Art Update - January 2013

It's good to be a busy artist. It's not good to be too busy to tell your friends about it. On that note, here is a list of upcoming shows and some other fun stuff I've been working on.

Electronics Alive VII

Dorothy Cowden runs a terrific gallery at the University of Tampa, and her and the jury decided to show my recent piece "CF_11_1179" (above) in the latest Electronics Alive. This 7th installment (the first in 2001) features dozens of video, installation, and multimedia works from around the world, and a number of artist talks.

Runs Jan 29 - Feb 23
Scarfone-Hartley Gallery, University of Tampa
http://ealive.utarts.com

13FOREST

I'll be one of three artists featured in "Design and Chance: Three Approaches to Contemporary Printmaking", at 13Forest Gallery in Arlington, MA, this coming month. Kristin Breiseth, another of the three, and I met at Wes Simon's studio a few years ago and we immediately saw eye-to-eye. Her work is remarkably intricate and subtle, and I love all of it. Check out the links below, and I hope to see you at the opening or artist talks.

Runs Feb 8 - Mar 15
Opening reception Feb 8, 7-9pm
Artist talks Feb 28, 7-9pm
http://13forest.com/exhibit/show-DesignandChance.shtml
http://seeartbykb.com/

ATNE Workshop

I'll be giving a workshop on using Processing to make generative artwork at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery late next month. The workshop is open to anyone, regardless of programming experience. I hope to demystify computational physics and bring non-programmers from zero to generative artwork (a tantalizingly short distance) in less than an hour.

Wednesday, February 27th, 7:30pm
Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Jamaica Plain, MA
http://atne.org/events/generative-art-using-computational-physics/

Open Studio

Finally, if you can't make it to any of the above events, but find yourself in the Boston area the weekend of April 6-7, stop by my apartment and hang out amidst works from 2001-2013. I'll be open 11am to 6pm.

April 6-7, 11am-6pm
115 Langley Rd, Newton, MA
http://www.newtonopenstudios.org/

Here's some other stuff that I've been up to, including a book, a talk, an interactive piece, and some small mountains!

Aleatoric Art in the 21st Century

"Artist and Aleatoric Art Gallery creator J. Coleman Miller, along with artist and writer Ray Cabarga have produced the definitive volume on chance in contemporary fine art..." I'm honored to not only be one of the 44 artists featured in this beautiful book, but my work was chosen for the cover and Forward. The writing is tongue-in-cheek, and the artists are all producing work that I envy. The book is professionally done, and the print quality is excellent.

http://www.blurb.com/b/3857455-aleatoric-art-in-the-21st-century

Video/Kinect installation

Collaborator Jim Susinno and I have been working on a video installation called "Swarm" for a few months. We showed it at
COLLISION18:present last November, but have improved it since then. A Microsoft Kinect reads the motions of the viewer, generating vortexes whenever the viewer moves their hands. Watch the video below to see how a user can subtly or dramatically affect the falling leaves in this piece.

http://youtu.be/ib9cP4JKWx8
http://collisioncollective.org/artwork/swarm
http://jimbomania.com/

LISA 2012

I was asked by Isabel Draves to give a quick talk at the Leaders In Software and Art conference in New York City in October. The result was a 5-minute distillation of background, thoughts, goals, and artwork, and is probably the best I've ever looked and sounded on stage. Which is a good thing, as the conference was held at the Guggenheim Museum. The conference was terrific---I cannot imagine being a software artist and missing it. Check out the other videos on the SoftwareAndArt channel, too.

Video of talk at LISA2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zReEz7VLTQU

TinyMtn

I started a small business in January: I'm designing and selling 3d prints of real mountains. The business is hosted by Shapeways, a large print-on-demand 3d-printing company in New York and Eindhoven. Each model is a true-to-scale representation of a real place on Earth, covering up to 100 square miles, but including details as small as 30' across! If there's a mountain climber or hiker in your family, please tell them about "TinyMtn."

http://tinymtn.com/

That is all for now. Have a great day, and thank you for reading.

-Mark

How this all got started

Hello and welcome to my blog: The Computational Artist.

My name is Mark J. Stock and I have been creating computer-based computational imagery since 1985, though only began considering myself an artist in 2000. This blog will hopefully contain a wide variety of news, information, and comments on computational art, digital art, science art, and interactive art. I hope it will be of interest not only to art-lovers but also art-makers, as I am a somewhat technical person and plan to reveal some of the behind-the-scenes work that makes it all happen.

I got started in this sort of thing in the early 1980's, when my family was fortunate enough to get a computer for Christmas. We first had a Timex Sinclair 1000, then a TI-99/4A, and shortly thereafter a Commodore 128. It was on the C128 that I began writing graphics programs and learning basic numerical methods---all in BASIC.

When I went to college, I didn't even know what an engineer did. But very shortly I knew I needed to be one. I mean, there was a college-level class called "Rocket Propulsion." How could I miss that? I soon found out that I really enjoyed simulating physical systems with computer programs. I enjoyed it so much that I took every class on the topic possible; and this was at the University of Michigan, so there were quite a few.

Of all the physics that one can simulate digitally, fluid dynamics piqued my interest the most. From these digital machines could emanate imagery of such analog-ness! How was that possible? Fortunately, the mathematics aren't that hard. Numerical methods allow conversion of the differential equations of fluid dynamics into operations that a computer can understand: +-/* and maybe a square root or exponential every once in a while. The only work left is to organize those simple operations in the proper order. I'm leaving out a few details, but we'll dig deeper in future posts.

My first job out of school was to extend a computer program that used a two-dimensional vortex sheet method to simulate the motion of gases inside of industrial boilers. The existing code could capture mixing and combustion very well, but was still only a 2D method. When debugging the 3D version, I encountered unphysical solution results---a bug in the code, no doubt. I had little success just looking at long lists of numbers dumped from the program and decided to convert the numerical representation of the flow elements into something physical. I had the program write out a list of cylinders, one for each vortex segment in the simulated system. Then I rendered that geometry data with Radiance, a program that I had recently been playing with to simulate light interreflection in architectural spaces.

This is the very first image that came back:

I knew I was hooked. Not only that, but because this differed so much from my expectations, I knew where to look for the bug, and I quickly found it. But I wasn't interested in that computer bug any more, because I caught another bug! I now had an intense desire to see how far this could go. I've spent the last 12 years using (pushing and punishing) computers in an effort to see the unseen---to explore the physics underneath nature and human existence, and to compare both with computation itself.

Stay tuned.