This  music visualization by Peter Menich is a glowing point in space that follows the timeline, emitting millions of particles to the different piano key strokes. Via.

Click to watch the video.

Silhouettes of Jazz is an animated short movie that outlines the history of traditional jazz music in a virtual walkthrough of a shadow art museum. Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.

The movie highlights five different milestones in the evolution of jazz: the early songs of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop. Each era is represented with a room containing 3D sculptures which cast multiple shadow images at the same time. This unique property is achieved using a novel computational method for the interactive creation and manipulation of shadow art. Given a set of desired silhouette images, a global geometric optimization builds a 3D shadow volume that can subsequently be edited by the artist using a set of 3D modeling tools.

Silhouettes of Jazz was one of the three nominees for the Best in Show Award of the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival. Authors: Dominik Kaeser, Martin-Sebasian Senn, Mario Deuss, Niloy J. Mitra and mark Pauly.

Aleksandar Rodic created this experimental video as a final project for his procedural animation class at Savannah College of Art and Design.  It was inspired by demoscene and sub-atomic particle collision images. The name comes from the Higgs Boson particle which is expected to provide a scientific foundation for the origin of mass in the universe.

The SCAN PROCESSOR STUDIES are a collection of works by Woody Vasulka & Brian O’Reilly.  The full work is of total approximate duration of 45 minutes, with sections of various lengths, textures, and dynamic qualities.

The source materials were generated by Woody using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor from the 1970’s that had been sitting on a shelf for years, and had recently been digitized. Woody came into Brian’s studio one day and asked him if he would be interested in using them to work on a collaboration, and the project began from there …

The works use sources excavated directly from the output of the Scan Processor, as well as further manipulations using Tom Demeyer’s ImX software. Extensive editing and layering and additional augmentations were done using Phil Mortons IP. The Sound was generated (mostly) by custom software developed by Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan and Brian, called NETHER GENERATOR, which sets up a number of complex real time feedback networks filtered and processed by various means.

What does it mean for an artist to ’survive’ in a tough economic climate? With the global economic downturn and the hardship it has caused blue collar workers throughout, Brooklynite Gallery found it fitting to explore the world’s simplest way to make a living – shining shoes. They have organized an exhibition around just that – shoeshine boxes.

However, a shoeshine box should not be taken in the most literal sense of the words. These objects have all been created out of necessity- a need to earn money, or further, to survive. The gallery pushes the need to survive beyond its literal context, commissioning established and emerging artists to design their own ’survival boxes’.

Urban Screening was produced by  design students from the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. The students turned the movie into a giant light projection using the walls of the campus building.

We Feel Fine, is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. Since August 2005, digital whiz kids Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris have been using their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape.

Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

THE MEETING PLACE by ASPECT Studio, is part architectural installation/ sculpture and social experiment. It is a playful installation which encourages participation and interaction whilst heightening the experience of moving through the urban space of Little Hunter Street. The concept is to create a space within the existing the lane way – by creating two 4m high curtain walls of elastic fabric. The material has an opacity to it which allows for views through and when lit at night becomes a canvas for revealing movement of people through the space.

People have to negotiate their way through the laneway by communication and contact with other people like themselves that are moving in the opposite direction. This social aspect of watching, communicating and negotiating with people will increase positive human contact with a sense of play.

When Blu Dot opened their SoHo store in 2008, they became surrounded by the resourceful culture of “curb-mining”: the act of finding furniture and art on the street. Now that a year has passed, mono approached them with a way to conduct their own curb-mining experiment: What would happen if we left a bunch of GPS-enabled Real Good Chairs all over New York, free for the take? Who will grab them? Where will they go? How will they get there? What will their new homes look like? Thus, the REAL GOOD experiment was born.

You can follow the Flickr stream here.