Yes, another one. For those around East London over the coming weeks, I have a digital print in the exhibition Cats and Kittens, opening at Barden's (N16) on 14th July.

Untitled (Digital Photographs, 2002-2011) compresses 11,000 digital photos taken over 10 years into a single poster-sized image, incorporating a line of pixels from each in sequence.

It's not reproducible online due to its large scale and detail, but can be seen from late next week (details on poster below).

This online procedural drawing interface (click + drag in the big white space beneath the bar) simultaneously inspires awe and unease in its instant transformation of scribbles into intricate drawings.

It's made possible by the new HTML version 5 and its <canvas> tag, which allows for images to be dynamically created and modified within a web browser -- here using the JavaScript port of Processing. Exciting (and occasionally unnerving) times ahead.

In an abominable act of oversight, one of the major projects keeping me occupied in 2010 has yet to receive an official announcement here. So, I'm belatedly pleased to herald Variable 4, an environmental installation taking place on the other-worldly shingle plains of Dungeness in May 2010.

In partnership with James Bulley, and with kind support from the PRSF and Campbell Scientific, we're building a system which will be embedded into the desolate landscape and equipped with an array of meteorological sensors. Using algorithmic compositional techniques, it will then respond sonically to the real-time weather conditions, transforming and recombining a bank of precomposed movements and recordings via a multi-channel all-weather soundsystem.

It is taking place over a single 24-hour period, from noon till noon on 22-23 May, and so encompasses one complete daily cycle of solar and environmental conditions. For those not living in the Romney Marsh area, there will be a couple of coaches operating from London - booking info coming soon.

It's been a bit of a baptism of fire as far as project administration goes; who'd have thought that licensing and insurance concerns could occupy so much time? Current top of the anxiety checklist is ensuring that local fisherman aren't somehow entangled in wiring as they begin their 3am working days. Anyhow, we're finally well into the composition phase - leveraging Max For Live and the endless generative musical possibilities that it offers.

We'll be documenting the compositional and technical development on the Variable 4 blog and twitter @variable4, releasing relevant sourcecode and patches wherever possible.

A short sound study in the structure of the number sequence. Each positive integer is broken down into its prime factors, with each factor corresponding to a harmonic partial. We then proceed to count upwards, for each integer only playing those harmonics which correspond to its factors.

More info and full source code (Processing, SuperCollider) available on the Prime Composition project page (coming very shortly).

Just been reading through parts of the PhD thesis of Rob Saunders, one of the previous members of the stem cell modelling research group, on "Curious Design Agents and Artificial Creativity". Lots of interesting ideas, which follow on nicely from a talk I recently saw by Alex McLean on mapping creative exploration to geometric spaces (cf Peter Gärdenfors).

The introduction aptly reins back something that I overstated in my recent piece on Jane Prophet: Ada Lovelace's views on computational creativity. She in fact stated that:

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform” (emphasis added by Boden, 1990)

As Rob comments, therefore, the credit for the creative products of the machine should remain with its engineer, rather than construing the machine itself as having creativity. His paper goes on to investigate such notions of synthetic creativity. It also brings to the fore Turing's ideas about machines exhibiting "surprising" behaviour courtesy, in the paper that introduces the Turing test, anticipating Cariani's emergence-relative-to-a-model.

Interesting, and relevant after a morning spent encountering some highly surprising behaviour from some swarms driven by Perlin noise (below).

Incidentally, Leafcutter John -- who we are off to see play tonight as part of Polar Bear -- has also been doing some brilliant things with Processing and particle systems. On the "unexpected" tip, check out his awesome moth wings...