Dark Matter
DARK MATTER is an artistic group that does some fascinating and high quality artistic motion and lighting installations.
Oregon Summer Fun
Fun stuff for this summer!
- Music on Main – starting on July 13th, Portland5 offers free outdoor concerts are held on Main Street next to Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall—between Southwest Broadway and Park Avenue in downtown Portland—and feature popular local musicians playing a diverse collection of music.
- Tigard Balloon festival – all agest/family friendly hot air balloon displays, crafts/vendors, and family friendly music.
- Portland Parks and Recreation Summer Free For All – family friendly concerts, movies, and events in the parks
- HareFest – Music festival that features tribute bans. From AC/DC to Tom Petty to Beastie Boys to Heart.
Art residencies and grants
It looks like ThisIsColossal regularly covers residencies, contests, and grants for creative and artistic creations.
Maybe you can even apply for a residency from Adobe.
Random number generators vs noise generators
Squirrel Eiserloh compares random number generators and noise functions. He does a great job summarizing the pros/cons of each and then shows how the noise functions can replace random number generators and then provide many other benefits (unordered access, better reseeding, record/playback, network loss tolerance, lock-free parallelization, etc) while often being smaller and faster than traditional random number generation.
Logarithmic Map of the Observable Universe
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I remember being blown as a kid when I learned that the further away you look in space – the further back in TIME you look. The furthest objects we have seen were actually objects that existed just a few million years after the big bang. We can actually see the history of our universe by simplying zooming further and further away.
So drink in this amazing look at our universe where distance is looking back in time.
AI based art generation
I’ve written about AI-based generated art before. Why not try your hand at some of the engines?
Dall·e is an open source project. Try it here by typing in something fun and see what it comes up with.
Craiyon lets you type anything in and see what it comes up with as well.
High End Home Furnishings
Les Ateliers Courbet is just one spot where people buy high end furniture and home furnishings for their modern architectural homes/evil mastermind lairs. It’s a fine balance between high end art gallery and furnishings provider – blending contemporary artists with master craftsmen. I always love looking at the designs coming out of high-end architectural and design work. I need to find some others. 🙂
See also: Arita Porcelain Labs
Stylophone business card
Tim Jacobs created a really cool business card. It’s a fully functional midi stylophone. What an awesome way to make a business card.
He has tons of other projects on his website – including having made his own simple video game console that runs on an oscilloscope as well as programming Tetris, Pacman, and Mario in assembly language. Amazing.
Virtual Production environments – at home?
Virtual Production is really hitting it’s legs in real movies like the Mandalorian and replacing green-screen flows. It is, however, ridiculously expensive and requires massive spaces to work in.
Cinematographer and developer Matt Workman breaks down how he used a mix of real-world camera equipment and 3D knowledge in Unreal Engine to set up an indie virtual production studio in his house. He talks about his remote collaboration workflow as well. Learn more at http://www.unrealengine.com/film-tv
Orbital VR
I’ve already written about how movie houses are often giving up on greenscreen and using giant LED displays along with game engines (like Unity) to control what is displayed based on camera movement. It gives much more realistic lighting, better sight lines, no green-screen removal artifacts, and a host of other benefits.
Orbital Studios is one of the houses doing this kind of work. They have some good videos on their website.
They’re definitely still defining these production environments and using some interesting things like Quasar lighting to create light zones around the actors: