The Library of Babel in VRChat

A programmer named Mahu recreated the layout of the Library of Babel, as described by Jorge Luis Borges as an infinite home for every possible book, in the virtual reality platform VRChat.

“The Library does things that are only possible in virtual reality,” explains Mahu. “It contradicts the laws of euclidean coordinate systems, allowing you to seamlessly traverse what I call fractal space. So in a way my take on the library is perhaps more infinite than Borges’ had imagined.”

[via + via]

Roblox Car Crash Videos

I just found out that Roblox Car Crash Videos are a thing: “also known as BeamNG Roblox, refers to videos of car crashes taken in the video game Roblox, edited to replicate real-life dashcam car crashes by downgrading the quality and adding audio from car crash videos”. This trend is insanely weird (and good).

Stunning 3D Scans of the Bust of Nefertiti

Two years ago, a scandalous “art heist” at the Neues Museum in Berlin—involving illegally made 3D scans of the bust of Nefertiti—turned out to be a different kind of crime. The two Egyptian artists who released the scans claimed they had made the images with a hidden “hacked Kinect Sensor,” reports Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica. But digital artist and designer Cosmo Wenman discovered these were scans made by the Neues Museum itself, which had been stolen by the artists or perhaps a museum employee.

[read the full article here]

In Statu Nascendi

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Created by Katarzyna Kijek and Przemysław Adamski, ’In statu nascendi’ captures the ’under construction’ process, in this case, of global illumination pass in rendering:

To highlight a peculiar inability to reflect reality by the film, we focus on the ‘struggle’ of generating an image. We capture the process of rendering ‘in statu nascendi’ (‘under construction’). Therefore we try to intercept this moment of the creative process, which is the most ephemeral – a temporary, piecemeal render phases (mostly global illumination pass). In the course of animation every next frame is more accurately rendered but still far from the target appearance. By analogy to chemical processes, the term ‘in statu nascendi’ refers to the intermediate products of chemical reactions, which can not be isolated from the environment of this reaction. They are therefore just ‘under construction’, and then disappear.

More at kijekadamski.blogspot.com

(via CreativeApplications.Net)

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Be Your Own Souvenir

Be Your Own Souvenir project by Blablabla:

“This proposal aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to under-laying spaces and their own realities. The installation was enjoyed during two weekends in January 2011 by the tourists, neighbours of La Rambla and citizens of Barcelona, a city that faces a trade-off between identity and gentrification, economic sustainability and economic growth.

This shapes through a technological ritual where the audience is released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object. 

The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites him/her to perform as a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of him/herself printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured light scanners (kinect).

The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.”

(Via iGNANT)

Souvenir 06

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Se non ti piace, non lo guardare

Don’t watch if you dislike” è il titolo del canale Youtube di wendyvainity. Ma è anche un monito per il suo pubblico, per tutti gli utenti casuali che atterrano sulla sua pagina e riversano insulti e cattiverie nei commenti (Youtube è il regno di troll e haters, d’altronde). Ma a Wendy non importa granché del giudizio degli altri, e i suoi video lo dimostrano. Wendy non è una professionista del 3D, ma si diverte un mondo ad usarlo; lo fa senza seguire le regole, senza ricalcare nessuna estetica riconoscibile, senza aspirare al virtuosismo. Di lei sappiamo che vive in Australia, in una casa con giardino nei sobborghi di Adelaide, in compagnia dei suoi gatti, che è appassionata di giardinaggio e di “roba gratis” (“ma mi capita di comprare le cose quando veramente mi piacciono”).
Preparatevi: i video di Wendy sono assurdi e inquietanti, surreali e senza senso. Per non parlare della colonna sonora, un mix di effetti audio al limite del sopportabile per un normale orecchio umano. Quando li guardate, però, non badate alla tecnica, non cercate una narrazione, non affannatevi a trovare un termine di paragone, perché non lo troverete. La potenza di questi video sta nella loro sfrenata, irrazionale, libertà espressiva. Per dirlo con una sola parola, sono coraggiosi.

Leggete cosa scrive Wendy nel suo profilo. In poche righe, dice di più lei sulla creatività amatoriale nell’era di Internet di almeno una decina di saggi che ho letto ultimamente.

“try hard noob hobby animator, anyone can make movies with animation software, I am pretty crap at it as people like to let me know, but instead of having no uploads on their channels when I check them out after nasty comments, get Daz studio from Daz3d.com the basic program is free and a lot of fun. or try iClone by reallusion, the free demo is fully functional, you can do better than me so please do!”

Potete fare meglio di Wendy? Fatelo.

Don’t watch if you dislike

I just stumbled upon wendyvainity’s Youtube channel.
Wendy is an australian woman who describe herself as a “cat lover/ try hard gardener/ port adelaide power supporter/ freeware addict”. She posts some crazy, hypnotizing 3d video experiments in which a virtual avatar of herself dances, sings and acts.
Her freedom of expression, irony and sense of identity are awesome and refreshing. If this is amateur culture, we totally dig it.

Exhibition One: a computer rendered group show

Gentili Apri is teaming up with Chrystal Gallery to present Exhibition One. A computer rendered group show with works by Kari Altmann, Charles Broskoski, Lindsay Lawson, Billy Rennekamp, Maxwell Simmer, and Harm Van Den Dorpel – curated and rendered by Timur Si-Qin.

Extracting a parallel instance of the work as a three-dimensional representation of geometric data, Exhibition One offers an opportunity to present an alternate framework that posits the questions: Where does an artwork stop and its documentation begin? What is the function of a prospective image that is decisively not-a-model?

Augmented City

Augmented City, by Keiichi Matsuda (best vied with 3D glasses)
keiichimatsuda.com

“The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from ‘reality’. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface.”