Created by Ariel Malka, Chronotext is a growing collection of software experiments exploring the relation between text, space and time. One of these is the new iPhone application called Babel Tower. The app lets you visualize, in 3D, the Biblical passage mentioning the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), wrapped around a helicoidal path, allowing you to read the text by rotating it indefinitely. The app also includes images of previous projects in the chronotext archive all wrapped up in a wonderful interface.

Note: if you shake the device, the tower will collapse together with the text!

Ariel Malka is a designer and programmer based in Tel-Aviv. Since 2003, he stands behind chronotext as “a playground to explore new ways to read and write, a constantly evolving software toolkit”.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0.0
Cost: Free
Developer: Chronotext

Related Posts:

• WriteRoom Now with WebApp Sync [iPhone, WebApp]
• SculptMaster 3D [iPhone]
• iAttractor [iPhone]
• abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz [iPhone]
• It’s About Time – Volume 1 [iPhone]
• Flourish [iPhone, Sound]

Kit Webster writes:

Enigmatica is a work in progress exploring new concepts in combining light, sound and space to create multi-dimensional synesthetic environments. The work experiments with spatial segmentation, illusory oddities and aural expression, freely shifting from order to disconnection and sweeping through the spectrum of colours from softly subtle to psychedelic. By constantly reforming the dynamics within the space, the installation demonstrates the potential for creating new forms of digital sculpture.

Presented at MARS Gallery in Port Melbourne.

More information can be found kitwebster.com.au

(via Saturn Never Sleeps)

Related Posts:

• Unfolding Space [iPhone, Environment]
• Augmented Sculpture [Inspiration]
• Sixteen Candles [MaxMSP, Environment]
• Artificial Smile [openFrameworks, Objects]
• Augmented Anamorphosis [openFrameworks]
• dataMorphose [Processing, Environment]

SUPERBROTHERS have just posted exciting new information about their upcoming iPhone game called Sword and Sworcery. While the full details are still not available, from the videos below and descriptions (the GDC 2010 build), we get a taste of the “a brave experiment in i/o cinema for apple’s touchtronic machinery“.

When Apple’s touchtronic machine is held horizontally, The Sword is sheathed & it is possible to explore & observe by tapping, dragging & pinching the multi-touch display, a style of play referred to internally as “sworcery”. In S:S&S EP there is always a clear path to follow although this path will vary depending upon the phase of the moon. Unlike comparable videogames, in S:S&S EP there are rarely if ever hard barriers to halt a player’s progress and it is possible to reach an endpoint in a single sitting, however the real S:S&S EP experience unfolds on repeated playthroughs when the player ventures off the beaten track to discover shortcuts, secrets and odd twisting paths that lead to some surprising situations. Occasionally obstacles & dangers will threaten & in order to overcome them it will become necessary to tilt Apple’s touchtronic machine vertically, unsheathe The Sword.

Related Posts:

• Mimeo [iPhone, Games] – Preview
• Noby Noby Boy [iPhone] – Latest
• Bit Pilot [iPhone, Games] – Preview
• Minipops [iPhone]
• Noby Noby Boy [iPhone, Games]
• Piyo Blocks [iPhone]

This is truly one awesome messaging service created by Protein’s boy Bjorn. The idea is simple, write text, choose style and save with the link to post to your friends. Big, bold, just the way we love it. Inspired by Barbara Kruger.
(sorry about the language below but sh*t and cr*p seem to work best =])

http://bigassmessage.com/

(via Will of Protein OS)

See also the awesome ColorBarsScreensaver

Related Posts:

• Twitter Magnets [Flash]
• CAN on Twitter [News]
• 5 Twitter Art Projects – Volume 3 [WebApp]
• Qonversation [WebApp]
• onedotzero.app [Processing]
• CAN Social Feed [News]

Artificial Smile is a collaboration between Stefan Stubbe and Andreas Schmelas realized in the summer semester 2009 at “Digitale Klasse”, University of the Arts, Berlin.

The camera ‘Artificial Smile’ plays with the notion of perfection and auto-retouch. Created as a picture apparatus, it shows only smiling people’s picture to be taken, irrespective of their former emotional state.

