Recursive Archives - Surrealism Today

Ben Ridgway

Last Modified November 30, 2018 Leave a Comment

Ben Ridgway is currently an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California, USA. He has 15 years of professional experience as both a 3D artist in the video game industry and as a Professor. While in the games industry he helped to create games for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft console systems. Ben has been making experimental animations since 1992.
“My abstract animations investigate the metaphysical features of reality. They are designed to stimulate archetypal associations and invite the viewer to make personal connections to the visual and auditory experience without any reliance on narrative or spoken language.”

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Ben Ridgway Website

With stunning cinematography (and no CGI), director Oscar Hudson pays homage to Japan’s social phenomenon of ‘Hikikomori’.
A dreamy, disconnected electronic beat plays as a Japanese teenager wakes up in his bedroom, visibly troubled at the thought of facing the day ahead of him. But there are tricks at play, as he walks through the door, only to find a replica of his bedroom ahead, and of him too, staring into the mirror. And then there is another, and another, till we see a series of bedrooms and the boy in it – only the room appears to be becoming smaller and more crowded as the boy gets bigger.
This linking of the psychological and the physical space plays as the perfect foil to British music producer Bonobo’s inspired number No Reason. Director Oscar Hudson mines the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori – when young people find themselves overwhelmed and end up as housebound recluses. According to the government, the number of hikikomori between the ages of 15 to 30 in Japan in 2015 numbered some 540,000.
The cinematography No Reason is inspired by the 2014 Oscar-winner Birdman. The vocals by Nick Murphy (also known as Chet Faker) contribute to the dream-like sequence and the feeling of overwhelming monotony. “We achieved the film using only in-camera physical effects and we designed an entirely new way of moving our miniature camera to get it to fit through the tiny doorways. Doing this film with CGI would have been a thousand times easier, but for me, it’s physicality and imperfections are what make it different, and, I hope better,” said Hudson.

Source: Watch: Bonobo’s surrealist music video for ‘No Reason’ is a visual treat (with a deeper message)

Miles Johnston

Last Modified January 4, 2019 Leave a Comment

Miles Johnston works primarily in pencil drawing. His surreal art explores psychological transformation in portraits and figurative images.

Captivating. Mindbending. Recursive. Face melting. Gorgeous.
Johnston’s art is our psyche staring back from the void. Beyond the threshold of strange changes; he illustrates not a calculus infinite worlds, but the infinite selves it is possible to become.

Transformations Series

Deform. Divide. Attract. Recur.

Each picture below is a story of transformation the subject is undergoing.

moleskine project v entry by Miles Johnston

Girl with Raspberry and Beetle Swarm by Miles Johnston

Pencil Drawing Timelapse by Miles Johnston

Miles Johnston is a lover of pencils & Instructor at SARA.

https://www.instagram.com/miles_art/
https://twitter.com/MilesJohnston
http://miles-johnston.tumblr.com/
The Dirty Sponge Podcast

http://www.milesjohnstonart.com/

Electric Sheep Introduction

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.
– Wikipedia

First created in 1999 by Scott Draves, the Electric Sheep is a form of artificial life, which is to say it is software that recreates the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction through mathematics. The system is made up of man and machine, a cyborg mind with 450,000 participant computers and people all over the Internet.

This is a distributed system, with all participating computers working together to form a supercomputer that renders animations, called “sheep”, that everyone sees. The human participants guide the survival of the fittest by voting for their favorite animations in the flock. You can join this project by downloading the Electric Sheep Screensaver.

Clade 1 at Michael Berger Gallery, Pittsburgh 2010

The Clade 1 Blu Ray showing at Bryan Bilgore’s (sensoriumav.com) place with dynamic lighting by ambx.com (photo by Shannon Harvey).

Dreams in High Fidelity II by Scott Draves. 4 channel HD projection at Lexus Hybrid Art, Moscow 2010.04

On the 2nd largest LED wall in Europe, curated by the Streaming Museum. 2010.08.

Scott Draves speaking at TEDx in Hungary, 2010.06.

Dreams in High Fidelity by Scott Draves. 25 projectors and 5 channels of HD in Hungary 2010.06.

Dreams in High Fidelity by Scott Draves projected at LICHTSTROEME, on the banks of the Rhine in Germany. Photo Jennifer Braun 2012.05.

Karjaka Studios; 2013; Rubin Museum; Green Lama; Linus Roache; Paul Haas

Generation 244 immersive projection at 21c Museum Hotel grand opening, 2013.04.20.

Generation 244 by Scott Draves. Students immersed in projection at Emoção Art.ficial Bienial, in São Paulo 2012.05.

Generation 244 permanently installed in a corporate reception in Manhattan.

Electric Sheep iPad App exhibited in Beijing, curated by ZKM.

