Aaron Oldenburg    
Baltimore, USA
http://aaronoldenburg.net  

Proyecto: Cho-Am

Visit the cremation site of Pol Pot as a sleepwalker. Interpret the world your character is inhabiting by their gestures and brief glimpses inside their head. This game does not have an ending until you decide to leave. Game time is connected to the current real time in Cambodia. The real life cremation site of Pol Pot in Cho-Am* is a place of contradictory spiritual and political significance. As a "good-luck" shrine, offerings are continuously left by visitors who hope to have assistance in their prayers from a main architect of the Cambodian auto-genocide. One of these visitors, a Thai businessman, constructed a hand-made spirit house at the site as thanks for Pol Pot appearing in a dream to him and giving him winning lottery numbers. This is a way of dealing with the memory and presence of someone responsible for pain and destruction that is outside of the realm of forgiveness and punishment. The site itself, across from a casino in a small town on the border with Thailand, in the region of Anlong Veng (a previous base of the Khmer Rouge), has very little aside from a tin roof covering a mound of dirt where Pol Pot's ashes used to be, a burn bin, a couple of spirit houses, and a hut near the entrance where a guard (the wife of a former Khmer Rouge general) sits and takes admission payment. It is an otherwise empty area with a powerful history.

tag: videogames

Brian Schrank
Chicago. USA
http://amomentfreefromdarkness.com/

Proyecto: A Moment Free from Darkness 

A Moment Free from Darkness is video art game about feeling empathy for a girl sold into sex slavery by her parents. Situations are presented through her subjective experience ranging from the hopeful to the horrific. The game has four acts that represent a cycle that repeats many times everyday of her life. The experience does not flow like a normal game. Each act feels distinct and demands cognitive work from players to thread one moment with the next and understand the game as a narrative whole. The game is played on four platforms sequentially to evoke an increasing sense of immersion through the first three acts (played on mobile, desktop, and Oculus Rift 2, respectively) and a drop off of immersion in a final act of healing and recovery (played on the Apple Watch).

tag: videogames

Booth, J
Jersey City.  NJ USA
https://vimeo.com/174046922

Project: Netty Ray

presents a world that is tearing us apart and devouring us together.

tag: generative arts

Claude Heiland-Allen
London, United Kingdom
https://mathr.co.uk/monotone/ 

Project: Monotone

Monotone reproduces the genesis of life as an organic character through fractal transformations emanating from random behaviour. The algorithmic work is made up of hundreds of thousands of fragile fractal texels in an iterated function system. The perceptible motion of the particles is similar to biomorphic and synthetic biological forms that connect to an unknown original universal matter and its procedural inception. They slowly and gently draw mesmerizing figures, according to stochastic rules. The result, hypnotic and mind-bending, is a brilliant example of the aesthetics of code. The sound composition uses digital signal processing to create shamanic rhythms of high intensity. The interconnected cells resemble processes in nature, from the origin of light to the creation of matter, in an unpredictable way, due to accidental movement.

The work connects biology, maths and arts imitating universal shapes of life in morphogenic and creative processes.

tag: generative arts

Dejan Grba
Belgrade, Serbia
http://dejangrba.dyndns.org

Project: Wake Vortex

Digital raster image can be treated as a three-dimensional object and viewed not just frontally but also from left, right, below and above. In that case the image is perceived as a one-pixel wide line whose height equals the frontal width or height of the image depending on the new viewing axis. Continual scanning along the orthogonal viewing axis displays all the one-pixel lines of the image.

Applied to a stacked collection of video frames, orthogonal scanning produces a new set of images whose number equals the pixel width/height depending on the viewing axis, pixel length of one side equals the total number of video frames, and pixel length of the other side equals the pixel width/height of the video depending on the viewing axis. The image sets extracted from video and the pixel line sets extracted from single image can be animated, and certain combinations of the original material and the scanning axes can produce interesting results. This processing technique can be understood as slit-scanning of digital imagery.

Wake Vortex comprises high resolution videos created by orthogonal scanning of some of my video works, the videos by Rhyland Warthon, Benjamin Fry, Luke DuBois, and a selection of statistically generated pop-cultural artifacts. This video was generated by orthogonal scanning of my video Alibi (Black or White)

(http://dejangrba.dyndns.org/art-projects/en/2012-alibi-black-or-white/index.php).

Dimensional collapse in orthogonal scanning reveals new formal values and facilitates layered observation. While visually estranged, the generated imagery retains the suggestiveness of the original so the viewer intuitively begins to watch it analytically and appreciate its visual, spatial and temporal dynamics.

In aviation, wake vortex is a dangerous turbulent trail of the aircraft, and in the context of this project the term points to the complexity of the imperceptible or unregistered default values of an artwork or cultural artifact, to their unforeseen expressive, cognitive, ethical and political consequences.

tag: generativearts

Eugenia Fratzeskou
London, UK

Proyecto: Interstitial Geometries

The supposedly simple methods of architectural design in the algorithmic ‘space’ of digital modelling systems, may yield unexpected outcomes. There is a challenging complexity of excessive beginnings and elliptical ends. As part of my mathematical and art research in drawing interstitiality, I have developed multilayered diagramming methods for revealing and engaging with the ‘hidden’ stages of digital boundary generation. The emerging paradox in digital modelling systems, inspires new creative possibilities for drawing and digital visualisation research, at the intersection of art, science and design.

tag: generative arts