The team writes:
The tools we use change the way we perceive and understand ourselves. Since the 1950s the proliferation of the amateur camera has allowed for the mass documentation of our individual self and our portrait. The staging of the image and how we ‘look’ or represent our selves and our body changed as we learnt in part to ‘play-to-the-camera’. Editing softwares such as Photoshop lead to further changes and to the ‘touching’ up of our image in the pursuit of ‘perfection’. While contemporary digital image processing techniques such as the auto-retouch function enables digital cameras to alter your image in real-time.

Project is made with openFrameworks, AAM Library and Amit Agrawals Poisson Solver

More info here + see this post on oF forums for source code soon to be released.

Related Posts:

• Enigmatica [Inspiration]
• Augmented Anamorphosis [openFrameworks]
• cheesePlotter [openFrameworks]
• Twitter Art Projects – Part 2 [WebApp]
• Body Paint [openFrameworks]
• Hall of Fragments [openFrameworks]

Colorendar is a simple diary like calendar app by Mitsuhiro Sugimori (birnimal) where you can color-code every day. Rather than filling endless info on the day just gone by, mark it with a colour instead. You can see the one-month change in mood in one view, imagine colour as attribute of something, the shape of the moon seen on the evening is displayed in the calendar to compare if you like and a beautiful graph shows the colour changes over time.

Other Features
- Northern Hemisphere / Southern Hemisphere switch
- Disable Auto-Lock
- Show percentage of colors
- Week starts on Sunday / Monday
- Color Theme
- Customizing Color

More + development info on Mitsuhiro’s blog.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.1.0
Cost: $0.99
Developer: birnimal APP

Related Posts:

• Büro Destruct Designer [iPhone, Air]
• It’s About Time – Volume 1 [iPhone]
• KulerClock [iPhone]
• AddLib [iPhone]
• Goldfish Music Box [iPhone, Sound]
• VernX [iPhone, Games]

Almost two years after its initial release for Mac OSX and Windows, Tale of Tales have ported their title The Graveyard to Apple’s iPhone platform. As of now, The Graveyard can be purchased in the App Store for $1.99. As with the PC release, a Lite version is available for free.

Finalist in the category of innovation in the last year’s The 12th Annual Independent Game Festival, The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michal Samyn (Tale of Tales). In The Graveyard you play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game, an experiment with realtime poetry, storytelling without words. The Graveyard is an emotional journey of empathy.

“The Graveyard offers a player the opportunity to imagine themselves in a certain situation,” explain creators Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. “It’s not a game in the sense that there is a way to win or lose or a puzzle to solve, or even a story to uncover. But the interaction does immerse you in a virtual world filled with narrative, an equally powerful feature of the medium of videogames. The iPhone version of The Graveyard is the same as the PC version. Only a few elements have been removed or simplified to allow it to run on the iPhone hardware. But the fact that you hold the game in your hand and touch it with your finger, adds to the sensation of fragility and preciousness.”

Without revealing too much, you really must try the game for yourself.  The free download version is similar to paid ($1.99) but does not include the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.

The game was originally built using the Unity game engine and considering easy portability it’s great to see Graveyard now also available for the iPhone.

Auriea was kind enough to share 5 promocodes with us to give away to you, our readers. If you would like one, please leave a comment below and we’ll pick 5 best comments later today.

Tale of Tales BVBA is a games development studio, founded by Auriea Harvey and Michal Samyn in Belgium in 2002. The purpose of Tale of Tales is to create elegant and emotionally rich interactive entertainment. We explicitly want to cater to people who are not enchanted by most contemporary computer games, or who wouldn’t mind more variety in their gameplay experiences. For this purpose, all of our products feature innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls. more

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $1.99
Developer: Tale of Tales

Related Posts:

• The Graveyard [Mac, Windows, Games]
• ONull Vector Generator [Processing]
• RGB MusicLab [Mac, Windows]
• 15 Best and Must Have iPhone Apps of 2009 [iPhone]
• Devil’s Tuning Fork [Games, Windows]
• Brain Damage [Games]

Augmented Anamorphosis (distorted projection) is a graduation project by Sander ter Braak at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht. The project explores projection of a 3d object in space dependant on viewer’s location. In the movie embeded below the first scene shows a simulation, the second a user view, the third from a different angle showing the anamorphosis.

