My parents are good jews. My mother and father both read torah and haftorah on a regular basis during Shabbat services at their conservative synagogue. That's why they love visiting their favorite site "Navigating the Bible" at bible.ort.org to get the weekly torah portion already color coded and even pre-recorded by a cantor. And while they make the material available online for free, the audio files are in an outdated Real Audio format. At the time I write this, the real media plugin only has 23% penetration on the web, and is a proprietary format that is not backward compatible. My parents were not able to figure out how to play the audio files. So after giving a try myself, I saw that the only thing that would play those .ra files on their mac was VLC and ffmpeg. First I tried writing my parents a 7-step email explaining how to use VLC to transcode the .ra files into .mp3 files. Then at some point, I decided to sit down and write them a [password protected] proxy through which they could visit bible.ort.org. It would allow them to click on the audio links and have them appear as mp3s in their browser. I did this in PHP by using the simplehtmldom library to parse the tags and by installing ffmpeg on the server. I found the html dom parser to be a lot of fun, and I was really happy that installing ffmpeg on my server was as easy as apt-get. This only worked because that particular site used basic HTML. It inspires me about the possibility of using a web proxy as a kind of commentary. This idea parallels biblical commentaries, like the commentaries of Rashi which even have their own rashi-script. Maybe if people like the idea of solving the real audio epidemic this way, we should set up a dedicated media cleaner proxy site so people can visit any url they want and have the media magically converted for them this way (and call the service Rashi).

I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy, working at Digital Domain with Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz, Jake Sargeant, and David "dlew" Lewandowski. This page has taken a long time to be published because I've had to await clearance. A lot of my team's work was done using Adobe software and Cinema 4D. The rest of it got written in C++ using OpenFrameworks and wxWidgets, the way I've always done it with this team ;) Uniquely however, Digital Domain's CG artists were able to port my apps over to Houdini for further evolution and better rendering than OpenGL could ever provide. Special thanks to Andy King for showing me that what seasoned CG artists do at DD is actually not so far off from what's going on in the Processing community.

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

HexVirus is a spherical map of the globe that features vector outlines of the continents. These continent vectors are slowly eaten away by a more hexagonal representation. Algorithmically, this is a path stepping function which looks ahead for the closest matching 60-degree turns. The HexVirus globe was used in the executive board meeting scene, and also inside the grid as a visual aid in CLU's maniacal plan presentation. In the board room interface, the globe element is surrounded by the lovely work of my team.

The scoreboard was the first element I worked on. I created a line-generator that produced bursts of lines which turned at adjustable angles. The line generator had "radial mode" which arranged the geometry in concentric circle form. This line generator was used to generate generic elements and layers of style in different things, and is a GMUNK favorite. At this point, I found myself moving to multisampled FBOs because the non-antialiased polygons were just too ugly to work with, and we needed to make film-resolution renders. In fact, this is the highst res I've ever seen my apps render.

Fireworks, mmmm. I started with a regular physics simulation where a particle has an upward force applied at birth, sending it upward while gravity pulls it back down resulting in a parabola. I then added particle-children, followed by various artistic styles, including what our team has called "egyptian" across several jobs -- which is a side-stepping behavior. We were trying to create fireworks that looked enough like real fireworks but had interesting techno-aesthetic. As a homage to the original Tron character Bit, we used icosahedrons, dodecahedrons, and similar. I was disappointed that Bit isn't in this one. After doing this simulation, I've grown more aware of how often fireworks are used in movies.

For the portal climax, the TronLines app was used, but also apps like "Twist" from our team's previous jobs. Once the look was mocked up by gmunk, a houdini artist recreated the rig for deeper control.

I wrote a particle renderer that could make the head holograms slurp in and out of the data discs. Special thanks to Keith Pasko for CLUing me in about using exponential functions to create a sliding-gooey sort of delay.

When fixing Quorra, there was an element in the DNA interface called the Quorra Heart which looked like a lava lamp. I generated an isosurface from a perlin-noise volume, using the marching cubes function found in the Geometric Tools WildMagic API, a truly wonderful lib for coding biodigital jazz, among other jazzes. The isosurface was then drawn along different axes, including concentric spheres. The app was mesmerizing to stare at.

After this project, I was fed up enough with wxWidgets and Carbon that I was ready to author my own OpenGL based UI. The most important thing I could use is a floating-point slider. I also got irritated with the way the Carbon sliders would not slide all the way to the minimum and maximum values. It totally messed with my zen thing. Also, after a job like this, it's clear that a member of the Processing community working within a CG community is greatly restricted by the differences of realtime graphics rendering engines, and that probably messes with an art director's zen thing. "TRON: Legacy" © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

For this rich scene of what's going on inside an athlete's head, Mark Kudsi had me writing C++ code to generate slowly growing neurons into a stretched screen 'topiary'. An adhoc rendering cluster was used to quickly render random seeded versions as we evolved the style into the fantasy vision displays. An average color was calculated from more than 26,000 images in the MoMA art collection. The result was this brownish gray.

My friend Josh Gallant sees looping corkscrews when he closes his eyes. Now you can too with this application for fiddling with a cycling spiral form. The application features high resolution image export, and a fullscreen view. Often times when I work in a production environment, I'm just making a fullscreen app with no GUI besides mouse and keyboard interaction. I used wxWidgets and added a nice native user interface to this one particularly to show Jake Sargeant that it's possible, although takes a bit longer to code.

withDRAWal is a series of ten interactive scribble styles commissioned by Graham Peet of The Public in West Bromwich, England. I programmed and tested the whole thing at Beit T'Shuvah. Each mode responds to the scribbling input in a different way. In writing this software using C++ and openGL in OpenFrameworks, I found myself using a maze solving algorithm, the Box2D physics engine, and Perlin noise. Instructions: draw with your mouse, and press the circle at the bottom left corner to move on. If you have a keyboard, press spacebar to clear the screen without moving on. Each number key corresponds to one of the ten modes. Press D to enable the debug overlay. Press - and + to adjust speed or fatness - use at your own risk. Press S to render one screenshot to the data folder. F toggles fullscreen. Q brings back the beginning instruction screen. If you're on a Mac portable that has a sudden motion sensor, mode 5 will let you tilt the screen.

Code was written at Motion Theory to generate content and effects in the Black Eyed Peas' Boom Boom Pow video. Amongst this highly collaborative effort were two other code artists: Keith Pasko and Ryan Alexander. After the video was finished, Keith and I went on to collaborate again on creating custom VJ software used by VSquared Labs in the Black Eyed Peas live tour. The VJ software processes a realtime video feed, and was written in C++ OpenFrameworks. The keyboard was filled with different behavior and content controls. If we had more time, we would have connected it to a Lemur device communicating via OSC. Once again a job well done with Motion Theory, and the beginnings of a relationship with VSquared Labs.

Marc Nimoy Extraordinaire was redoing the website for the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance (CIP) and he had embedded a small animated gif that had a marquee of text announces and fun blur transitioning. I offered to redo it in Flash 8, and give him a lot of customization features on the html side so the thing could be dynamically driven and lower bandwidth. After pulling a happy all-nighter at Beit T'Shuvah, TextFlasher was born. Thank goodness for cool flash filters. Although I know and love as3, I chose flash 8 because at the time I write this, that's installed by 98.9% of internet users. If you look in the example files, you'll see a large associative array of values and heavy commenting.

Commissioned work that deals with the browser as a medium in promotion of Google Chrome browser. I chose to port Balldroppings to processing.js and I made PopupPong -- pong that uses the brower windows as interactive game elements. BallDroppings was able to happen because of the native Canvas tag included in Chrome, and because the js engine runs so fast. PopupPong actually proved to be a bit difficult because of a bug in the window resizing and placement functions.

A series of 7 camera view treatments that I probably did at ITP. When I went to Fabrica, I shared my source code with Joel Gethin Lewis and he quickly understood it. Shortly after, Joel went on to work with United Visual Artists. To interact with this piece, move the mouse to tumble the 3D form being generated from the webcam image.

I redid the website for the human computer interaction organisation in Liverpool England that was commissioning me to do a couple pieces at FACT. I used an open source flavour of flash - mtasc and swfmill with a lot of xml and a makefile. The source was made available on the site. We used the blog engine, b2evolution, to manage the content, and the flash file just pulled the content from the mysql database and presented it this multi-windowed way. Now that I look back on it, Drupal would probably have been more appropriate. The user interface was a bunch of UIComponent windows that popped up inside the browser. Small green indicators and trails were used to point out where the user had clicked and dragged the mouse in an artistic overlay. I subclassed the window component to add a resize control at the bottom right corner.

I worked at Mekanism in San Francisco for a couple months mostly programming in Actionscript3 Papervision for a few things. The front page of "Need for Speed Undercover" is a papervision panorama with interactive elements. I'm impressed with papervision but it still has all the eccentricities of flash-based anything. It was easy to get into from having been so into OpenGL all this time. There were plenty of example apps to show the art director.

I developed two versions of this company website for my friends from ITP. They would email me still mockups showing me their designs and I would distill that into a real site. The first site in 2006 was a lot of flash, php, and xml. The second site in 2009 is more php and html layouts. Because the original web host did not have mysql, I built a custom CMS which rewrites an xml file to disk and constructs its interface based on the xml structures it finds. It turned out to be great for designing custom data structures.

Interactive Flash-based visualization of news items pulled from a mysql database for an art-activism group. I developed this in preparation for a show at FACT, Liverpool having just made friends with project leader Naeem Mohaiemen. The project was supposed to be open source, but I can't figure out where I left the source.

An open source Java desktop application for authoring PIC chip firmware in a restricted form of Java. I got to know Eclipse pretty well during this time, and had a lot of fun seeing the application look native even if it was cross platform. I discovered how little programming one needs to do with all the wonderful libraries that are available.

A game demo where the player changes the terrain by laying down blocks, then presses go and watches the avatar walk forward, bumping into walls, and eventually reaching the heart and completing the level. When I first began writing this, I was trying to create a game that introduces basic computer programming concepts to the player through architecture and symbols. I still haven't found a good network of metaphors to use -- particularly in the area of working with numbers and math and trying to make it not so mathy. This project almost became my graduate thesis. I later went on to the Icon==Function project and I failed at making those audio visual environments turing complete as well. With Teamwork, I got so wrapped up in the fun of designing a retro-esque 2D side scroller that I almost lost track of my regular school work. I hope to some day pick back up on making an accessible visual programming system.

A short video for an NYU class starring Matthias Lorenz and generative blood. A short video for an NYU class starring Ariel Churi and Jessica Josephson I painted a black phoebe onto a new sketchbook for my father's birthday.

My part in this project was inspired by a piece "pinch" which i had been emailing around at the time. I worked with Jake Seargeant, 3D artists, and director Carl Erik Rinsch at Digital Domain to create the light effects for this commercial about little robots who have a party while the owner is away. I was able to write several OpenGL applications in C++ which allowed Jake to tweak parameters and render the frames. Giving Jake this amount of control made my life more convenient and gave us more creative options.

