Category: Video

New Painting With Light installations

This weekend I set up a new Painting With Light audio/visual installation at Watermans Arts Centre in London using the new audio playback features in the 1.5 beta.

I also ran a workshop with Exploring Senses through a Brighton Digital Festival Education Award for thirty 13-19 year olds who hacked toys, built a cardboard city for them, created animations about them, and finally used Painting With Light to bring everything together into a digital metropolis!  And all in just 7 hours!

And finally, I was featured on BBC News 24 and BBC Global World News talking about the My Robot Companion art project that I’ve been working on in collaboration with Anna Dumitriu as part of my ongoing artist residency at the University of Hertfordshire.

Alex-May-BBC-News

Fugio Update – Oculus Rift Support

Oculus Rift support in Fugio

I’ve been somewhat busy installing new work, doing a video mapping performance in France, and doing talks, but development has continued apace on Fugio.  Most recently I’ve just added Oculus Rift virtual reality support, which means its very easy to update an existing patch into an Oculus enabled one by the addition of one extra node.

I used Fugio to animate this exploding Stanford Bunny as a test for the 3D model loading and OpenGL shader code:

I’ve been adding some basic audio analysis nodes, so now there’s a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and an initial power spectrum node (works, but needs cleaning up):

Fugio Audio Analysis

There’s now a node for loading Whole Genome Sequencing data for an upcoming artwork that I’m currently working on.

Not to mention lots of basic work on logic operations and maths.  Lots of documentation to do now…

Also exhibited my humanoid robot HARR1 at NESTA’s FutureFest and Ravensbourne.  Sometimes HARR1 makes a portrait of me:

Alex May portrait by HARR1

The Art and Science of Linen

The Art and Science of Linen is a video artwork created by artists Anna Dumitriu, Alex May, and microbiologist Dr John Paul, with sound by Martin A. Smith.

It looks at the whole ecology of linen production from the bacteria used to break down the flax in retting tanks to the industrial production of linen and its cultural importance.

The video focusses strongly on textures of antique linen textiles, flax flowers, linen production methods (rural and industrial) and the beneficial microbes that help in its production and was strongly inspired by pioneering microbiologist Sergei Winogradsky’s text “Le Microbiologie du Sol”, specifically his chapter on “Le Rouissage du Lin” which describes the retting (rotting) process where flax fibres are separated from the plant stems using microbiological processes. Winogradsky isolated the beneficial bacterium – Clostridium pasteurianum – responsible for this process in 1893-95.

The piece Includes images and footage taken at The Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum and McConville’s Flax Mill & Museum where these historical processes can be seen in operation.