I really enjoy the simplicity of it all. Even though we have seen a number of similar projects in the past this one clearly demonstrates the concept of augumented objects in space.

Created with openFrameworks with openCV.

(via vimeo)

Related Posts:

• Enigmatica [Inspiration]
• Artificial Smile [openFrameworks, Objects]
• mjuvi [Processing, vvvv, C++]
• Hand From Above [openFrameworks]
• Body Paint [openFrameworks]
• Orbitone [vvvv, Sound]

Inspired by this code in the Generative Design book, Harmony by Mr.Doob aka Ricardo Cabello is a result of weekend play with various drawing algorithms and <canvas>.

Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use inside their own Mac OS X WebKit component, later adopted by Gecko browsers and standardized for the next generation web technologies. It consists of a drawable region defined in HTML code with height and width attributes. JavaScript code may access the area through a full set of drawing functions allowing for dynamically generated graphics (wikipedia).

Ricardo’s app includes a number of different drawing styles generally driven by connecting previously drawn points together or tangenting off the same points creating a pencil shading type effect where the edges are not as clearly defined. Ricardo also points out that the web app is built modular so he can keep adding more brush styles in the future.

In addition, because the app is basicly based on WebKit, some adaptations to the code make it work on Webkit mobile (Android and iPhone). Whilst he hasn’t implemented multitouch support yet and is a little slow compared to desktop browsers, it is quite impressive nonetheless.

Read more about the app on Ricardo’s blog.

Harmony

+ See also Mark Knol’s flash version here.

Sketch by Edu

Related Posts:

• the389 [Javascript]
• 3D Waveform [Javascript]
• Composition with JavaScript [WebApp]
• Pixuffle [WebApp, Photography]
• Eyebrowse [WebApp]
• Face Maker [WebApp]

Nearly 4 months since our last post on Twitter Art Projects but this time we have collected more diverse than ever collection of art installations/web projects that utilize twitter in a very unique way. From radio controlled cars to hand drawings these show that there is much more to twitter than what some may have had for breakfast – definetly a reflection on our group consciousness.. (vol 1). If you missed the previous editions, check out:

Volume 1 + Volume 2

Hard Drivin

Hard Drivin’ is a kinetic installation created by Ivan Twohig, Benjamin Gaulon and Brian Solon. The title of the piece references Hard Drivin’ a video game released in 1989. The game featured the first 3D polygon driving environment.

The installation involves radio controlled (R/C) cars that physically react to short messages (‘tweets’) sent through the popular social networking site Twitter. The cars are placed on a 3d-like structure inspired by polygonal modeling. Anyone can participate by telling the cars to begin following another user, by sending a simple command inside a tweet.

You can get the cars to start following a user, by sending a reply to @harddrivin, e.g.: @harddrivin follow @exchangedublin
Then every time that user tweets, one of the cars will move in a random direction.

More info @ http://harddrivin.com + see this Flickr Set for more images.

Default to Public

“Default to Public” is a project by Jens Wunderling dealing with the discrepancy between people’s feeling of privacy on the web and the physical world. It consists of an ongoing series of objects and interventions linking the physical world to the online world in unexpected and narrative ways to create awareness for self-exposure.

Currently there are three projects, Status Panel, TweetScreen and Tweetleak with another two still under wraps named Classified Tweets and Tweetcast.

Status Panel enhances the well known interface – the doorbell providing a small LCD panel displaying one’s twitter status along with the name. Additionally the status panel has it’s own Twitter Account and then the button is pressed it re-tweets one’s current tweet.

Tweetscreen is a networked projection/installation in public space showing tweets which have been written near it’s own physical location on a large projection screen. The twitter users whose tweets have been chosen receive a reply message aling with the photo taken by a webcam.

Tweetleak is a monolithic anthracithe-coloured pole which is placed in a public place aggregating tweets from nearby and “materialises them”. After the tweet has been printed out the author is notified.

