What's better than graph paper? Of course, it's a tool to grow your own printable graph paper, sufficiently configurable to cater for the wildly divergent graph-paper needs of our times.
This Processing sketch (PDE) will generate single-weight, multi-weight and cross-grid graph paper in PDF format, with configurable weights and colours, support for metric and imperial measures, and control over margins and paper sizing. Unsupported, but should be simple to modify.
The blog of architect Lebbeus Woods is one of the most consistently rich and stimulating sites that I've encountered recently, a source of endless inspiration and philosophical avenues. His latest piece is on a series of machines created by Daniel Libeskind for the 1985 Venice Biennale, Three Lessons in Architecture. Even given my infatuation with both Woods and Libeskind, these blew me away.
Memory Machine
Reading Machine
Writing Machine
(+ many more unmissable images...)
Each of the machines is intended to illustrate a set of architectural ideas relating to Western architecture; according to theorist Ersi Ioannidou, “[re-articulating] the role of humanism in design”. Ioannidou goes on to describe the process that Libeskind undertook in building the Reading Machine, modelled after monastic rotary reading desks:
Libeskind, determined to retrieve the experience of constructing such a machine, chooses to recreate not only the object, but also the experience. He works as a craftsman, bearing total faith in the craft of making. He builds it with hand-tools, solely from wood, with glue-less joints, dawn to dusk, in complete silence. When finished, he makes eight books – he writes them, makes the paper, binds them; just one of each – and places them on the wheel.
Hardcore.
It feels like there's been a particular surge lately of quality digital art hyperlinks, which make the cut over on my twitter/delicious feeds but I don't quite have time to blog about. To save them from the abyss of social network ephemerality, here's a digest of the highlights.
Been working with the great folk at Telegramme to aid them in getting their new design portfolio webified. This means translating their beautiful Photoshop comps into standards-compliant (almost), usable and accessible HTML/CSS, wrapped around a WordPress backend, complete with Twitter integration and smooth DHTML feature spots — which were today's hacks. Mostly there - launch party early October...
For this year's Sound And Music Expo, taking place imminently in Leeds, I'm developing the interactive visual elements for Peal, a virtual bell tower realized with lasers, LEDs, surround sound and projection. Lewis and Nick of Monomatic have asked me to transform Malcolm Garrett's vector-based design work into a responsive application that somehow ties together the various elements of bellringing (time, communality, musicality, circularity) into an animated projection, reflecting the current state of the virtual bells as well as providing live scores to established sets of changes.
Lots of concepts to take on board, not least dealing with scalable vector graphics (SVG) in Processing, which is what I've been doing today. The idea is that the application is multi-modal -- switching between contexts based a combination of the time of day and the signalling from the electronics that make up the physical part of the installation -- and so must be able to fade gracefully between different display states.
I might well shoe-horn at least one more Peal-related dev session into the hackpact.
For those on the other side of the North Sea, a new video recording of AtomSwarm is being shown at this weekend's New Media Meeting festival, in Norrköping, Sweden. Aside from an impressive roster of media artists by day, and some hot European techno by night, they've also got a damn fine website - apparently created as part of a web development training exercise!