This is a software art birthday present for my friend Mike Knapp in San Francisco. The jelly physics bubbles react to the mouse clicks, and overlap like stained glass. I did the piece during a time when I was obsessed with balloons. Press the 's' key to render one still frame to disk as a PNG. Shout into your microphone to disturb the bubbles.

I worked at Pentagram, New York in the summers of 2003 and 2004, and made a small webpage with images on it at some point. Pinch is a hypnotic and inspiring aesthetics exploration toy that allows the player to easily generate many kinds of abstract shapes. A virtual sheet is made from free-floating physics masses. Click in different places to apply forces making the masses move towards that area of the screen, hence "pinching" the sheet. The resulting forms look organic, architectural, and sometimes erie. Pinch is highly customizable and exports to OBJ format to be imported by 3D software. Change the texture by replacing texture.png. On the mac, this is inside the app package contents under Contents/Resources/media. In the same folder, change the color pngs to customize the interface.

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/3.0/88x31.png" /></a> Pinch by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://jtnimoy.net/?q=153" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Joshua Nimoy</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License</a>. Jttoolkit is a C++ system for Processing artists. Actually, OpenFrameworks is probably going to do a much better job at this than me, so let's all get on that boat now. And for Gabe, it was really more about the cleanly managed dependencies. Cygwin and MacPorts have been absolutely a headache for us, and for students. So I wrote this tutorial guiding you how to migrate your jttoolkit apps into openFrameworks. Be free! Be free! Experiences attending Malaga Cove and Palos Verdes Intermediate Schools.

i see you. i type you. do you love me? [spacebar] you see me. type love. [spacebar] love types. type sees. [spacebar] type is you. love type.[spacebar] type sees [spacebar] you [spacebar]and [spacebar]me [spacebar]

dancing with the lavender moon glow.

gellical with pixazzz *^

in San Francisco on the building 101 Broderick, a lowercase r hangs upsidedown. An upsidedown lowercase r was projected from a window of the opposite building.

Art done while attending Lunanda Bay Elementary School in Palos Verdes.

Art done while first entering Lunanda Bay Elementary School in Palos Verdes.

Drawings done in response to younger brother's hospitalization due to epiglottitis.

These crafts were found archived in a family garage.

Samples of work from high school art classes, mainly taught by Linda Jo Russell and Patricia Merrill.

This was my first and earliest attempt in high school to create art with my programming. I was still very new at computers, and at the time, making a great effort to apply those skills I had learned for fun on my graphing calculator - to my PC. I loved making little games and tiny reactive geometries, but I was tired of the slow processor - and I wanted to work with a mouse instead of directional arrows. I also felt that as an artist, I should get to know the computer as deep as possible - as I had been attempting to do in all the other media I was working with. The idea was that I would create a series of screen savers which responded not just to time, but also to the mouse and keyboard. I think I called it Impracticality because the idea of a bunch of programs that did nothing - was still a weird concept for me. I wanted to be upfront with people that these were not tools. The pieces did not mean much to anyone. They were mainly meant for myself, my mother, my brother Marc, and my father - until I showed them to a few friends in college a year later. The amount of encouragement I received for these pieces made me feel young again, and I decided to pursue it further, practically leaving my beloved oilpaints and Nikormat camera behind.

Jaggy World was a tiny experiment I did while I was in high school. I thought I would be witty and embrace the pixelated style of blown-up black-on-white images. The result was a mini-choose-your-own-adventure that began a very long effort I made to keep everything I did extremely low-bandwidth and low-filesize. I was convinced there was still uncharted creative territory in "older" technology. I did not know what I was getting myself into.This piece predates both the 5K web design contest, and the wide cultural acceptance of pixelated aethetics on the web.

This was the first thing I did in the UCLA design department, as a fine art major crashing one of their media classes taught by Robert Abel. I led a group of students in producing a malleable interface for a completely unrelated topic. The experience was both embarrassing and enlightening. After that class, I applied to become a design major.

This sort of work (influenced mainly by Peter Cho) predates the widespread presence of keyboard-controlled type shapes on the web. Click the black area then start typing.

I made an early attempt at giving draggable points a kind of intelligence which would theoretically keep them visually organized. They "want" to form a swiss grid.

This one-page coloring book takes care of the lighting and shading. You choose the colors. This is a watercolor by Chuck Close, entitled "Leslie"

With Brian Kobashikawa, I created a navigational element for the beginnings of a student group web site. Click to expand and contract. The "Synergy" node is also draggable.

A digital video game reproducing a young girl's idle hobbie. Game Nomenclature, Original Conceptualization: Megan Elam & Angela Feraco Electronic Conceptualization, Design, Programming: Josh Nimoy 3D Butterfly graphics: Mike Spasoff Testing and Debugging: Marc Nimoy

If "interpersonal" means communication between two people, and "intrapersonal" means communication between an individual and himself, then what is an intraface to an interface? This was an early artistic exploration in interface design/art.

Cameron McNall's Image Capture class was my 5th and last photography course. In my opinion, it was also the most unique of the five. Here is a morphing object QTVR. This was before the professor taught Object QTVRs (only panoramic) and before he taught morphing. Actually one quarter before. Drag left and right to rotate the figure. Drag up and down to morph between my mother and my father. Model #1: Joseph Nimoy Model #2: Marizon Nimoy Photography and post production: Josh Nimoy

Playful advertisements for community software workshops, produced by a student who had not yet begun learning print media. They needed to catch attention, and they needed to convey information. Otherwise, no one cared what I was throwing on. I used found photos. This was during the pre-Gabe-Dunne era of the UCLA Design | Media Arts workshops in which nothing was Adobe-sponsered, and the only people allowed to attend were design students.

Print design for the Center for Digital Arts for one of their showcases. [TODO: DEV PROBLEM - IMAGES NEED TO HAVE SEPARATE FILE FOR THUMB]

My beginnings with 3D modeling were rather uncomfortable. My favorites from below were the butterflies, among other simpler pieces. I felt discouraged by professor Cameron McNall, and my classmates. Almost none of the pieces you see below were done for class - and were equally thrown out of class critiques. Frustrated with FormZ, I started learning Rhino, and SoftImage - which further confused my class efforts. I was graded poorly at the end of the course. Ultimately, I abandoned doing anything with 3D modeling/animation software until 2001. It caused no disturbance in my 3D programming.

Final project in Gail Swanlund's Typography class. A photographic collage is processed into text taken from a book I wrote in high school about reality being too much. I was attempting to make too much text. The original piece uses a truetype font I created in the class.

I produced a few ascii based images using a converter I wrote. Although the idea is cliche now, I was thrilled at the idea that pixels could be replaced with meaningful symbols. Other students used the software for their work, which also thrilled me. It was the feeling of automated collaboration. The first image is a screenshot from a test animation for grad student, John Zast - who later used the software to produce a film include in his thesis, entitled "This will Kill That."

After taking a core class on color theory, I produced this rather young and angsty memoir. On it, one can see the kinds of assignments that Vasa gives his color theory students.

Interactive Kiosk for student work. A curving bud opens and closes while shy student titles react and play. Press Spacebar to trigger one of several kiosk-attraction modes. Gail Swanlund (faculty advisor) Design and Production by Drew Hodgeson, Brian Kobashikawa, and Josh Nimoy

I redesigned the website for the Center for Digital Arts at UCLA, taking it from Mom & Pop to something local design students could look at. Pieces of my original layouts and graphics still remain in dark corners.

UCLA Undergraduate Design Exhibit's 2000 Interactive design kiosk for viewing student work. Thumbnails spin according to distance from mouse, graphics slide back and forth on screen, also responding to mouse. Cursor shrinks and grows to fit thumbnails. Graphic designs by Josh Smith. Exhibit overseen by Professor Jennifer Steinkamp.

I quickly built this newsgroup/messageboard as an effort to give my fellow design students a place to voice their opinions in a truly informal, yet public setting. People have been using it for years. The site has needed minimal maintenance, and allows the design students to change colors, images, and titles as they please, without a password. The site provided a nice communication ground while there was a winter in the student group efforts in our department. The construction of this site predates the widespread popularity of reusable forums.

Poly Edit is a kind of development program I wrote in hopes to speed up the behavior scripting process for Rebecca Allen's Emergence project. This was also the first Help system the project had. The application is based around the emergent processes for creating reactive creatures in the 3D world. I hear they still use it.

Several pieces produced with tools I programmed, which deal with the (now cliched) concept of smaller images as pixels. Image collections were mostly taken from stock-photo CDs. Others from whatever was sitting on my hard drive. I did not consider them from an artistically meaningful perspective; I did it more just to see if I could. These pieces pre-date the wide distribution of free software which does this automatically for people. At the time, I was required to write the software.

I received the indescribable honor of being invited by John Maeda to join the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media lab for a summer, as an undergraduate researcher (UROP). The experience changed me forever. I helped to develop the Design By Numbers system, made them a pretty font editor, produced several art pieces, talked with the grad students, and realized how young, naive, and arrogant I am.

Textension was a collection of 10 interactive experiments in making creative variations of word processing applications. It was my response as an artist to the way programmers always use the typewriter metaphor when they are creating a typesetting application. Textension combines the metaphor of the typewriter with that of other things in the physical world - in the below picture, it is the act of blowing soap bubbles.

This is a prototype for a graphics system I proposed to the UCLA Design student group which allowed for creative interactive typesetting. The provided example defines a "mouse-responsive curve HTML tag" for the text. The idea was rejected because it was not anti-aliased. To interact with the applet, click and drag all over the place.

A motion type animated short about sending messages into space, done in Gail Swanlund's Motion Typography class, Desma 155. Photo Models: Sophie Pennes, Wendy Pennes, Frank the UCLA Guard, and Mike Spasoff. Collage images taken from the web in a school assignment.

A short animation using motion to express typographic forms, done as the first animated project for Gail Swanlund's Motion Typography class.

Poster designs for Design | Media Arts lecture Series. [TODO: again, all these images are being used as their own hi res.]

For a final project in James Bassler's form class, I did a stop-animation with Eric Mendez to produce a UCLArts logo short film. The final project in the class was the bird sculpture, which still hangs from the ceiling in the computer lab at school. Musical score composed by Marc Nimoy Bird Puppet Construction was a collaborative with Eric Mendez

A series of short mock advertisements for a web presentation in Feb. 2000. RAWK (not my idea) was the name of our design team. Henry was the victim of our urgent need to make cheesy zero-budget film with only 3 hours of edit time. Apparently, a state-wide film festival liked it. Video by Josh Nimoy and Mark Yen Acting by Henry Lopez and Caroline Ekk

For money, I worked to design / implement the first interactively functioning Bruinwalk.com, summer 2000. I ended up writing a web based file system, user access system, and a web based pop email client with MIME attachment support and a spell check - it was quite a painful process. The site design today still features a lot of my original structures. The back-end does not seem like it has changed much.

