View on Vimeo.

I like to visualize strange attractors in real time, and OpenCL is a promising technology to take this to the next level, as it can utilize all processing cores available on a system, be they GPU, CPU, or a combination. As long as the algorithm can be made massively parallel. This is not too hard with the equations I’m working with… they are simple iterated functions – pop in an x and y coordinate and get a new x and y coordinate. Repeat this many times, and the strange attractor appears. Although most people are used to having one thread perform this iteration, there’s really no reason that a million threads can be performing it. As long as the starting positions of the particles are randomized, you’ll still get the strange attractor.

Almost. There’s an interesting numerical side-effect… when the attractor goes into a less chaotic orbit, and then comes back out to a more chaotic orbit, everything is “sparkly”; i.e. the points in the attractor are not well distributed. Because they all started from a fixed set of points (not theoretically but in practice, as they are floats), they zip around to a fixed set of points in the attractor. Or something like that.

Anyway, I attempted to overcome that with some added randomness. In the process, I have come across two really cool “accidents”, of which this is one (I love accidents in code). Basically, I’m adding a bit of random jitter to each particle. But the random value range I first tried was big enough to create this amazing motion. WOW.

Memo’s demo on Vimeo
Memo’s post on his website with more info

Aesthetic Exploration by Nathan Selikoff. Real-time interactive video projection (screen capture).

View on Vimeo.

Æxploration (Aesthetic Exploration) represents a new direction in my artwork – a focus on interactive algorithmic motion as performance and installation. What once was my internal artist’s tool has become externalized – the beauty and the mess exposed for all to see. This is experimental, in-progress work, as I revamp my codebase once again and seek opportunities to perform and collaborate using its generative visuals.

Until recently, my goal has been to generate individual, high quality, still images, and the interactive software I have developed has been geared towards that purpose – an artist’s tool that is a byproduct of the process, viewable only by myself. But in October of 2008, I participated in Create Chaos – a local conference for creative professionals – as a performer, using my software to create new artwork live. The response was very positive, and opened up a last minute performance opportunity with MGFest.

In the course of a single day I made some changes to my code that completely revolutionized what I was seeing on the screen while using my software – suddenly, I was thinking about and playing with the principles of motion graphics design and time-based media. I also enjoyed and benefitted from the process of collaboration, both in the performances themselves and in discussions surrounding them. Based heavily on this experience, I have continued to develop my software in this new direction and look forward to seeing where this exploration takes me.

Helios by Nathan Selikoff. 2007. Dimensions variable. Open edition print.

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