I’m waiting for the SC09 Opening Address to begin (“The Rise of the 3D Internet”, by Intel’s Justin Rattner) and on the opening video reel they have a fantastic video from Sheldon Brown of the Experimental Game Lab at UCSD of a project called “Scalable City”.
Scalable City creates an urban/suburban/rural environment via a data visualization pipeline. Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.
Throughout these artworks, a variety of computer concept buzzwords take on physical form. Wallowing in them provides equal measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms that we are rapidly creating. The project neither indicts nor embraces this future, but offers an extrapolation of its algorithmic tendencies, heightening one's awareness of the aesthetics of the underlying logic as it becomes the determinant of much of our cultured existence.
The video is impressive, and you can see screenshots and the trailer on his website.
