Blog Process · PostSpectacular

Data Visualization Workshop @ CADA, Lisboa

Karsten Schmidt — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:06:02 -0800

Data visualization has been a longterm interest of mine and I'm extremely pleased about the opportunity to run a workshop about the topic at CADA in Lisbon (super thanks to Tom Carden for making contact! ;). From April 20-22, we will have three intense days of experimentation and team work exploring the field in a hands-on manner using Processing as well as other open source tools. If you want to take part, head over to the CADA website and sign up. A brief abstract & outline of what we've plann…

Social Collider

Karsten Schmidt — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:27:20 -0800

Social Collider is a new collaboration with Sascha Pohflepp, a JavaScript visualization to reveal cross-connections between conversations on Twitter. The project launched just 2 days ago and has been commissioned by Google for their Chrome Experiments collection and was produced by the friendly peeps at Instrument. Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to visualize how wikipedia>memes are created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

March '09 summary & newsletter

Karsten Schmidt — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:53:44 -0800

Painfully aware of sometimes breaking my own manifesto, specifically the “small steps more often” part, I had to rely on ye olde “no news are good news” wisdom on your side to excuse & endure the lack of blog updates around here. Rather than disappearing from the face of the earth though, I found myself more busy than ever for the past 5 months and so have actually a lot more to blog about too, but instead of actual blogging have adopted Twitter and Flickr as a more 2-way medium to fluid…

Recent press & upcoming events

Karsten Schmidt — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:46:03 -0800

On special request from a special client (as well as just for the record) here's a brief round up of recent cases of PostSpectacular in the media and some details for the upcoming Advanced Beauty screening in London: Creative Review, November 2008 issue This month's issue has an extensive 4-page feature & interview about the PostSpectacular approach and recent work (incl. collaborations with my friend Matt Pyke under his Universal Everything banner). I'm super happy about how it turned out,…

OFFF 2009

Karsten Schmidt — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:19:32 -0800

Just a quick note: Not being part of the whole design conference circuit (read sometimes: circus) I felt incredibly honoured to have just been invited to speak at the OFFF festival in sunny Lisbon next May, especially being part of such a line up (more speakers to be confirmed):

Processing Light @ TodaysArt 2008

Karsten Schmidt — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:04:24 -0800

There are only 2 days left until TodaysArt festival, my favourite arts festival, is taking place again this weekend in The Hague. Already having taken part in the festival under the umbrella of <>TAG's Information Aesthetics 2 Symposium last year, it'll be a slightly more architectural affair this year round... Processing Light, an exhibition organized & curated by Maxalot, will be all about especially commissioned generative works applied as large-scale super highres projections (4725 x 7250 pi…

Generative design in 4096 bytes or less

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:14:49 -0800

" A byte is the basic unit of measurement of information storage in computer science. In many computer architectures it is a unit of memory addressing, most often consisting of eight bits. A kilobyte (KB) is made up of 1,024 bytes. A megabyte (MB) is made up of 1,024 × 1,024 i.e. 1,048,576 bytes... wikipedia>Byte"

Food for thought

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:43:41 -0800

Since I've done a fair bit of travelling of late and often been listening to some (not as often) interesting talks on the plane, I wanted to share some of the more inspirational gems with you... Whilst on a visit in Paris earlier this year, a friend of mine has introduced me to the Mimetic Desire theory created by René Girard, who fundamentally claims that all human behaviour is learned and learning itself is based on imitation. Initially using examples from literature, the theory then also in…

Ad-hoc interactive workshop in Auckland

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:53:29 -0800

So Semi-Permanent 2008 is all over and much fun was had. To summarize the event in one word: Inspirational. But a more detailed debrief of the event is coming... I just wanted to inform any of the interested Auckland people, that The Church, organizers of Semi-Permanent, Joel Gethin-Lewis and myself will be holding a little spontaneous interactive media workshop tomorrow AM. But hurry, places are limited and we can only accept the first 20 people who RSVP. More details on their blog.