Generation 244 Triptych at Vida Retrospective in Madrid, 2012.05.

Generation 244 at LACMA, as curated by Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music. Showing on 3 screens at Renzo Piano–designed Stark Bar in the courtyard. The show ran July 2011 – February 2012.

Generation 244.1 at Microsoft Research Studio 99, 2014.01, Seattle.

In the atrium at MoMA, 2010.12.

Each participating computer follows mathematical instructions, Draves’ Flame algorithm, to render its own piece of the larger work, as seen in the table at left. The images are sent back to a central server which compresses them into animations which are sent back out to the viewers. The electricsheep.org website shows the family tree for each sheep, including its parents and offspring, and viewers can track family resemblance. The artist’s Clade series shows a selection of family members in high resolution.

Like Draves’ other software art, the Electric Sheep code is open source, which has allowed it to benefit from code contributions from many enthusiastic programmers. Now Draves serves as head Shepherd on a project with many participants.

The most popular sheep from the current flock can be viewed on the live server, or you can browse the archive.

– via scottdraves.com

Scott Draves Interview with Surrealism Today

Surrealism Today: You have designed this technology, company & ecosystem. Electric Sheep has taken on a life of its own. In a sense, from a systems perspective, you have developed your own game rules rather than just being another player in someone else’s game. What in your thinking has made that possible?

Scott Draves: That’s right, I definitely think of the Sheep as generative world design. My approach is based on languages and metaprogramming, as a way to cross from finite to infinite. It was made possible by exposure to books like Gödel, Escher, Bach and SICP and my friends and colleagues at Brown and CMU SCS who taught me so much about computers and programming.

ST: In previous interviews, you mention Pollock, Gysin, and Burroughs as artists who inspire you. (Related: Cut-up Technique) Art has changed more in the past hundred years than it ever has, and likely will even more in the next hundred years, where would you like to see it go? Rather than create the content of art, will next-gen artists create algorithms that allows for infinite works of art? If that’s the future, you’ve actually been doing it for some time…

SD: I am loving the Cambrian explosion of software art going on. What are my wishes for art? The more the merrier. Algorithms and coding and infinite art are definitely growing and that’s great. But are they growing popularity in the art world? Maybe? I can’t imagine 100 years in the future. I will admit I’ve been doing this forever, I am old, and got an early start, releasing the first open source art in 1992.

Surrealism Today: Many of the Electric Sheep are reminiscent of mandalas in various religious traditions in both East and West as well as psychedelic and visionary art. These movements seem to have goals in common. Do you have an affinity with any spiritual traditions or movements?

Scott Draves: The Sheep have a meditative aspect for me and a spiritual aspect. Yes, there are goals in common, and affinities. Yoga. Zen. Negentropy. Positivism. Science.

ST: You’ve created this ecosystem of beautiful living mandalas that change over time and breed and evolve and die. Each sheep had DNA (code), its form, not to mention the memetic (conceptual) & cultural level. In what senses are the sheep alive?

SD: Thank you. They are alive because they have emergent complexity, at both the breeding, DNA, evolution level and also in the Flame algorithm, where the image emerges from the DNA. The memetic level kicks in with the open source and allowing others to create their own flames and sheep.

Surrealism Today: What non-intuitive things do you do, think or avoid that may have helped contribute to what you have created?

Scott Draves: When I started doing Open Source it was considered unamerican and anti-capitalist, and literally compared to “cancer”. It turns out sharing code has merit. Actually, that was always intuitive to me but most people just didn’t get it. These days it seems open source has taken over in some domains and is thriving.

On the other hand sharing everything may not be advisable. That was not obvious to me. It took me a long time to learn.

ST: William Gibson mentioned in one of his sci-fi books that instead of writing music, musicians wrote algorithms and the code would generate infinite, unique songs that never repeated themselves. Recently the iPhone app “H__r” got me excited… it loops sounds from the environment into a surreal listening experience. What being created today (that I can perhaps link to) has gotten you excited recently?

SD: Joshue Ott has a bunch of amazing av apps: https://intervalstudios.com/. A bit further afield: Alpha Go, https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/. This is an enormous breakthrough that promises so much to come.

Surrealism Today: I’m super excited about this recent high-resolution release of the sheep, and the subscription. What’s next?

Scott Draves: Thank you.

Dots! The real-time audio interactive version, which premiered last year at Creative Tech Week and is going to be in it again this year: http://creativetechweek.nyc/. The mixed reality party was on the 17th of April, 2017.

ST: Where can we find you on the internet?

https://gold.electricsheep.org/
http://scottdraves.com/
https://twitter.com/scott_draves
https://twitter.com/ElectricSHE3P
https://www.facebook.com/groups/82690628019