Site prototype for an advertising interface that the Daily Bruin newspaper would use to automate its advertising division. Note: This presentation prototype is meant only for IE5+ browsers. Mark Yen, Sarah Richardson, Josh Nimoy Prototype purchased by UCLA Student Media Services

Folding program for SHORTTAKES Annual Film Festival Design collaboration by Henry Lopez and Josh Nimoy

Interface design for UCLARadio (KLA) A couple Flash pieces, an act of good faith to the desktop publishing community.

Several print design excercises under Gail Swanlund's direction.

I organized a one-quarter fashion design research group in the design department in order to study garment-making for the sake of diversity, and also to show people that you really can study anything you want here. Some planned to do garments and typogaphy. Some planned to make a single dress in 10 weeks. Others could not decide.

NANANA is a 3D message board, whose interface is based on the structure of an old jungle gym from my elementary school. A 360 degree photographed version the jungle gym I had in mind (from the playground of Lunada Bay Elementary, in Palos Verdes) spins as super-imposed 2D lines of text float in 3D space to extend the polls which make up the jungle gym's structure. Based on the possibility that a message board can be interpretted as a jungle gym. Metaphorically, a skeleton is built, and then people fill it with life.

UCLA Design | Media Arts annual newsletter 2001, based on the aesthetic of junk coupon mailer packages. Collaboration between Jana Vich and Josh Nimoy

A mailer / fold-out poster designed for UCLA department of Design | Media Arts Based on Val-Pak junk mailer coupons. Each speaker has their own coupon. I was later hired to carry the aesthetic into the Fall newsletter.

JTNGSE was a graphics editing program that was half GUI, half scripting. I originally wrote it for undergraduate friends in the UCLA design department because I was sad to hear that John Maeda's awesome Design by Numbers "did not save" or "did not support color." I also saw that Processing was wonderful, but also discouraging for my peers to learn (at that time, they considered it too complicated). Basically, everyone seems to need something that integrates in a very obvious way with their software packages. This lack of easy integration is what my friends claim is holding them back from beginning to learn this sort of process. JTNGSE was one attempt. Since that time, I have come to believe that the problem is a bit more complex. Special Thanks to Debrah Isaac for using it in her senior project, Gabe Dunne for testing.

Artistic Variations on the classic "scribble" interactivity - used as teaching examples Instructions: Click an image to view shockwave. Draw.

We took over the UCLA Dickson Hall elevator and made it hug you when you touched its walls. Floor buttons also controlled music. It involved sensors and motors controlled by a computer. David Votava Sarah Richardson Josh Nimoy

I was surprised to discover that Alias Wavefront Maya does not export wireframes to Illustrator! I wrote this plugin so I could incorporate my 3D work into my print design, without having to render and take screenshots. Since the plugin simply intercepts the OpenGL commands of a window refresh - control handles, grids, background colors, and even shaded polygons export to postscript as well. note: only works for Maya 3 Mel Command: saveViewAsPostscript "c:filename.ps" In Illustrator, you can "zoom in" on and edit the control handles for various tools; the control handles for tools become part of the art.

A music video for "Cape Canaveral" by a new band from MN, Astronaut Wife This was also the final project for UCLA Design 156b, 3D animation class. The video is meant as a pastiche to all the scientific 3D lego work I've seen which has no story or emotion. I made my best effort to include every possible 3D cliche.

I taught a graduate workshop in Lingo programming, in conjunction with Maria Redin's Physical computing workshop. She taught them sensors, circuitry, and EZIO programming. I taught them the basics of programming, on-screen animation, and I made myself available for a couple months to answer their emails. Some of the examples from that session were later adopted by Jennifer Steinkamp and made into an "examples" site for undergraduate students.

Concerned with the quality of my 3D animation screen shots, I wrote this experimental plugin that enables smooth lines in the Maya model editing windows. note: only works in Maya 3 MEL Command: modelEditorAntiAlias

These are a few openGL experiments. They were not meant as finished pieces, but merely practice exercises. Each executable program shows an animated 3D object, drawn by code. "Cubewalk" is interactive - type A,S,D,and W.

I was involved in authoring software plugin allows Macromedia Director Lingo to control an EZIO Board, developed at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design by Micheal Rodemer and Ed Bennett in order to make circuitry and computing much easier for artists. As the board is meant to make things easier, so it the EZIOXtra. I wrote the PC version in cooperation with Ben Chang so that we could use it in UCLA Tangible Typography class, in which sensors control onscreen type as one of the final assignments. The Xtra makes it unnecessary for students to learn serial port programming. To get a list of functions, type: put interface(xtra "ezioxtra") The EZIOXtra is a Windows port of the original Mac EZIOXtra written by Ben Chang.

QuickVector is an Asset Xtra (plugin) for Macromedia Director. It creates a new kind of sprite which draws lines, curves, polygons, and more in different colors using Lingo code - extremely fast. This Xtra was written for Tangible Typography, a UCLA Design | Media Arts class taught by Jennifer Steinkamp and Gail Swanlund, in which students are instructed to control typography in complex interactive ways. As the TA, I was dissatisfied with the default "vector" object - as it was not fast enough to give realtime control to the vertices of everyday vector art. Consequentially, the plugin also provides an easy way to implement a simple paint program, providing many "shape drawing" functions that are traditionally forged using unexpected Director work-around techniques. Pelina.net has used Quickvector in past projects. QuickVector was used by Prof. Christian Moeller and TA Fabian Winkler to teach UCLA Design | Media Arts course 157A Interactive Media. Quickvector is not available for download at this time.

Reactive Logo for Sinapse, a new UCLA Center, dedicated to networking other UCLA Centers to each other. The Java applet features "centralized" and "decentralized" network simulation, based on the building shapes in the UCLA map. Hold your mouse down for a long time to see the buildings turn into typography, with network connections still intact. The applet also outputs illustrator files, thus acting as an automatic generator of images for future Sinapse designers.

Illustrator Scripting Palette Plugin, meant for programmatic image creation within the Adobe Illustrator environment.

Screen Installation for the grand opening of DMALabs (Sept 24, 2001), running on 4 screens in a curved display case built by John Ruppel. Six visual interpretations of the logo spin about the screen, alternating every few minutes.

Vector - A series of creative variations on a vector path tool, commonly found in vector graphics software like Illustrator and Freehand. Vertices are allowed to behave in ways which celebrate the act of drawing a shape by laying down points. These are part of a larger series, in which I explored making different post-tool, and post-video-game art. These sketches were done during an independent study session with artist Rebecca Allen.

Four aesthetic video games, in which one traverses a 3D scene with keyboard arrow keys, while the ground slowly raises up from below. These are not intended as "terrain design" software, so much as they are one exploration in relationships between movement, and a possible spatial artifact of that movement. These sketches were done during an independent study session with artist Rebecca Allen. Five creative variations on blur, as in the "blur" tool found in common pixel graphics editing tools. These were part of an independent study with Professor Rebecca Allen in which I made post-tool-software and post-video-game art. These sketches were done during an independent study session with artist Rebecca Allen.

Kaleidoscopes that manipulate real time video input from a commercial "web cam." Click to alternate between mouse-controlled and time-controlled rotation.

MotionPaintings was a system I built in collaboration with artist, Rebecca Allen, based on the terrain mapping from her emmersive environment, Emergence. It allows her to easily create a looping keyed path of 3D cameras, intended for motion-tweening at the speed of growing plants. The idea of the piece is that this painting on the wall will change so slowly that a viewer must come back in an hour to see any noticable visual change. The beautiful mountainous terrain becomes a semi-still painting, admired as an abstract scene of blurring colors. Additionally, I aimed to bring the Emergence software to a level in which the system could be installed on a computer by one non-technical person, in one minute - instead of a crew of programmers over several weeks. This software is currently unavailable for download. Concept by Rebecca Allen. The beautiful mountainous terrain built by Gino Ok, Pete Conolly, Damon Seeley, and Daniel Shiplacoff. User interface design and data-cleaning by Josh Nimoy.

The kiosk interface for showing the student work at the UCLA Design | Media Arts Undergraduate Exhibit 2002 was a rotating 3D conception of the postcard announcing the exhibit. Viewers dragged the screen to turn the object, then clicked on the text items to launch interactive student works. The interface features a web browser designed to match the look of the exhibit's visual theme. Exhibit headed by Gail Swanlund. Postcard aesthetics conceptualized by Mark Yen, Tanya Peng, Melissa Mar, and Aimee Lynn. Adoption to "3D" interactive piece by Josh Nimoy.

This robotic worm moves around and bows at who ever gets close to it. The piece was received by the audience as a strange pet. No artificial intelligence was involved, but people grew attached to the unpredictable personality, controlled by the unpredictable factors in my camera vision software. The robot was a model for a larger installation entitled 'garden of lovers' in which a 5x5 grid of life-size robotic worms would dance together in response to who ever was walking around amongst them. This was a proposal (which i am still looking for) and this single interactive prototype. I built for "Interactive Multimedia" in the UCLA Hypermedia Studio, within the dept. of FilmTV, under the instruction of Jeff Burke, Jason Brush, and Fabian Wagmeister.

WebCamXtra/Myron is an open source project that allows people to do camera tracking art in many programming languages. A PC screen saver that communicates with other screen savers via internet, slowly building a sculptural object on the screen. Working closely with the UCLA DMA chair to adapt a concept from her original n0time installation into this new delivery format, I made a screen saver, network server, and web site in efforts to make the piece into something more accessible. Collaboration between Josh Nimoy and Victoria Vesna

I collaborated with designer Jiyoon Chun at the School of Visual Arts in New York in creating an interactive exhibition for the Museum for Korean Contemporary Art. Based on style guides and mockups, I created three online exhibits in Shockwave. Aesthetic concept and content by Yoon Chun, interaction design collaboration with Josh Nimoy.

Passers by encounter a display made from finely combed sand, reflecting expressive "shadows" of their bodies. This artificial shadow system intends to ask questions of designer intervention with nature, and aesthetically explores commonly seen polygonal body form outlines in a real-time context. professor: Christian Moeller

A logo piece commissioned for California Nanosystems Institute, conveying maleability in common matter. The design concept was extrapolated until it became the final logo. Instructions: drag the dots to change aspects of the hairy surface.

Five interactive typography art pieces, commissioned for Zero@WaveFunction, an art project more popularly known as "Nano." Instructions: Move, click, and drag your mouse while reading the texts. Try clicking and dragging in different places, many times. Haikus written by Victoria Vesna.

