Running time: 1’47″

Dozens of thousand of wildfires occur every year most of which are caused by human activity.
In this video about 200 million satellite data points were processed, filtered, rendered and sonified in an attempt to illustrate the size and frequency of this human intervention and examine how the patterns change during the seasons and whether they’ve evolved over the past few years.

The data used were captured between 2012 and 2019 and they are reproduced at a rate of one day per video frame.

Data source Nasa.

We acknowledge the use of data products or imagery from the Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) system operated by NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) with funding provided by NASA Headquarters.

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

13Oct19 | onFire

Running time: 0’40″
Music : Πέρα Στα Όρη - Γκρίνιες (Numb Capsule Records)
Photogrammetry : Leonidas Koufalis
Video source : Gerasimos Vallatos

Teaser video for Saristra Festival 2019 in Kefalonia – Greece

Running time: 0’45″

Commission for Integrated Projects using the point cloud and models derived from one of their surveys.

Running time: 1’00″

Teaser for the upcoming Fractures EP by David Lindmer on Mogador Records.

Music Video
Running time: 4’40″
Music : Crøm-lus (Poppy Edwards)
Producer: John Tonks

Crøm-lus
Strange Jealousy is mash up of warped sounds, acoustic instruments and synth sound design. Sounds and motifs flow in and out throughout the song, sometimes deliberately detuning, giving a feeling of uneasiness. This uneasiness links to the song’s emotion, the subject of which touches on family, love and its peripheries. This song has references to the aesthetics of trip-hop, jazz and Dub, with “instrumental inversion and ghostly voices, distant horn sections, odd perspectives, deep illusions and unexpected noises” [David Toop]. Perfecting this song came from the genius ears of Producer John Tonks, who has worked with many artists I admire from Tricky, to Massive Attack and Neneh Cherry.

Georgios Cherouvim
The visuals of the video are generated algorithmically and feature visually complex patterns that emerge through the simulation of a self organizing behavioral system. Such patterns appear in nature and the brain is tuned to categorize them as organic, which also carries an inherited feeling of unease. This is used in the video as a vehicle to reflect on the emotions of the song. Taking the lead from the lyrics, the patterns evolve and shift between ambiguous shapes to the recognizable form of the two faces, an elegant interplay between synthesis, metamorphosis and decomposition of organic patterns and the human figure.

The video was shot and edited as normal and then used to drive the behavior of a multi agent based system, obeying a set of simple rules and forces. The most characteristic behavior is the slime mold (Physarum Polycephalum) which creates a distinct network of interconnected branches. Over the years slime mold has fascinated many scientists and artists. Even though Physarum Polycephalum is a single cell organism, it exhibits a remarkable sensory-motor behavior and has the ability to create complex networks while searching for nutrients. Despite the lack of a central nervous system, it is able to effectively locate, migrate towards sources of food and over time optimize its complex network of interconnected branches, to effectively transport the nutrients over its constantly changing body.

The system was implemented in Touch Designer, with the core logic coded in GLSL with compute shaders and can also be performed in real time. Off-line motion vectors were extracted from the video using Furnace in Nuke.

—-

References

Jeff Jones (2011) Influences on the formation and evolution of Physarum polycephalum inspired emergent transport networks

Guodong Rong & Tiow-Seng Tan (2006) School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Jump Flooding in GPU with Applications to Voronoi Diagram and Distance Transform

Thomas Diewald

David Reeves

Touch Designer

Optical flow in Nuke

Screened at :

ÉCU 2019
(Paris, France)

Running time: 1’49″

How do you feel about spam?

218 spam emails were received over the period of one month. The raw text is printed on screen in sync with the sonification of the same data, a simple conversion of the character’s ASCII codes into audio samples at 44100Khz. In red are the last 1470 characters that are audible on each frame.

27Mar18 | spam_01

27Mar18 | spam_02

An agent based feedback loop system that simulates the behavior of Physarum polycephalum (slime mold) and the natural process of network optimization. Implementation based on this paper.

At later iteration it is also combined with additional forces and a video feed to affect its growth and behavior.

Rendered in realtime (300k partilces @60fps) using GLSL compute shaders within Touch Designer.

Running time: < 1′

Running time: 2’43

Mouse movement recorded over five typical working days in a Visual Effects Studio. The sped up visualization of the mouse trajectory is in sync with the sonification of the same data, by re-purposing the X and Y coordinates as Left and Right audio signals.

Captured at two HD monitors, using a digitizer tablet, at 30fps and reproduced 1470 times faster to match high quality 44.1Khz audio.

2nd week of January 2018

19Jan18 | 1515714748316

19Jan18 | 1515628818606

19Jan18 | 1515540148787

19Jan18 | 1515458097037

19Jan18 | 1515799528642

Running time: 0’40

What does the fingerprint of your daily commute look and sound like?

Personal geo-location data were recorded over a period of 3.5 years (May 15 – Jan 19). The  80,000 collected points are visualized and converted into sound to reveal the patterns of my daily life. The data are playing back at a rate of one day per rendered frame and the longitude and latitude coordinates are mapped to the two audio channels.

22Jan19 | geolocation

Detail of the path recorder over New York City

Running time: 5’34
3D scans: Cosmo Wenman

What does a digital object sound like?

Geometric objects are stored as a series of points, which are connected to form a continuous surface. Each point is associated with a set of 3D coordinates.

In this experiment, the coordinates of a given object are plotted along the point index to form three individual graphs. The graphs are then normalized and combined into two channels, transforming the topological information into audible tracks.

These soundscapes are generated solely by the data representing each object. In the same way a gramophone reads the grooves of a record and outputs sound, the geophone iterates through the points and turns the traveled path into audio waves.

The end result is defined by the shape of the object, the order in which the points are digitally stored, the frequency in which they are iterated and the way the three graphs are mapped on to the two audio channels. No further processing has been applied.

Screened at :

Ars Electronica Animation Festival 2017
(Linz, Austria)

ADAF 2017
(Athens, Greece)

anifilm 2017
(Trebon, Czech Republic)

PERFORMANCE 0630 by Arts Incubator
(New York, USA)

Included in Animation Online Theater