Category: Digital Design of Nature

. Galapagos

The interactive installation “Galapagos” was commissioned by the ICC (In­terCommunication Center) in Tokyo, and exhibited there from 1997 to 2000. The visitor was positioned before 12 monitors arranged in a circular arc on pedestals showing amoebas or anemons, which reminded one of organic forms (Fig. 12.8). On the floor before each pedestal with a monitor, […]

Evolved Virtual Creatures

In 1994 Sims showed “Evolved Virtual Creatures” a video animation in which simple block structures in a virtual environment move around in a partially bizarre way. The movements were not programmed or produced using tech­niques such as key framing, but originated from a virtual motoric of the block structures coupled with a sensor system, which […]

Panspermia

Panspermia, from 1990, visualizes the theory that life in the universe exists in the form of seeds and spreads spores. The two-minute computer animation be­gins with a grain flying through the universe, which hits a planet and bursts. From the spores scattered into the surrounding field different plants evolve. In the animation sequences that follow […]

Karl Sims

Karl Sims is referred to as one of the pioneers of evolutionary computing. He became known through his video animation “Panspermia” from 1990, his in­novative and still-impressing work “Genetic Images” from 1993, and “Evolved Virtual Creatures” (1994), for which he had already described the basic struc­tures in 1991 [199]. In 1997, he presented another aesthetic […]

William Latham

William Latham studied art at Christ Church, Oxford, and print media at the Royal College of Art in London. Between 1987 and 1994 he worked as a “visit­ing artist” at the iBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester, where together with the mathematician Stephen Todd he developed his artistic style. The works evolved during this time […]

Media Art

Growing Plants and Evolved Organics In this last chapter we would like to treat a topic that substantially contributed to the development of this book: plants and organics in media art. With digital media the border between art and science is more and more indistinguishable. Artists develop solutions that contribute to the scientific discussion, they […]

Resume

Nonphotorealistic computer graphics offers a fascinating field of new visual imagery that can be rendered via the computer. If we view the photorealistic rendering as only one part of the whole field of rendering, then only very little research with regards to the wide range of possible forms of expression has been provided to date. […]

Variation of the Linewidth

Half-toning algorithms on the basis of cross-hatching control the grayscale val­ues of an image either through variation of the line density or line thickness. The variation of the line density was already discussed above for short lines. Examples for the variation of the line thickness can be found in [151]. For the intersection lines, also […]

Rendering of Cross-Hatching

cross-hatchings usually serve the rendering of lighting effects in illustrations. They are applied to those regions that lie in the shadow, and in contrast to adding details they permit an additional blackening that has a more two-dimen­sional effect. Hence, they are rather used for smooth surfaces such as the trunks and branches (compare Fig. 11.8). […]