The Zerowave Buckyball projection was an interactive environment that allowed users to interact with squishy balls by using their shadow gestures. This piece was commissioned by Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski. The Zerowave Buckyball Projection is legally represented by and is property of UCLA. For more documentation of this project (video, images, more interactive toys by Josh Nimoy), visit the Zerowave website (2002). The buckyball projection inevitably became the central art piece in Vesna and Gimzewski's art exhibit long after I had moved to New York. The year-long exhibit was entitled "Nano", commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "LACMA Lab". Screenshots of my software art ended up hanging on banners and billboards across the Los Angeles area. The Los Angeles Times Newspaper responded in their review of the exhibit by asking "Where is the artist?" Commissioned by Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski. The Zerowave Buckyball Projection is legally represented by and is property of UCLA.

a typeface traced from chicken wire. This font was made for a brochure design commissioned by a nanotechnology research institute obsessed with the aesthetics of hexagons. To my surprise, more favor was put by the client on being hexagonally aligned than legibility.

a computer keyboard controlled music box. a small experiment - part of a brand new portable device effort I have begun, in order to encourage the recycling of common devices whose cultural metaphors are becoming fixed way too fast! I see that the world's household inventory is changing. I find that there is at least one PS/2 keyboard in an average household. TONEBOX has a PS/2 input jack (shown at the top left of the below picture) that allows you to type characters in order to create sound tones that come out of either the speaker (top middle) or out of the mini headphone jack (bottom middle-left). The device uses a single 9-volt battery (top right) and the entire encased device fits in your pocket. The below image was taken of the prototype, with the casing removed. The prototype costs $100 to produce. In the future, i plan to add support for PS/2 mice, and other household single-purpose devices that are currently going to waste on things like "email."

Week 1 Assignments Problem: Make an interactive map of your brain or body, or a mine field of life. [without defining any variables or going far beyond what we were taught so far] This piece is inspired by Lisa Steele's 'Birthday Suit - Scars and Defects', 1974.

a hyper-ornate annual newsletter used by the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts. Cover folds our as poster. Collaboration with Li Xu, font assistance from Gabe Dunne, commissioned by UCLA department of Design | Media Arts

Physical Computing Week 2 Exploration: Make a switch. Here is a small, snap-ridden soft-sculpture which can be shaped and snapped as desired. When snaps are connected, a computer is able to notice which ones, and for how long. Asside obvious abstract-art implications of such a digitally aware object, a childrens origami toy can be designed (just for example) which provides reinforcing sensory material about what the child is exploring while snapping. If you form a dog shape, the object will bark. TODO: images need to be thumbnails. Remind me.

A webpage with an interactive "spirograph" maker on it allows the drawing to leave the small embedded square. Tiny Guerilla Video Game Installation: A minimal ball paddle video game that uses a sewing pinhead for a joystick (move paddle left and right). The screen is the size of a penny. Theoretically, this tiny videogame would be installed into a wall in a public space - preferably a wall that people must stare at a lot. Subway station waiting benches have wooden arm rests that are perfect for this. In these pictures, you see the presentation prototype. it is important to design this system so that it can be installed into a wall in 30 seconds with only maybe a pocket drill and glue. The electronics can be designed so that the entire thing can be poked through a fresh hole in the wall without having to open the wall up. This prototype can be reprogrammed with a serial cable to provide other interactive or non-interactive content. The system can potentially be battery powered, plugged in, and solar powered depending on context. It would be great to see one wall with 50 tiny video games all lined up in a row.

Instructions: drag dot

Creative Exquisite-Corpse Viewer, using content generated by a hundred ITP students in collaboration with my Applications group during the preceding week. Solution: a cyclical self-drawing, line-recycling, and motion-mimicking strip of communal art.

All of NYU ITP graduating class of 2004

As you press keys on the keyboard, six wooden "brush strokes" shift into place, forming the character most recently typed. This typeface is named after Thomas Davenport, inventor of the first DC motor in 1834.

An interactive interface which attempts to re-use the visual vernacular to create a system for folding virtual paper.

Interfaces to existing interactive installations can be altered by building additional technology on top of them. This motorized arm interacts with other physical pieces by being present, moving its joints, and waving a flashlight. What if twenty students made twenty pieces that could interact with one another in a similar fashion? Many surprising outcomes would delight the heart and soul. What is great about this collaboration is that we did not hook our projects up to one another through a serial protocol or by merging the electronic circuitry. The exchange was both elegant and accessible, for the communication happened within the human spectrum. Scott Fitzgerald also provided some interactive light experimentation.

When I was a first year at ITP, I did a lot of social engineering in order to bring open source culture to attention. I also wished to support the efforts of some friends in another research program. I taught early releases of Processing to the students and faculty (and current faculty who were students then), and I also chose to use Processing to create a number of projects. My greatest propegandistic vessel was the "Proce55ing Workshop" (in 2002, two fives were being used in the name). My workshop was a precursor to the modern-day-ITP "drive-by seminar." I prepared a 3 hour performative coding demonstration, with a light discussion on open source. I designed my class hand-out to be not just a give-away, but something they might use more permanently. If GUI file viewing interfaces offer a user things like sort-by-date, sort-by -name, and sort-by-size, I was offering the community of Processing-incomers a reference that was sort-by-macromedia. We could reuse the knowledge the students already had and give them a fresh perspective on the debate of authorship and capitalism. By Fall Semester of 2004 (after I graduated), Processing was adopted by the NYU ITP Introduction to Computational Media course series as its primary teaching tool. My "tutorial for macromedia minds" has been translated to Japanese, and linked to by educators around the world. I am happy to have made some sort of contribution. Original Date: Saturday - Feb. 8, 2003 721 Broadway, Floor 4, Room 406 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm Working closely with faculty and students, I redesigned the cover page of ITP's website. This design was used by ITP from Winter 2002 to Fall 2004.

Adjusting Well is a film produced by Rachel Miller, written and directed by Glenn Clements. Both of these people are alumni of the NYU Tisch film school. I was asked to do the titles and credits for this romantic slapstick comedy. Adjusting Well is a film produced by Rachel Miller, written and directed by Glenn Clements. Titles and credits by Josh Nimoy.

Some mice were human and some were circuit.

a few drawings from a female model.

Photograph taken from the Chanhassen Project by a good friend, Katherine Copeland. Instructions: click & drag These paintings of a small toy car were disseminated throughout the NYU ITP space on bulletin boards where advertisements would normally be pinned up.

Two wind chimes that robotically induce their own chimes when the other senses presence. Ideally, each chime is placed in the personal environments of participants in long distance romantic relationships. This chime system is an attempt to establish an ambient, passive communication between humans in different places - in response to the fact that all existing communications technology require "push" communication, in which one chooses and intends to communicate rather than giving off a communication.

Record of the drawing act, as the art. A program was written in which the scribbles would be remembered and played back in realtime. A contagious media experiment was done between four brainstorming artistic individuals in New York City. The goal was two fold: to create an artistic expression about female identity, and to create a meme that would spread throughout the virtual and physical landscapes - pre-calculated to be something people would want to send their friends. The site www.victoriassecret.com was reproduced verbatim using custom photography of female models (ourselves) wearing Victoria's Secret lingerie, vomiting all over the place. The hit statistics were off the charts. If you google "Victoria's Secret," our site comes up as #2. The results? Several interviews in different countries, one U.S. broadcast television spot, one INCREDIBLY overloaded webserver, one angry corporate lawyer, and one wonderful synergy between four artists at ITP just doing what ITPers do best: playing. Alicia L Cervini Katherine Copeland (primary contact) Josh Nimoy Ann Poochareon

Interview by Laurent Jadot of CyberCafe.TV * What group of artist are you? How many are you? We are four artists who came together to create this project while attending graduate school in New York City. This project grew from our desire to create something that was both about female identity and female objectification as well as the goal to create that idea into something that would be contagious, something that would spread to a great number of people around the world. The group and the project drew its strength from each of our individual interests and talents combined together in order to make whatisvictoriassecret.com. While we have not yet worked on a second project together we all continue to work as artists individually as well as in other collaborations....however the idea of the next project as a group is always brewing. * Where can we find more information about your group? Website? Information on the website and on us as a group can be found through some searching on the Internet. There was a piece featured on the television show Celebrity Justice that dealt with the legal issues that we faced with Victoria's Secret the company. We are happy to provide any information requested. * Is your group composed only by women? We are three women and one man. * Do you have other artistic projects online? We have various projects that can be accessed online individually but at this time there is not another project online that we have worked on as a group. * What where youre motivations in the creation of this website whatisvictoriassecret.com? We wanted to create a piece of social commentary about the way women are represented in the media as well as the effects such representations have on women in general who are constantly subjected to images of the "ideal type". We would like to answer our own criticism with a follow up project that shows possible alternatives to the one view, one woman representation that seems common in our society. We have received a variety of responses from ander, outrage, appreciation, disgust and enthusiasm. It seems to spark powerful reactions in those that have been responding so in this sense we feel our message and the desire to spread it to vast group of people was achieved. Make a self portrait on paper in color. Use at least three but no more than six colors. Use any materials you want---crayon, pastel, collage, found color, water color, oil, acrylic, colored pencil, magic markers and so on. (One note on collage: you can for instance cut strips of color from a magazine illustration, but at this point I don't want you to import a whole image that is already in two dimensions. No photographic images. You can however interpolate a part or whole of one of your own drawings or sketch book pages) Try to fill or account for all the space of the page. I want you to become hyper aware of the boundary of the edge and how it affects composition. This self-portrait can be "realistic". (if it is, try to avoid "the staring eye syndrome" and try to make the nose look like it sticks out.) It can be "psychological". It can be metaphoric or involve a self-surrogate. Work on several and we'll analyze them in class and hopefully pick the most interesting one to then develop into the final portrait. --Billy Sullivan

A computer screen shows the Earth floating in outer-space. Slowly, as the computer receives and sends Internet data, this model of the Earth folds itself to bring the two countries closer to one another. I hope to illustrate the post-regionality of online community through contorting the landscape -- changing the shape of the Earth to make possible the physical travel that would have otherwise been necessary. EarthFolding is a carnivore client. Carnivore, created by RSG, is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to the Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a given local network. CarnivorePE serves this datastream over the net to a variety of interfaces called "clients." These clients are each designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Carnivore clients have been produced by a number of computational artists and designers from around the world. Note: You are not required to install Carnivore. If the Earthfolding software cannot connect to Carnivore, then it will default to an entertaining demonstration mode in which IP addresses are generated at random. This Carnivore client was produced as a project in a class taught by Alex Galloway entitled Internet Protocols. The class was cross listed with the NYU Media Ecology department. The folding earth is a reflection on the following writings: Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies"; Brecht, Bertolt, "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication"; Eric Hall, "Internet Core protocols"; Lessig, Lawrence, The Future of Ideas; Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown; Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber; Sol Witt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

Instructions: When you download and run this program, a tiny window will pop up, shown in figure A. Find a window you hate, and drag this red bomb onto it.

I wrote this techy tutorial showing people how to set up a PIC chip to talk USB with a PC using USBXtra.

