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)

35x50cm, Limited edition silkscreen prints on 190 and 300 grams paper.
Generative background pattern and custom raster for shading the 3D model.

13Apr18 | Fighter - print

35x50cm, Limited edition silkscreen print on 190 and 300 grams paper, using 120TPI gauze.

13Apr18 | Fighter - print

35x50cm, Limited edition silkscreen print on 190 and 300 grams paper, using 120TPI gauze.

11May18 | shading_09_fighter

more ►

13Apr18 | Fighter - print

35x50cm, Limited edition silkscreen print on 190 and 300 grams paper, using 120TPI gauze.

13Apr18 | Fighter - print

35x50cm, Limited edition silkscreen print on 190 and 300 grams paper, using 120TPI gauze.

11May18 | Fighter - print

32x24cm, silkscreen print - detail

Printing sessions generously hosted at tind‘s studio in Athens.
Limited number of prints available for purchase.

32x24cm, Water based ink silkscreen print on 300 grams paper. Self portrait encoded into a single number using custom software FIG .

13Apr18 | Self Portrait - print

32x24cm, silkscreen print

13Apr18 | Self Portrait - print

32x24cm, silkscreen print

13Apr18 | Self Portrait - print

32x24cm, silkscreen print

Printing sessions generously hosted at tind‘s studio in Athens.
Limited number of prints available for purchase.

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′