"I am not a type designer. This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”. A Google on the subject brought up little, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps the process of averaging, or interpolating, existing fonts might bring up interesting results. Luckily at this point I didn't do any more web searching – instead I grabbed my laptop and came up with an initial idea for finding what the average of all my fonts might look like – by overlaying each letter at low opacity. The results can be seen in the below image."

"We investigate the ray-length distributions for two different rectangular versions of Gilbert's tessellation. In the full rectangular version, lines extend either horizontally (with east- and west-growing rays) or vertically (north- and south-growing rays) from seed points which form a Poisson point process, each ray stopping when another ray is met. In the half rectangular version, east and south growing rays do not interact with west and north rays. For the half rectangular tessellation we compute analytically, via recursion, a series expansion for the ray-length distribution, whilst for the full rectangular version we develop an accurate simulation technique, based in part on the stopping-set theory of Zuyev, to accomplish the same. We demonstrate the remarkable fact that plots of the two distributions appear to be identical when the intensity of seeds in the half model is twice that in the full model. Our paper explores this coincidence mindful of the fact that, for one model, our results are from a simulation (with inherent sampling error).…"

"The result is a series of columns that exhibit both highly specific local conditions as well as an overall coherency and continuity. The ornament is in a continuous flow, yet it consists of very distinct local formations. The complexity of column contrasts with the simplicity of its generative process."

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

"The first category is best termed Design as an Exploration of Production. This category is the largest in terms of the number of .MGX products it contains, and is made up of products whose central interest is an exploration of what rapid manufacturing technologies can produce, which conventional technologies cannot. It is typified by complex detailing on both the interior and exterior of the product, geometries which would be impossible to achieve were any form of tooling required."

"SuperCollider is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.

SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists, and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia."

"3D print of a dataform based on 365 days of Canberra weather data (July 08 - June 09). Daily minimum and maximum temperature generate the profile of the outer edge; the holes show rainfall per week. Model generated with Processing, boolean operation in Blender, cleaned in Meshlab, printed by Shapeways. I'll be showing this piece in the Beginning, Middle, End exhibition at ANU School of Art Gallery, 18-24 September"

Via Tim O'Reilly

"The idea builds on an installation, called Bacterial Orchestra, the pair took in 2006 to Brazil, Germany, Norway and elsewhere. This year, the new generation, called Public Epidemic No.1 is spreading beyond the microphones and loudspeakers of the original installation.

Cornéer said the current project could be hosted on any mobile phone but they chose the iPhone “because it’s popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread.”

Check out the clip from the first test of the project above and follow after the jump for more detail on how it works."

Probably the piece that most impressed me at the Cranbrook MFA 2009 show this year.

"In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet.

This site is an implementation of such a game. The music and table of rules for this game appear to have been published anonymously in 1787, and interestingly, the table of rules for this Minuet is identical to Mozart's. However, it is not clear who the composer of these measures is."

"ColorLib is a library for the Processing programming environment. It makes it easy to import color palettes from different sources like files (.act or .cs) or webservices (colr, kuler and colourLovers). It has some handy functions to create color harmonies and sorting colors."

"Citing Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander as an example, "art photography" was a practice valuing the artist's command over the medium, whereas for "conceptual photography" (e.g. Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons...) the emphasis was not on one's mastery over the tool, but rather the tool as a means to express an idea. In applying this contrast to artists working with computers today, Moody astutely observes a similar ethos between conceptual photography and "artist's with computers." In my opinion, one weakness to the post is Moody's stark polarization between his constructed categories, stating, "New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don't care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop.""

My first Garkov attempt

Amazing series of laser-engraved generated artfoms. Trying to discern if they're paper, plastic, cardstock.. or what. Want one.

I've blogged it, but it warrants bookmarking too.