This electronic squishy is made of colorless translucent rubber silicon. It hooks up to a computer with a USB cable. If two people hook a squishy up to their computers, then they can see each other's squishing activities coming over the Internet to light up the device. A blue glow means that the partnering squishy is not being squished. The red glow means that the partnering squishy is currently being squeezed. Varying degrees of squishing can produce an array of purple light in a darkened room. The target audience is Internet savvy long distance lovers. John Bergren Josh Nimoy Courtney Ka`ohinani Rowe

A Drawing Piece by Josh Nimoy, 2003. Medium: Computer and Electronic Circuitry. Viewers are able to call this installation from a cell phone. When they whistle, ascending scales make vertical strokes on the "paper" while descending scales make more horizontal strokes. Volume will affect the fatness of the brush. This is a computer projection on a wall - situated amongst other people's drawing artworks. Besides its white glow and pixel grain, the rectangular area looks just like another drawing. Vector-based "screenshots" can be plotted onto large format paper. Premiere: ITP Spring Show, May 13, 2003.

Technical Information: A custom USB device was designed from Radioshack parts to answer phone calls from a gallery land line, while projecting the video onto the wall is a computer program written in C. The output files will open in Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, Acrobat Reader, GhostScript, AutoCAD, and various Adobe-powered printers. Innuendo is a film produced by Dayna Frank and written and directed by Ethan Tobman, alumni of the NYU Tisch film school. I was asked to do the titles and credits for this spoof comedy Sundance entry. The below image is the concept tests. The final version turned out to be much less ornimented. The idea was to subtley mimic the old news flashes from noir films; most notibly in Citizen Kane.

This interactive announcement was done for ITP Thursday Night Outs, hosted by Lian Chang. Because of the sensitive 9 11 date, a design expression opportunity arose.

Instructions: Click the image of the US to strike the landscape with lightning bolts and make the power go out in those areas.

One season, I was getting this ridiculous email forward about the readability of messed up words. After the 3rd time I received the forward, I decided to make an online application that would scramble peoples' text for them. The application caught a meme wave, and people started emailing me thinking I was the authoritative "Cambridge" researcher who originated the "study." Try to guess what emotion this square enacts.

Instructions: move your mouse. Be patient. A single red pixel, networked between two wall hanging displays with embedded network circuits inside them. One controls the X movement while the other controls the Y movement.

You type a character to this single-letter sign with a mobile device, AIM, or the web, and it responds by forming the approximate typographic shape through contorting a thin white ribbon. In the following video, the cover has been removed from the installation, exposing the insides for fun.

Networked Multiuser Art Installation. Japanese Cartoon character teardrop sculptures can be caressed in order to make water stop streaming from their eyes. The teardrop sculptures may behave organically, but that's only because they are hooked up to other random public viewers over a network. It's art. I was involved with this project during the early stages. The project later went on to be submitted to festivals and art shows, evolving into new forms.

Fujii, Yuriko Nimoy, Josh Poochareon, Ann Balldroppings was one night of idle programming that blew up unexpectedly into a web phenomenon. I learned that simplicity is elegant, and C++ is wonderful for low-latency sound+image. I also learned about addiction and glucose metabolism rate highs. Although I do not accredit myself for having originated the idea of interactive lines with bouncing balls, there exists a small following in the online gaming community that gives me such credit, particularly when accusing one another of having copied me in their recent developments. BallDroppings has also been re-implemented in other languages by random people, referencing the name "BallDroppings." All this activity is very surprising to me. It is also a clear example of the great power resulting from refraining to mark intellectual property. A lot of people mistook BallDroppings to be my graduate thesis. I don't try to correct this misunderstanding. Phonemoneme is an expressive simple-rule-based toy or musical instrument or game, like BallDroppings. It uses both the keyboard and the mouse to play. In it, my handwriting moves through space, interacting with four colored bars. These adjustable bars affect motion in different ways. Each grapheme sounds out its phoneme as it passes over the tan colored bar, whose length affects the pitch.

This was an applet written to demonstrate how a piece of physical computing in my future would roll about, forming letters. Instructions: click the applet and type. My graduate thesis project was to create a third robotic typography sculpture, and to think about the three pieces as one large project. I documented my design process and created many physical prototypes.

Froggies is a play-testing prototype for a children's digital play environment. A table with a screen embedded into the surface acts as an arena for virtual life. Children react with the virtual life by placing various symbolic markers on the table and sliding them around. The result is a musical rythm of animal noises.

Collaborative relationship with artist sculptor Mark Disuvero in search of patterns in prime numbers. The following are a few visualizations produced from various programming languages. click for high resolution file.

I co-founded a project in the East Village, providing a peer-invite safe-haven for free thinking experimenters to get support to continue experimenting, and owning/controlling their own work. DET, as coined by Yoshimi Shin, stands for Design Entertainment Technology. The online system provided password protected collaborative workspaces and most importantly, an automated way for the young participants to propose ideas to potential funders from within a bubble of mutual non-disclosure. Detlab was effectively the opposite of the Creative Commons community project, but did contain a commons within its protected center. I left the project when I moved to Italy.

The Interactive Media Department of Fabrica at Benetton was lead by Andy Cameron of Antirom and Romandson fame. I managed to create a few media experiments targeting retail storefront window displays - getting the attention of passers by. This is a screenshot of a video application that records camera input into a history buffer - starting at the top left and streaming across the screen with carriage returns. The application is meant to run on a plasma display and has a medium sized configuration system, allowing people to tweak important design parameters.

I was involved in the early stages of a collaborative web prank for art's sake, created at the Interactive Media Department of Fabrica / Benetton during after-hours. This site shows an embarrassingly ignorant company selling fake products to help American citizens participate in the nation's new color-coded threat alert system. The T-Shirts, however, are actually for sale. Jonathan Harris, Joel Gethin Lewis, Josh Nimoy, possibly others This is a logo designed for the "Global Experimentation Group", an arts non-profit organization providing funding to other less corporately-adherent collectives. A True Type font was provided to allow users to create crisp vector-based logo graphics on their Word documents without having desktop publishing applications.

A stand-alone wall-mounted or table-sitting piece that slowly logs the ambient light, creating a kind of diagram showing the light activity in your life as it accumilates. The light pattern is interpretted as a sound grain table,making a humming tone out of your activity.

Some people on the ITP Alumni list were trying to learn the basics of making Mac OS X Tiger "dashboard wigets" so I spent some time to really simplify things down as far as possible.

In response to all the media attention being given to my typography robots, I formed this page for easy viewing of the big picture in the project.

