper based works entitled Paperwork which also included artists Rhonda Kuhlman (San Antonio, TX), Sachi Komai (Madison, WI) and Michael Velliquette (Madison, WI/San Antonio, TX).

The images in the photographs show how the piece appeared during daylight hours.