Dear OpenFrameworks Peoples,
When we started Sosolimited, we dove head first into the OpenFrameworks universe and have never looked back. We’ve marveled at the growth of the OF code base and community over the last few years. It’s a staggering body of work and an incredibly powerful tool. We’re slow to the party, but after almost three years of coding with OpenFrameworks, we’re sharing our OpenFrameworks addon, ofxSoso.
I just returned from Raleigh last week. The Ribbon is hung and looking brilliant. The real-life manifestation of most architectural elements falls short of the initial renderings, but I have to say, in this case it surpasses them. None of us had any idea what a stunning object this would be. It actually looks likes it’s floating. And the atrium itself is a gorgeous space, full of light and reflections. Bill and Jeff—along with Greg, Jeremy, and Curtis, their rigging team—did an amazing job installing the piece.
For the last two years, we have lovingly toiled on the glass and metal leviathan we call “the ribbon”. We are distilling the beauty of nature’s patterns into 20 x 180 LCD glass pixels that swoop through the four story atrium of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
The sculpture itself is being hung as we speak. Jeff Lieberman and Bill Washabaugh, our collaborators on the piece, are down — I should say up because they are standing in a four-story high cherry picker — in Raleigh with a team of riggers, hanging the glass beast piece by piece. As you might imagine, it took some ingenious mechanical and structural engineering to get 3600 pieces of glass to twist and bend like a scarf in the wind.
Lauren just got back from the North American International Auto Show, where we installed a booming interactive. Building on past work, we developed a touchscreen sequencer that allowed users to create their own custom beats. These beats were then pumped through a 4000 Watt sound system installed in the back of a pimped-out Chevy Sonic. You could also record your beat to share it with friends or download it as a ringtone.
Jack Morton Worldwide developed the concept and we had a great time working with Dave Lentz, Cooley Ludtke, and Linda Nahas to pull this one off. We also worked closely with 24G, who developed the social sharing screen and Bluewater Technologies, who handled the audio hardware.
Timelinks is a slick new visualization startup based in Brooklyn, New York, helmed by our good friend and serial entrepreneur Jeff Beil. If Facebook’s Timeline is trying to take your one-dimensional blipvert social experience and add the axis of time (resulting in a 2D scrolling HTML page), Jeff is attempting something a bit more… ambitious. (Chrome Required)
It’s been a dream of ours to develop and install a permanent television remix artwork, so we’re very excited to announce that Firebrand TV is installed at the brand new Firebrand Saints. Gary Strack, the chef and owner behind Firebrand Saints, Central Kitchen, and the Enormous Room has been a big supporter of Sosolimited since the very beginning, so we’re especially proud to launch this artwork in his new space.
Firebrand TV is a development of Set Top Box. It’s an installation that continuously watches, catalogs, and transforms live television. The piece is a five-screen video beam. The left-most screen always shows the live broadcast signal. The other four screens display a series of visual and typography transformations of the signal. Firebrand TV is a platform for live television transformation, and a development of our live remixes of the US Presidential Debates.
As John mentioned in an earlier post, prior to joining Sosolimited in June, I spent the past two years completing an MFA in the Design|Media Arts program at UCLA. During my time there, I created a series of works exploring the potential to use technology to alter social interactions and increase one’s sense of agency within the current network of social relations. The final project in the series was Inneract – a location-based mobile phone application that allows people to imagine and realize alternative interactions in the real world.
Last week, I had the pleasure of spending five days at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, installing our piece Set Top Box at Graphic Design: Now in Production. I’d never been to the Walker before and found it to be an excellent destination.
Walking through the show feels like walking inside the extruded pages of a well-designed magazine. You’re excited to turn to the next page, but you’re happy to sit and gaze wide-eyed at any one spread. The Walker design team is stellar. In fact, the Walker staff is amazing on all fronts—from the workmanship of the exhibition furniture to the A/V crew to the curation staff. Professional and friendly.
The show is an impressive collection of work, spanning many mediums and temperaments, with a focus on typography. There is a mix of design and artwork that uses graphic design as its medium. I was reminded of the accessibility of artwork that looks like design. It has the power to lure people with an aesthetic language they are familiar with, and then deliver a deeper message. Of course, there is always the risk that the viewer walks away, satisfied by a quicky, without letting the real power of the work sink in. However, the pretty face often keeps people around long enough to feel the real punch.
This past summer Sosolimited developed the winning proposal for the lobby of the new headquarters of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This non-partisan think tank is a leader in global issues, energy policy, defense, and health. In preparation for their move into a brand new building on K Street CSIS asked a number of interactive design studios to submit ideas for their atrium. Our proposal is for a global data clock, a grand chandelier that reacts to world news and displays real-time information across a map of light.
Eric is in Minneapolis for the Opening of Graphic Design: Now in Production, an exhibition curated by a team lead by Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton, showcasing graphic design highlights from the last ten years. We are very proud to have Set Top Box included in the show. It opens at the Walker Arts Center and travels through 2014.
The Walker describes the show as follows:
This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.