This series of seven interactive musical compositions is intended for serious play and wonderment about tools. Each piece is an abstract visual sound scoring language capable of playing itself back as the user gives input. The series is several attempted embodiments of my conceptual response to a recent HCI conclusion, as written in CWC 2004: "Icon interpretation is inherently ambiguous because the relationship between icon and function is not determined by a set of well-defined syntactic and phonological rules." Icon==Function is a science fiction, showing a hypothetical dystopia / utopia. What would an interface be like if its iconography were determined by a well-defined ruleset? The software art was conceptualised by JT in a series of long-winded email discussions with David England and curator Michael Connor. The sketches were then interpreted by Josh, Matthew Phillips, and David Lu in a number of programming languages. The code is hosted by Sourceforge. Each piece in the series is a simplified programming language used to instruct the computer's functional output. A whimsical code editor is exposed to the user as a visual toy that interacts with a mouse and keyboard. No other labeling or indirect tagging is used to mark the mini-programs written with each mini-language. The languages are made of simple geometries - capable of representing themselves as their own icon. The function's code can be seen as its own graphical icon. The well-defined syntax of iconography in each representation is precisely the instruction language controlling the sound output. When a user browses a small set of thumbnails looking for a state to load and play, the user is not seeing a textual name given to the work, nor a proxy graphic that attempts to explain the function by some cultural mapping. Instead, the user sees the code, itself. In the name "Icon==Function," a double equality operator is taken from modern text-based programming to communication that the icon and the function are the same as one another. If a single equality sign were used, it would signify undesirably that the function in these pieces are somehow being assigned to the icon, and that the icon is a transparent address for the function. The art series aims to collapse the two ideas into one just for the sake of both conceptual argument and exploratory scientific research. Just Language Enough In computer programming, the word "function" is used to describe a collection of instructions that perform a coherent task. A function hides the code inside of it from attention, and allows its code to be invoked only by calling the function's name. In creating the seven visual languages in this series, my biggest aim was to produce the beginnings of language-ness from my interactive geometries. The aim of adding the modern features of 'real' programming code (such as memory and logical flow of control) was somewhat irrelevant. In most cases, a simple linear list of instructions sufficed in order to make the artistic point, and to provide the software user with an experience that was close enough to programming that they would gain some sense of authorship with their constructions. A stronger focus was also placed on making the experience playful in a game-like way, rather than providing the user with an industrially competent solution. Usability of the Pie are unfamiliar components that interface designers hope to channel their users to embrace through play or necessity. This is the part of the experience that I am calling the exploration. In the pieces of Icon==Function, the interfaces I am recycling come from CAD and desktop graphics software applications like a paint program or paste-up application. The colored square game is a slight variation of a pixel editor. The triangle music interface is a modified vector-line drawing tool. "Gear Sound" and "Nested Circles" both rely on circle-drawing tools. Although HexBall heavily resembles a video game, the most basic interface is a pixel editor -- and so on. That is the intuition aspect. The exploration aspect is what happens to those graphics creation interfaces that result in something more than simply the circle that was drawn, or the pixel that was toggled. No one originally expects music to come from their rectangle dragging tool, nor would they expect the element they drew to bounce around on the screen and obey gravity after they drew it. However, this expectation should also become intuitiho are already familiar with painting and graphics applications. Even if draggable rectangles exist as part of widespread commercial GUI OSes as a 2D spatial "multi-select" for file icons, it is questionable what percentage of the user population considers that an integral part of their computing lifestyles and would recognize it in a new program, or know to check for it. My mother (age 59, health care manager) has had considerable difficulty getting into each piece as she must be told to actually drag the mouse instead of just clicking it. After being reminded to drag, she spends most of her time struggling with the touch pad on my laptop, and eventually concludes that the piece is visually beautiful, without delving deeply into trying new combinations. It is interesting for me to see her interact with the pieces because she doesn't seem to understand the language, nor is she searching for one. On the other hand, my brother (musician in his early 20s) is better familiar not only with graphics programs, but video games and software development as well. He has witnessed my software interface experiments since the mid-1990s and already knows that I expect him to explore, given little or no instruction. My brother will start by doing "the sensor dance." The sensor dance is what happens when a human is trying all the different entry points into the interaction that he or she can think of, in hopes to get any sort of response out of the unrecognized interface. While an ambiguous physical installation will cause a person to wave their arms in the air, move close and far, shout, clap, and touch, a desktop computer based work (restricted to a mouse and keyboard) evokes a different kind of sensor dance. The person will click around on everything, dragging the mouse in different places and pressing different keys. In my own observations, people have also been known to re-launch the application to see if it does something new or to check to see if it's broken. My brother is quick to engage in a neactive language, creating new instances and enjoying the outcomes as his own achievements. Since he is a musician, he's familiar with the idea of embracing a system and recombining its parts to produce a new expression. One could say that my interfaces are more intuitive for him. He is familiar on more levels than just see-and-remember. I think these outer, more anthropological scopes of understanding usability could make the problem clearer than simply analyzing the language that translates between icon and function, or icon-system and function-system. Artist and coder: Josh Nimoy, coder: David Lu, coder: Matthew Phillips, Commission from FACT (www.fact.co.uk) and JMU HCI (www.hci-fun.org.uk) curated by Michael Connor & Marta Ruperez. HCI research headed by David England. Report: FACT HCI Augmented Reality Workshop, Success. In early November 2005, a forty minute educational workshop experience for 300 pupils age 10-11 was given for the Liverpool FOCUS EAZ (Education Action Zone) for schools in the Fazakerley and Walton areas. The technology introduced was addressed at various times as "Augmented Reality," "Camera Vision," "Gestural Interface," and "Illuminating Lamp." Pupils were invited to step into a silhouette-driven environment and interact with six demonstration programs in a game play mode. Additionally, a five minute slideshow was given by the team (Karen Hickling, Josh Nimoy, Marta Ruperez) giving brief backgrounds on FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) and HCI (Human Computer Interaction group at John Moores University). In preparation for the workshop, Josh had authored (or massaged previously authored) software into an automatic shuffle of six abstract games. Some of the games were more multiplayer than others. Those which were not multiplayer presented limited resource for interactive satisfaction - making great exercises in collaboration, teamwork, and turn-taking for the pupils. The workshop was given a total of ten times. This essay reports on things we learned about the workshop and the HCI as we refined the workshop's structure. In the planning stages of the workshop, Josh was initially unsure that the camera interface would be appropriate for the age group but proposed it to a few people at FACT. Artist, Carlos "Caen" Botto came back with a strongly positive response, saying, "This kind of activity is very appropriate. The most important needs at this age is that the system have a very evident reactivity (think that at this age the abstract thinking is in early formation), letting the children experience a sensation of control in a very direct way. The other important need is for high physical activity. I think this proposal is right in both aspects. The group size is not a problem. It is important not only to interact, but also to see others interacting with the system. A big group can be broken into three shifts, When one group is interacting, the other groups can observe. On the pedagogic side, I think the educative aspects are centred in psychomotricity, creativity development, cooperation and intuitive problem solving, et cetera." Just before software development, a local toy store was visited in curiosity about which products were targeted for this age range - in hopes to keep the experience from being boring, embarrassing, or too complex for the students. Similar conclusions were reached as Caen's mentions of creative development, psychomotricity, and high physical activity. These children were going to be more energetic than us! The order of the workshop was originally planned to begin with a 35 minutes of play, with a five minute presentation at the end. The rational for this was so the students would be engaged first, generating questions in their heads. In retrospective analysis, there had been too much preparation to entertain than was actually needed. We soon realised in implementation that workshops lasted for unpredictable durations, sometimes cutting the presentation completely off from the experience. Since the presentation was a relatively important component, it was moved ahead to precede the play session. This change turned out to be beneficial as well. Ideas were put into the heads of the students pre-play, so the play sessions could be more than just play. It was informed play. This was not the only response to chaos. Besides the duration of workshops varying, it was also hard to position ten children in the projection -- it would completely block the projection and although the students were having fun, we wanted them to experience the software in a way that would allow them to comprehend the interactivities. We began to break the groups into three or four, and segmenting each software program into 1-2 minute turns, calling out each group and keeping time. Before we bothered to do this, the turn taking emerged naturally from the group behaviours. It was just faster to impose this early on for punctuality. We gave very little instruction, and just let the students do what they did. Each group's behaviour evolved in similar ways. As the students discovered the systems, one student would back up so far that the projection was blocked completely by his (it was usually male) body, preventing the rest of the children from interacting with the systems. In the more self-governed clusters, this would result in that person being yelled at by the spectators to "move forward." On the second day, a clear barrier was drawn so that no one could back up too far. This architectural restriction was somewhat of a solution for the "block all" personality type - although this impulse was still observed in students within the remaining space. Students would also pound on the wall where the image was projected, treating the virtual objects as if they were buttons, or as if there were sensors in the walls. The only reason we introduced a rule against the wall pounding was in respect to the workshop happening just in the next room. Other than disturbance, there didn't seem to be any problem with pounding the wall. While on the subject of violence, it was interesting to note the playful violence between boys. Often, when in the shadow space, boys would pretend-fight, as in karate or boxing. This was probably not just due to the high energy levels of the activity, but the expectations that come along with any game-play mentality. The boys felt as though they were "inside the videogame" and were acting accordingly - creating the same scenes they had seen in Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Violence was one kind of cheap laugh among the several categories of cheap laughs discovered by the students while in play. On the first day, there was no teacher accompanying the groups. This caused them to be less obedient. However, even if on the second day, there was at least one teacher governing the students, the "play violence" persisted with unusual strength. A special learning group came in - a smaller group with a wide range of conditions. In this case, the most immediate software worked (the sparkling star trails). The initial concept presentation was cut very short and more time was given to play. This group reacted more or less the same as the other classes of children. It is entertaining to note the democratising power of Augmented Reality: everyone seems to act like a ten-year-old child when they try it out. By the time we got to the last group, students already knew what to expect. Rumours were being passed between friends during breaks and lunchtime. The technology turns out to be not as new and shocking as predicted. Each group was asked to raise hands if someone had an "EyeToy" at home. Three to ten children would always raise their hands, completely aware of what was about to come. On the other hand, slides showing Tom Cruise in Minority Report doing gestures in front of his pre-crime computer-cave went virtually unrecognised. These children were too young to be allowed into the cinema to view this movie with that rating, despite its being responsible for disseminating the idea of AR so widely. The popular question asked was "how does this work?" The next most popular question was "Is this an EyeToy?" Josh's favourite question came from a special learning student: "Are you from America?" Previously, an emerged personality type was mentioned - the boy who blocked the entire screen. Other such personality types reoccurred during the workshops. The "geek" type would get bored of the demonstration and sit in the back of the room with Josh and the computers, talking about more advanced topics like programming (example question: "Did you do code this in HTML using Notepad?"). The non-participant would sit in the chair, or on the floor and refuse to get up and join the play, even after being prodded by Karen or the teacher. Conversely, and more frequent was the over-active participant -- a child who did not have enough patience to wait for his/her group's turn, would have trouble leaving the game space when the turn was over, and would be found sticking arms and legs into the projector from the perimeters during other groups' turns. Somewhat related to this over-active participant was the shouting director, trying to verbally control who ever was in the ring - telling them to try different positions or interactions. For the most part, children listened to the directors. In the end, we fully realise that it really did not matter what software was running. The most entertaining part of the experience was students being allowed (for once) to let loose in a projection-obstructing frenzy. Teachers sitting and watching the experience seemed overwhelmed. While only a few of them stepped in to try the interface, everyone had something positive to say. "It crosses the whole curriculum" said one teacher, in reference to the joining of arts and sciences that is the augmented reality field. "You have got a mixed group of people co-operating and working together. Boys mixing with girls and children who do not know each other" said another teacher, amazed at how the experience seemed to break down barriers between different kinds of students.

A panel in the Disuvero/Tiravanija Peace Tower. Bent brass. Awe Yeah. The theme of this year's show was "day for night."

The title of the piece, "AB42908610B", is the US Mint serial number of the one-hundred dollar bill. If a green back's serial number is its unique identification code much like a finger print or retina pattern, then it can be seen as the element that separates the object culturally from its genetic partners. In this way, the serial number is the green back's personality or soul. As an artist, I aimed to modify the bill - and not completely obliterate it. The title of the piece was decided early on in the thinking process, to ensure that whatever happened to the dollar bill physically, its soul would live on - inherited by the art object. I chose to do the one hundred dollar bill firstly in order to be bold in destroying an amount of money that would actually mean something to someone, and secondly because the back of it shows Independence Hall, where the US nation was born. The Declaration of Independence was signed, Articles of Confederation ratified, and The Constitution was written in that building. To split this image up into ten pieces and ask the viewer to join in has obvious symbolic meaning. The pieces self-animate, creating a paper rustling noise. Through time, the paper will rub up against itself enough that the bill will destroy ITSELF, and I have delegated the alteration of the bill to the entire audience body. I am asking everyone to feel a piece of authorship in the scrambling of the bill. That idea of delegation or collaboration with the viewer is the only reason I incorporated robotics into the work. I used a light sensor so that the interaction with the money could be indirect - someone's presence is all it takes to kill the bill slightly. The piece also responds to ambient light changes, giving the robotically scrambled bill a life of its own - engaged in a noisy dialog with the household life. I do not see my project as government subversive. If anything, it questions ideas of value in general. Destroying US fiat currency is not illegal, nor is there a body of law preventing it. In fact, one can walk into Disneyland and pay fifty cents to have their penny squashed into a Main Street Commemorative token, complete with keychain hole punch. Companies sell collectable coins colorized with pictures of soaring eagles and the world trade center. If those are sound businesses, then where is the sneaky bit in all this? It turns out according to Crimes and Criminal Procedure - 18 USC Section 331 that the only way you can go to jail is to alter the money in such a way as to trick the next receiver into trading more for it. Apart from that law, there are also intellectual copyright issues with the graphics on some of the bills. This absence of defacement law makes sense to me. Money is whatever a society can agree it is; that is money's basic truth. If the government issues green backs, it's not that they are allowing you to borrow their property. It is your property - you traded for it fairly, and you can do what you please with it. The area that the government is concerned with is how much value the monetary instrument symbolizes to its users. I have explored the idea of incorporating money in earlier works, but it was never the main focus of the piece until now. I had also never joined the money play with my main artistic focuses on interactivity and movement in the physical space. In 1996, I was a drawing and painting student in Palos Verdes Peninsula High school. My teacher, Linda Jo Russell [1], assigned a standard drawing exercise in which students were asked to sketch objects from the environment and try to join the objects to one another through imagined fictitious conjoining methods. The assignment was entitled "Morph" by Ms. Russell. Among the contents I scavenged from around the classroom and from inside my backpack was a one dollar bill - which I conjoined to a rotting ivy leaf [2]. I recall from then that the reason I joined the leaf with the dollar bill was wishful thinking - I wanted money to grow on trees. I also remember thinking that the level of detail on the bill was so intricate that I would not possibly be able to reproduce it with my meticulous realism. I later realized that there was a functional reason for such visual intricacy. In 2003 in New York, I was doing a drawing exercise guided by Billy Sullivan [3] in which I would do a self portrait in a "drawing" medium. Because it was that time and place, I had a very expanded opinion on what "drawing" was, and ended up attaching all kinds of materials to a piece of acrylic plexiglass that I found on the upper East side of Manhattan. Among the materials were my old retainer from adolescence, used bars of soap from my toilet, and the pocket change lying around in my flat [4]. Because it was a self portrait, I was really trying to do a meaningful job and put valued pieces of my life into the work. When asked by Billy later on to explain why I had taped money to the drawing, I responded with the unfortunate one-liner, "because I want to give my work some VALUE." The actual value of that statement was probably akin to the scene in the 1971 "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" in which Gene Wilder's character picks up a pair of sneakers and throws them into a pot of boiling confectionery research, saying "gives it a little kick." [5] I have always found money to have a troubled relationship with the arts. My parents, worried for my financial future, wanted my art training to be more industry applicable. This rational finally rubbed off onto me from within when I decided to change undergraduate major from art to design at UCLA. Then, the design department was more "design" and less "media art." I saw that I was joining a particular movement or genre that had experience being industry-integrated, hence securing my financial future. Of course I was wrong about that (aside the department switching emphasis to theory-driven media art), but the principal remained. I find that the arts in America have an anti-capitalist tint. I don't know if that's escapist, anti-corporate, or just left-over counter-culture zeitguists from the 1960s. Movements seem to try and resist what is being called "Disnification" ie. the industrialization or monetization of an art genre - much like cartooning in hollywood, or industrial arts in early 20th century Germany. I personally find no shame in creating art for money or about money. I still consider it artful. I also hold no bars on "money-free" art practices because I think there is experiential value to that. When an artist tells me that he or she is anti-capitalist, the first thing I ask the person is whether he or she has had a good experience in selling work or in employment. People I've met prefer to keep the money talk out of the art talk. But what if the piece, itself is interpretting the idea of money as the very subject matter? The conversation suddenly changes. A threshold is crossed, and perhaps a boundary of safety is violated. FOOTNOTES [1] - Linda Jo Russell, MFA, California State University, Long Beach. Trained to teach perceptual drawing techniques by Betty Edwards [Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain], Ms. Russell now teaches workshops on drawing and creativity throughout the United States. She is part of the continuing education faculty at Otis College or Art+Design [2] - image of drawing held by private collector [3] Billy Sullivan, New York painter - best known for faux naive painting style - similar to Hockney in aesthetic and subject matter. [4] - image of this drawing held by private collector [5] - see line 2163 of WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY as transcribed by Aaron Villa in 1998. Logo design project for art exhibit curated by Monica Nunez Laiseca. The final choice was #2. The logo was used for branding purposes.

