These BobbleHeads are offered by MoMA as an extra token for people that buy access to the live stream of the Armory Show closing event: a live performance by mexican chill wave band Neon Indian. In addition to this, the collection of generated BobbleHeads will be projected on stage during the performance.

Aside from it being an interesting fundraising participation system, momaarmoryshow.org is an excellent example of a seamless, low-effort online transaction experience. I would probably spend a lot more money on digital content if other online stores made shopping as easy and pleasant as momaarmoryshow.org does.

I designed most of the BobbleHeads based on dead celebrity artists (Frida, Picasso, Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, etc.), together with a couple of celebrities from pop culture, one science celebrity, and a monster made from body parts of several cadavers. This flickr link features the complete BobbleHead collection in the form of a wallpaper, including a famous superhero that didn’t make it to the website for obvious copyright reasons.

Here are the two BobbleHeads I made so far:

Update: Mud’s post in the BuzaMoto blog.

The work I have on this show is part of two ongoing series that I have been doing for a while:

Black and White City is a series of ongoing drawings, prints, animations and public interventions that I started in 2004 for my artistic residence in ISCP-NYC. My intention with this series is to extract a graphic language from the experience of big cities that separates urban technological elements from their human counterparts, to combine them later in sequences and configurations that explore ideas closely related to the life in the city, like routine, waiting, isolation, fear and pressure.

Reflections on Symmetry is a line of aesthetic research that I pursue to understand symmetry as concept, system and form. It started as a script for a short film on the work on Escher and Coxeter that I wrote in 2002 and 2003 with Javier Bracho. Over the years, this work has taken the form of writing, 3D models, animations, paper cuts, computer software, drawings and laser-cuts.

The show will open from August 22nd to October 24th at 8670 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills CA 90211 Suite 114.

This exercise in Telematics and participation is just one out of many—Amodal Suspension by Ralfael Lozano-Hemmer and Absolut Quartet by Jeff Lieberman & Dan Paluska immediately come to mind—but it stands out in a particular way that is relevant to some of the work we were doing back in the PLW a few years ago. UndefPrint is only open to participants that can write code. The general public is excluded. At least a bit of knowledge of Javascript and computer science is required to get anything out of UndefPrint. The idea that code is a mode of expression in a way similar to simple speech, doodling, or any other gesture that can be performed in public is not new, but it is an important one, because it puts code next to activities that come naturally to most humans—like speech or hitting on a keyboard to produce sounds—even when coding doesn’t come naturally for anybody. Perhaps in the future we will be able to speak code—and math—the way we can sort out objects in a crowded room. One can only hope.

Here is the code that draws the pattern in the image above, the fifth in my series of submissions:

for (i=0;i<=pWidth();i++){
  for (j=0;j<=pHeight();j++){
    pSymbolB(219+(Math.floor(Math.sin(j*i))%3));
    pPixel(i,j);}}

And, some fooling around with triangular patterns:

Did I ever mention how much I like simple nested for-loops?

The character featured in the picture combines features from Disney’s Stitch and the little green aliens from the Toy Story series.

I am not sure if a version of this technique will ever become an industry standard. It all depends on how much smarter computers will become in the future, but it’s a good reminder that the creation of new digital tools is an open door to new forms of expression, even within the constraints of traditional forms like cartoon animation.

Cartoons sit halfway between realism and typography, still kind of faithful to some aspects of realism, but conceding a lot to symbolic representation. It’s not that cartoons can’t represent things faithfully, cartoons choose not to do so in order to communicate things better.

Cartoon shapes and environments can’t be fully defined in terms of geometric systems and mathematical modeling, forcing the intervention of the human component that is the essence of many deep cognitive questions. Cartoons are Gestalt at its best, and they are also fun as hell.

• http://www.vimeo.com/ogfx
• http://www.vimeo.com/e15

It helps a lot to understand what these things are about when you look at them in motion.

Places like the MIT Media Lab tend to push towards figuring out new ways to make technology mediate between humans and their needs. There are many cases where this mediation might lead to an improvement of human life, but in many others the result is simply alienating. Writing instructions that make pictures instead of making pictures with my own hands is an interesting separation. Sharing the way these instructions change as I search for a different picture might illuminate about some aspects of computational art, but It could also be just another way to produce data where patterns could be found, just as it seems everybody everywhere is doing these days. We live, after all, in a statistical world.

The studio application is called MyStudio. The following image shows the first 110 pictures I published there:

The following image shows the effect of a spotlight hitting on one of Kate’s meshes, where I placed a scanned image of original artwork from the classic Vampirella comic from the 1970s published by Warren that I found somewhere in the web.

It might take a while to properly implement full control of the OpenGL light resources from the E15 python interpreter, but it will be a very nice thing to have, specially thinking about the potential of combining lighting information with Kyle’s new in-progress implementation of GLSL support for E15. It makes me wanna grow hair on the MIT website.