We made it on Thursday to the opening of the show Darkness Descends: Scandinavian Art Now curated by Christina Vassallo. Our friend Marius Watz had three of his pieces in the show and performed with/vs Alexander Rishaug. His responsive visuals were absolutely stunning.

View more images and short clips after the jump.

SOFTlab worked with Marius on the laser etching and mounting of the pieces.

John Maeda’s collaboration with Reebok has produced the Timetanium Ventilator. Only 100 of them were produced and of course, already gone.

Visit the Rbk site here.
See the YouTube video after the jump.

We made it back yesterday from the Scripted by Purpose exhibition opening. The place was jam-packed with people, a sign that it *might* have been a successful exhibit. It was definitely an interesting sample of digital work, made even more interesting by the fact that ALMOST everyone who showed stuff actually DOES the work. It was also good to see (a sampling) of the new generation of scripting gurus together.

Something I would’ve liked to see more though, is real-world implementation of some of these systems. A lot of it was the standard year 2000 digital-exploration type of stuff that just doesn’t get resolved.. It is still very interesting, but only a few people showed how these systems can be translated to physical form, and they did quite successfully, with even more interesting results.

The gallery itself was also pretty cool: the former Corn Exchange Bank building. A very large 2 story space with the mezzanine overlooking the first floor. A wire-installation by Marc and Skylar filled the central space, bundles of what seemed to be electrical wire shooting off in all directions and the bases inhabited by pillows. Lots of cool people, lots of food and lots of beer -the last 2 having disappeared very quickly though.

In all, it is a tough exhibit to put together because of the broad spectrum of the work, but Marc Fornes and Skylar Tibbits did quite an amazing job. Kudos to those guys and now we’ve all got to find a venue for it in the city.

SOFTlab

Aranda-Lasch

MOS

MATSYS

MATSYS

Installation

SOFTlab

SOFTlab

1/2 SOFTlab

minusArchitecturestudio

Neil C. Katz

Marc Fornes (theverymany) | Skylar

Mike Szivos (SOFTlab) | Jason Johnson
(minusArchitecturestudio)

Mara | Annie Suratt

Alisa Andrasek (BIOTHING) |Marc Fornes (theverymany)

Mike Szivos (SOFTlab) | Jason Johnson (minusArchitecturestudio)

4-pli

Unrelated free-standing facade in downtown

Seriously, this proves to be THE EXHIBITION, it’s getting a lot of attention so don’t miss it.

Marc Fornes (theverymany) is curating “ScriptedbyPurpose”, an exhibition at the F.U.E.L collection in Philly.
The show brings together young and emerging offices/research groups/individuals in the field.
SOFTlab will be showing some stuff among Biothing, 4-pli, Aranda/Lasch, theverymany and a bunch of other amazing people.

View the beta version of the exhibition site here.

I recently came across this interesting experiment in Typographic genetics (?). It allows you to modify very common typographies and then breed them to create new Types. There is a lab area to alter traits of each type, which you can then breed to create a new race of super-Types. Quite an interesting experiment with even more interesting results. My font’s came out pretty gnarly, which leads me to believe, I’m definitely anything but an “Intelligent Designer”.

Visit the site here.

Flight 404 has posted some images of an exhibition in Seattle with Barbarians. It is actually two installations, one on “Biomimmetic Butterflies” or in their own words, procedurally generated butterflies while the other has prints of magnetic structure pieces, generated through Processing and then visualized in Maya.

This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a while. My short blurb does no justice to the complexity of the installation, so read their own stuff here.

More on the Voronoi butterflies here and here.

I had come across this experiment a couple of weeks ago but forgot to post it. Today, poking around my bookmarks I found it again.
It’s done in Processing and it displays about 3000 flocking elements. More on the project here.

And by all means, check the site All Manner of Distractions out. There are some amazing experiments in there.

Mark Goulthrope’s reactive architectural wall Hyposurface will be on display at the 2007 BIO International Convention, a Nanotech convention going on in Boston until well, tomorrow…

For those of you who haven’t seen any of dECOi’s stuff, here’s a link with more info on the Hyposurface at the SIAL.

His presentation of the Mirian Gallery is also very interesting.

You have to keep in mind that this stuff is over 3 years old, but the techniques are truly great and new parametric/reactive systems are just starting to catchup to Goulthrope.