A programme designed for brother Marc's graduation from the UCLA music department. The graphics are intended to communicate the dissolving of the guitar into nothingness. The page folds vertically in half, bisecting the guitar's circular hole.

Motion Theory's workflow of the Nike 'One' commercials did not just benefit from an applet programmed by one of the team members. This time, the core workflow became a team of four visual programmers risking carpel tunnel to generate a diversity of floating engineering graphics using every trick in the book. Although the production process was organic and artistic, the team collaborated well - subclassing a common object oriented super class, using common (custom) rendering frameworks, establishing file format protocols for shared data, and using versioning systems. The result was complex yet delicate and tasteful swarm of diagrams and math floating around the heads of thinkers - interacting with the physical, emotional, and narrative surroundings. A demo applet was also published in Processing.org exhibitions. Processing Artists:

had the great honor of doing (more) algorithmic particle artistry with Motion Theory to produce this stunning new HP commercial, for their "The computer is personal again" campaign. Spinning spools of typographic smoke, shaking the pixels off shoes, and of course, a swarm of gratuitous abstract cool stuff -- these composite effects were animated primarily in Processing code with reinforcement C++ coding when needed. Thanks to Gabriel Dunne for doing some of the satellites. Unlike Nike 'One', this was quite a chromatic job. I have since gained a personal relationship with the colors magenta (FF00FF) and lime (00FF00). Special thanks to Mark Kudsi and Mathew Cullen, whose talents were absolutely essential to this wonderful project. This is what baby looks like. A map of Liverpool's Sefton Park for the Sefton Walk Park project, the sound player will follow the trail and even catch its place when the user jumps around in the playback controller. I'm also particularly proud of the black and white version of the map. The map had to be drawn from several references since neither Google, nor conceptual maps have needed to show such a detailed level of trails in the area.

For Paulo, finger trails of personal photos dissipate like horse hair underwater. My C++ JImage object is born - something that allows pixel addressing that can also update its display list cached textured unit rect. I later based a hair style on this aesthetic. It was a pleasure to collaborate on this spot because everything was so warm and natural.

This music video turned out to be a unique family effort, rewarding in the end. A couple of the island shots feature the pop celeb's face rendered by our custom after effects plugin, Pixel F. Meanwhile indoors, Gabriel takes a simple springy spider web I had set up and activates it artistically using pointer bugs and interpolation error. The JChain addiction is born. Special l33t props go out to Gabe as well for his MEL fish fin wave behavior!

For this superbowl spot, I had another amazing collaborative coding experience with Gabe Dunne. The approach was different in high level regards. Our generative renders were being used as concept for other artists to flesh out into several shots and variations. We were also coasting on a sufficient body of pre-written code that pulling up old building blocks and combining them experimentally was at our fingertips. Because of path smoothing politics residing from previous projects, we start the JPath object, featuring smooth(int); This class will change the future. At least one project into the future.

I shared a hotel with knights of Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) et. al. in Barcelona whilst showing at offf 2007. At one point, I coded this brush that turns a few mouse drags into a randomly generated bubbly blingy style. The brush code was then massaged into <a href="http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=76">L.A.S.E.R. Tag</a>. Here is the stand-alone version for your enjoyment and algorithmic plagiarism. I should quickly note for interested jttoolkit participants that this begins my attempted merging/joining/cooperating between OpenFrameworks and jttoolkit in hopes that they could eventually be one in the same ACU strain. Thanks for hot Spanish summer nights, Bennett, Evan, James, Theo, and Zach! An intersection of bodies and code had been long overdue. I certainly got offf. Key Controls: MOUSE DRAG - draws one line. ESC - quit. SPACE - clears the drawing area and generates a new brush. M - show/hide the mouse L - easter egg. F - toggle fullscreen C - choose 3 colors (mac: get out of fullscreen mode first)