All works follow a simple, yet powerful principle: Information from the twitter network (standing for information on the web) are displayed in another public environment, the documentation of this process is fed back into the digital public sphere and the authors of the information are notified of that abduction. Two public spheres are temporarily linked, creating repercussions of communication in the digital public sphere, which seems to be regarded as less public than the physical world, although it has a far wider reach than classic media, plus it never expires or is written over.

More information at defaulttopublic.net

Tweeting Colors

Tweeting Colors is webpage comprised of vertical color bars created by special tweets from Twitter users. New bars are added from the left, pushing the existing arrangement to the right. A project by A Feverish Dream, this piece allows the audience to directly manipulate the resulting visual. Anyone can view the piece, but a Twitter user can add bars by following these simple directions. The page auto-refreshes a few times a minute, so sit back and enjoy the Color Feed.

To participate in Tweeting Colors, simply post a tweet containing the following three elements:

#afd (This is a tag acting as a filter. The “afd” stands for A Feverish Dream)
a color name from the HTML color chart below. It is not case-sensitive, so you can use all caps or all lowercase.
a number between 1 and 20, inclusive. This determines the width of the vertical band of color you’re creating.

Your tweet should show up in the Color Feed within a minute.
Examples of acceptable tweets:  #afd DARKRED 4 or  deeppink 18 #afd or  you can simply work these tags into a normal post: Cleaning out the blue garage today #afd 8

See more at tweetingcolors.com

UTV

UTV is the transposition of our Internet identities from Twitter feeds to an over-the-air TV broadcast.

UTV is part of an exhibition entitled “Ill Communication” by Rob Duarte, which examines the role of technology in our understandings of community and communication. The format of the exhibition is such that each of the participating artists presents a work that spans two halves of the gallery space – an “interface” and an “output”.

Interface

The UTV installation begins with an open presentation of the technology behind the television broadcast. A laptop computer connects to a display, which shows the real-time workings of the scripts and patches that gather Twitter feeds from people in the Chicago area. A camcorder then converts the image into a ready-for-TV signal and finally leads to a UHF transmitter that broadcasts the content to any television sets in the area. The corkboard above this makeshift TV station contains my notes, sketches and observations about the technical process, comparisons between the sociopolitical histories of Internet and broadcast TV media, and the re-appropriation of the obsolete medium of analog TV for the purposes of broadcasting local community-produced content.

Output

In the second half of the gallery, a pile of TVs and their rabbit-ear antennae are tuned to UHF channel 14½ to receive the reconfigured broadcast. The commentaries and mini-monologues from the once-digital medium scroll past the TV screens at varying speeds. The translation of this content to the fuzzy world of analog TV happens as the medium reaches the final stage of its gradual appropriation for purely commercial purposes. When it is discontinued this year, its final remains will be sold to private corporations and its demise as a medium for geographically relevant, freely available, community-driven content will be complete. UTV is an effort to filter “local” content from the world-wide medium of the Internet and funnel it back into the communication void that will exist during the final days of analog TV and beyond. This project also serves to expose this sociopolitical history of analog broadcasting and compare it to the power struggles that the Internet has and will face in the future.

More about Rob and his other work can be found at robduarte.com

Twitter Drawings

On February 19th, 2009, Marc Horowitz posted this “tweet” on twitter.com (see first image below). Each of the 100 original drawings were mailed out to the first 100 respondents after the entire collection was put on display at Postmasters Gallery in New York as part of the exhibition “The future is not what it used to be” from February 28th – April 4th, 2009.

This limited-edition catalog contains all 100 drawings and you can purchase it at http://bit.ly/buytwitterbook.
You can see all the drawings at http://bit.ly/twitterdrawings.

If you are interested in purchasing the book, see here.

Marc continues to tweet and you should add him at @marchorowitz.

Related Posts:

• 5 Twitter Art Projects [WebApp]
• Twitter Art Projects – Part 2 [WebApp]
• onedotzero // BFI // London [Processing, Events]
• Tweeeeet [WebApp]
• BigAssMessage [WebApp, Flash]
• Fire with Fire (2010) [Inspiration]