Nokia Friends, generative characters

Karsten Schmidt — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:40:49 -0800

Am currently preparing myself for my biggest trip of the year to speak at Semipermanent 2008 in Auckland, next Friday evening. This also means I'll have to finish documenting some more projects and their creation process before and so here's one of them... Earlier this year Matt Pyke invited me to help creating a motion graphics piece for Nokia's five superlarge 14.8 x 3.36 meters LED screens at the new Heathrow Terminal 5. The concept was simple enough:

Advanced Beauty: Enerugii, part II

Karsten Schmidt — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:55:36 -0800

Advanced Beauty is an ongoing collaborative activity initiated and curated by my friend Matt Pyke of Universal Everything and his brother Simon, sound artist extra-ordinaire, active under the monikers Freefarm/Freeform. Started in late 2006, for the first project both have gathered a group of 18 participants to create a collection of sound sculptures, audio-reactive visual pieces further exploring the related themes of wikipedia>synesthesia, mixing the senses to create interference and so improv…

Faber Finds generative book covers

Karsten Schmidt — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:08:43 -0800

wikipedia>Print on demand (POD) is becoming more mainstream by the day and new(ish) contenders are popping up everywhere, slowly covering more and more parts of the market. Recently the renowned English publisher Faber & Faber has also joined that field. However, unlike the other players who are largely focused on the self-publishing game, Faber's plans were to bring POD to that part of the market, which due to the traditional ways of the publishing business has ceased to be a market at all: out…

Street interaction

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:40:25 -0800

Coming home by train last Friday night, the whole street in front of the train station (incl. side streets) was filled with one big solid traffic jam due to a broken down bus in the middle of the road. While I was walking down the road some of the cars further away started beeping randomly, intermittently. Am pretty sure these drivers couldn’t see the reason for this traffic jam. After a few seconds the beeping seemed to form a cascade of “Mexican waves” towards the bus. Spreading meme-lik…

Print magazine August 2008 cover design

Karsten Schmidt — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:25:26 -0800

Update About Late in April the super friendly people from Print Magazine commissioned me to create a cover design which would conceptually support the main feature article about “kinetic typography” of their special summer issue. And here kinetic isn't even so much about motion and animated typography as about the process nature driving the creation of letter forms. It's an interesting (apart from the marigolds and fresias, heh!) article written by Emily King who is currently also cura…

Upcoming events

Karsten Schmidt — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:02:22 -0800

" “Good things come to those who wait.”" I've always subscribed the truth of the above saying (not only when it comes to Guiness), however when it comes to updating and finally fully launching this website I unfortunately can't be (yet!) the bearer of good news - we have been simply too busy getting actual work done and are still not able/allowed to document it so far.

Up & coming in The Netherlands

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:39:23 -0800

As usual, a last minute notification (few hours before leaving) about my participation in this year's TodaysArt festival in The Hague, Netherlands. <>TAG kindly invited me to give 2 lectures about my Processing works in the context of their Information Aesthetics 2 symposium. First I'll be joining Mr. Casey Reas and Aaron Koblin @ Mediamatic in Amsterdam, this Thursday at 2030h.

Creating weblinks in PDF with iText

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:34:40 -0800

Mr. LennyJPG pinged me this morning asking about creating hyperlinks in PDFs generated with Processing. After some digging through the iText javadocs and reading various tutorials it became obvious that Processing's PGraphicsPDF class had to be modified to give us access to the wrapped PdfContentByte instance so that the hyperlink magic can happen. My modified version of Processing's PDF library can be downloaded from here (jar) and there (source). The .jar has to be placed in the /libraries/pdf…

Using JavaDB and db4o in Processing

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:33:09 -0800

Kind of as reply to Tom's mini howto for using SQLite with Processing, but also since I've been dabbling with it myself recently, here's an alternative take on using an embedded database from within Processing (or more generally in Java)... Mainly due to Java's strong focus on server side development, over the past few years there have been several large scale community efforts to create Java native database engines, which don't rely on underlying C code, are high performant and portable: the …

String based design

Karsten Schmidt — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:31:46 -0800

As we delve deeper into the realms of applied generative design and deal with a whole population of possible design outcomes, we often find ourselves preferring certain outcomes more than others and want to narrow down our explorations. So the identity of each such design plays an important role. Identity in this context can be defined by the set of input parameters used, but we also need to ensure the processing of these parameters is deterministic, meaning that even though we often use (pseudo…