The most thorough Pong art exhibit travels to Bern, Switzerland opening fresh at the Kornhausforum Bern at 650 sqm. More pictures available soon. Here is good energy to the Pong Mythos team, and your hard work. `Nike Golf` just won typographic excellence in TDC53. Look for screenshots in `Typography 28`, an all-color hard-cover volume published by HarperCollins and designed by Number Seventeen. Available in bookstores in December. Hooray for the Type Directors Club. Shout outs to the Motion Theory coder crew of December 2005. Yo jttoolkitters, the JoshFont class is hereby officially deprecated. All we are saying is give OpenFrameworks a chance! cout << "i love you" << endl; "box song and others" work by Marc Nimoy, showing at Dangerous Curve. The exhibition opening celebration Saturday, July 7, 2007 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. The documentation for Realidades Avanzadas is now online. I closet-coded for CONSERVAS ; Simona Levi et. al. in Barcelona during May. Curious to know what that was all about? hey jttoolkit hackers, you might be interested in this new tutorial that shows you how to migrate your project into openFrameworks. Be Free! 10,11, y 12 de Mayo: International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture. Come watch Josh type out a C++ hello world demo in emacs in front of 1200 Spaniards. Represent. So if you're in San Francisco and you like music made by The Nimoys, I guess you'll probably need a friend who works at this company so you can go to this private corporate show. But I thought I might blog it anyway in case you know how to jump a fence and pick locks. Come watch as Marc and I make semi-danceable beats from disassembled products for the entertainment of the good folks at Yahoo. At the Yahoo Brickhouse. Josh Nimoy gives work lecture at CalArts. Feb 12 at 7pm. The lecture will be at CalArts in F200 (which is on the second floor, across from the art office). Organised by Colleen Corcoran and Roman Jaster Motion Theory gets 2006 Award of Excellence from Communication Arts 47th Annual Design Exhibition for the HP HANDS spots. Hooray for Motion Theory! Hooray for Communication Arts! Hooray for Goodby! Los Angelenos, Josh MCs at another LA Salon Series. This intimate open-mic event is always a joy you will wish you had not missed. Come witness the solving of algebraic equations in exhibitionist and otherwise flamboyant performative fashions with the purpose of keeping the audience happy between the actual, real art acts. Liverpudlians, come for an origami workshop at the TAO Antique Shop. 6pm. 102 Seel Street - The Living Gallery and TAO HQ. Click the URL below to see a map. I will probably start with a classic fish, move to the ubiquitous crane, and if you are up for it, we can go for the blow-up frog. Free origami paper, or bring your own. I will also give a brief discussion on how origami meets NASA engineering, zen understandings of organism cell division, and of course, relate the entire thing to 'new media arts'. Be there or be square [folded into a water bomb base] Camping Pong, Painstation, Pong Folie, Pongmechanik, Minipong, Power Pong, Brain Pong, Susipong, Littlelights, Pong Clock and the Art and Pop Station. See it. opening is at Wednesday, 15th 7 p.m. Scousers, I'm VJing at Magnet tonight. Come watch me dish out semi-meaningful randomly filtered pieces of pop footage to the accompaniment of electronic dance musics. Okay. The Pong.Mythos Show (starring Minipong and BallDroppings amongst other more exciting works) opened in Leipzig, Germany yesterday. Congratulations to curator Andreas Lange and the Pong.Mythos team. More algorithmic particle artistry with Motion Theory to produce this stunning new HP commercial, for their &quot;The computer is personal again&quot; campaign. Spinning spools of typographic smoke, shaking the pixels off shoes, and of course, a swarm of gratuitous abstract cool stuff -- these composite effects were animated primarily in Processing code with reinforcement C++ coding when needed. Thanks to Gabriel Dunne for doing some of the satellites. Unlike Nike 'One', this was quite a chromatic job. I have since gained a personal relationship with the colors magenta (FF00FF) and lime (00FF00). Special thanks to Mark Kudsi and Mathew Cullen, whose talents were absolutely essential to this wonderful project. This is what baby looks like. Hooray for Motion Theory! Hey ISEA community, Andrew Senior presents a workshop on &quot;Computer Vision for Artists&quot; at San Jose 01 / ISEA , in which basic JMyron will be demonstrated within context of a greater social history. Hooray for free-as-in-beer plugins for your high level multimedia studio apps. Thanks to Gerald Kogler and Angela Precht, the &quot;Processing Tutorial for Macromedia Minds&quot; has been translated to Spanish, and has undergone a 20% upgrade in order to work with the latest version of Processing. (now if only we can get the English version up to date). Los Angelesans/Angelenos, Marc and I will be pumping out some randomly re-ordered slices at the Dangerous Curve gallery in down town LA near Sci Arc. It's tonight. It's a fund raiser. It's $10 minimum at the door. quoting the website: Saturday, June 17, 2006, 6:00-10:00 p.m. Good Work, the DC summer fundraiser and grand re-opening with all the (ab)normal extras. Oy! Liverpudlians! Icon==Function and Mixed Hello will be shown on the BBC Big Screen ... 37SECONDS PROGRAMME 6....THE NATURE OF THE BEAST Friday 19th May - Thursday 1st June, BBC Big Screen Liverpool, Clayton Square, L1- 1QR. Everyday at 10:00, 12:00, 14:30, 16:00 and 19:00. Special Thanks to Rebecca Lennon for pulling this all together! Hey all you 20-something year old Processing-Heads out there, the Nike One commercials we did at Motion Theory are now being shown from the front page of the Processing website. Although there was a lot of C++ involved (mainly to have nicer typopraphy), the mainstay tool was Processing. Hooray, Processing is useful to a diversity of creative people! Hooray for Casey Reas and Ben Fry! Hooray for Gabe Dunne, Flux, and Matt Motal! Hooray for Motion Theory! Yo Peace-proactive New Yorkers, Peace Tower Event for Saturday, 29 April - immediately following the citywide march for peace. The Peace Tower Event will be free and open to the public. Be there or be square. Woops, a photo of the piece "Mixed Hello" made it to the front page of the collaborating university's website. Long live AR/MR hysteria! Yo New Yorkers: Look for my [piece of piece] in the Whitney Biennial. Hint: courtyard. At the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool England - to coincide with the Mark Lewis opening, my pieces "Mixed Hello" and "Icon==Function" will be on display with work by Caen Botto and Simon Poulter opening on 30 March. The show runs until 27 May. This project has been going on since Autumn 2004 - an enticing mixture of the scientific research process and the artistic process. "Mixed Hello" being shown and explained from 11 to 4 pm in The Box at the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology. This is a free event, and is part of British national Science Week 2006. If you miss it, there's always the Media Lounge exhibit from 31 march to 27 may. Dear Liverpool, I was interviewed by Pippa of BBC Merseyside about my new art piece, the future of technology, and about my relationship to cousin Leonard. To air around 7pm this evening. I'm showing two of my pieces (BallDroppings and Minipong) in exhibition about one ball, two bats, a playing field and our situation in a digital world. An Exhibition of Computer Game Museum (Berlin) in the Forderverein fur Jugend und Sozialarbeit e.V. Concept and Curator: Andreas Lange. First of three (so far secured) show locations: Stuttgart (Germany), Wurttembergischer Kunstverein www.wkv-stuttgart.de Feb 11, 2006 - Mar 19, 2006 extended until Apr 30, 2006 Achtung Collectors! Ten limited edition signed duplicates of jtnimoy's MiniPong are available for purchase from this exhibition. Contact curator for more details. The brothers perform 40 minutes of game glitch and narrative grime/dnb on a fresh batch of "altered" consumer products and max patches. New VJing by the honourable FLUX. If you are in Los Angeles tonight, please attend. Free resistors and capacitors for all! jtnimoy featured in ssdesigninteractive's G2 Want to hear recordings of me improv MCing at the Los Angeles Salon Series v.6 ? I mention squirrels, acorns, and funky knuckle-shaking. Some mp3s from this event have been posted to the Salon Series website in the "media" section. Click the links in the parentheses and enjoy hearing me make a fool of myself (as always). Wow, a lot has happened since i last broadcasted through this list. I've been very busy; I haven't touched the format of my site in years, and neglected updating it. So a large chunk of recent activities have just been added. Themy time. Add me to your RSS reader. Check out the site from your lynx browser. These days I've been in the UK just preparing for the Icon==Function opening on Tuesday. Let me know if you didn't get that announce email (it's a new server script still buggy). Seats are still available if you're here. Other than that, please drop me a line and tell me what you have been up to in life! best regards jtnimoy HCI @ FACT *Josh Nimoy*: Icon==Function 4 October 2005, 18:00 - 20:30, The Box FREE (pre-booking required) The HCI (Human Computer Interaction) project is a collaboration between FACT and the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University that seeks to explore issues of computer usability. Artists Josh Nimoy (US), Simon Poulter (UK) and Caen Botto (Argentina) have been commissioned to propose experiments, based on scientific principles of human-computer interaction, that analyze how a variety of different users, from different backgrounds and levels of technological training, interact with "the machine" Josh Nimoy will be presenting Icon==Function, a series of interactive game-like audio-visual environments that analyzes the relationship between the functionality of user interfaces, and their iconographic facades. The body of work attempts to eliminate the divide between the outer and inner parts of "the machine." Caen Botto and Simon Poulter will also be present to inform us about their projects up to date. www.hci-fun.org.uk Made possible by a Partnerships for Public Awareness grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council featured on G4TV's "Attack of the Show". I was not sitting in front of the tube for this. If anyone has a video of this, please email me. I'd like a copy for my archives. BallDroppings and Textension in Chaise Magazine Issue 2 in the states. Software included on DVD as well! Robotic Typography project will be featured in an upcoming IdN publication. Keep an eye out! Josh Nimoy + James Clar showing the notorious 3D Cube Display at Wired NextFest. New programs! 3D Pong! New music visualizations! Discussion about work at Otis College of Art+Design at 11am as part of the "Are you experienced?" series Due to popular demand on the NYU ITP alumni email list, i have prepared a quick "Hello World" style Tutorial for Tiger Dashboard Widgets. Enjoy~ TheNimoys perform at Hammer Museum as part of The THING exhibit. 300 seats available, plus other bands. Come see our strange instruments built from old nintendos and computer fans and stuff. And the beats are even dancable. A picture of Telesquishy in LA Times this week. All you Los Angelesans out there keep an eye out for a blinking potato-shaped thing. Minipong Showing in Stefan Lindfors Gallery. Curator's comment: "A wonderful nice proposal for entertaining people by a concrete wall waiting for the bus. The minimal execution of the idea gives this little wall game a sympathetic touch so welcome to any urban environment." "custom Balldroppings" at TKNY's Compact-Impact show. Using a camera for input, visitors were able to move real, physical wooden sticks around on a table. The balls were projected down from the ceiling. New York, NY Los Angeles, CA: BallDroppings performed by Marc Nimoy at Coles live performance. Los Angeles, CA: BallDroppings will be performed by Marc Nimoy, among other experimental musical instruments at Zen Sushi. Published in CommArts as featured site. Team Strausfeld wins a gold for interface design at the Industrial Designer's Society of America IDEA Competition Davenport Sans published by AWC Electronics as a demonstration of their microprocessor. Featured in I.D. Magazine 'Emerging Designers Make Their Mark' Featured in I.D. Magazine again. MiniPong won in JAMe[jaemi], Inje University Digital Interaction design competition in Korea. MiniPong shows at DECODE, an art exhibit at Ateneo Gallery in Manila, Philippines Aug. 14 - Sept. 9 MiniPong shows at the COMPACT-IMPACT event at the TKNY store in New York, NY Featured on Rhizome.org -> net art news. Snipit: No Time For A Screensaver What do you get when you cross a networked screensaver, Buckminster Fuller's quasi-cosmic tetrahedron worship, Richard Dawkins' evolutionary cybernetics, and a whole lot of computer down time? You get n 0 time, software that attempts to embody practically every major wired theory put forth in the last 25 years. Networked, customized, imploding, meme-laden tetrahedral avatars! "n 0 time-sharing" community protocols! Auto-generated e-mail invitations to exclusive online implosion re-enactments! And you thought it was just a screensaver. Exhibits in Sao Paulo, Brazil as part of the FILE electronic arts festival. Josh gives a three hour Lecture. Features in NEURAL.IT Features in 'Experimental' Magazine Screened at SHORTTAKES California film festival Honerable mentioned at the SHORTTAKES film festival Balldroppings and MiniPong shown at TKNY event, Compact Impact. BalldroppingsPhysical featured in article+video by NYStream. Balldroppings and Telesquishy featured in Neural. Nimoy reviews past works at Dorkbot-NYC, Columbia University, New York, NY Mohawk Papers interface by Team Strausfeld is gold winner of digital media & interfaces in IDSA's IDEA 2004. Josh Nimoy moves to Italy to work at Benetton's Fabrica At Foxy Production in New York Chelsea, Robotic letterform #3 exhibits as part of Infinite Fill, curated by Cory + Jamie Arcangel Mohawk Paper Mills interface design shown again in commarts. 2 ITPers: Josh's Robotic Typography shows in I.D. Magazine along with James Clar's LED Cube. jtnimoy's work shown in Creative Code by John Maeda - now available world-wide. Enjoy. Robotic Typography makes it back into I.D. Magazine two months later with a Bronze in the Interactive Media Design Review. Josh and Marc Nimoy get exposure on CDBaby for their 2002 "Eventide" album, and the product sells out very quickly. An emergency production order was made to restock the store. Here is the review they wrote: Intense, glassy and distilled tones drawn from the sounds of videogames, high and low frequency beats peppering drawn-out phrases, pecking holes in a long, stretched-out melodic thought, dancing with the possibility of pure randomness, one step away from the samples composing themselves, delving into the stripping of soundwaves, taking a guitar lick and slowly unwinding it, taking the stance that all is "game" for their soundplay. These approaches begin to capture the far too rare approach to their album- one of genuine curiosity, possibility; one of "why not?!"s and "what if?!"s. As wiry threads dodge and tumble around thicker, more lush tones, the high-strung samples dart in and out from among the more ambling qualities, multi-layered textures of diverse color and mood are juxtaposed with a sense of spontaneity, yet not without meaning. Similar in style to groups like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Autechre, the album prods the brain much like a kaleidoscope where lucid colors and abstract geometrical patterns, pulled by gravity but seeming to move with their own will, inject fleeting imagery and fractal-like impressions onto the mind, leaving behind an indefinite sensation. In a nutshell? Kick Ass. Screenshot of Nimoy's interactive buckyball projection software hung 3 stories high on building by owners of work. Los Angeles, CA. Also look for flag pole banners and news paper reviews of the show. Latest work shown at ITP's Winter Show ; New York, NY Creative inspirational speech given at Murder by Design! conference, Mandaluyong City Ricochet shown at II Muestra de Arte Electronico Villa de Mostoles (MAEM) Jtnimoy gives talk about work in the MFACA department of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, hosted by Kathy Brew Jtnimoy is one of the judges for the 6th Philippine Web Awards. MiniPong, Textension, and other works show at DECODE, a show at Ateneo Gallery in Manila, Philippines Ricochet published on Aug 2003 cover of Processing Site Textension ported to MacOSX and Linux. The OSX version even has anti-aliased lines. Have fun!. New York, NY Textension shows at EyeBeam in ArtBot, New York, NY Textension ported to Mac OS9, from OS7-8. Fairwell to the interactive buckyballs! UCLA's law representative legally revokes Nimoy's privileges to publicly display the art. Josh Nimoy gives artist talk & Processing Introduction at DORKBOT in Nieuwpoorttheater in Belgium. Josh Nimoy starts working at Pentagram. New York, NY Buckyballs show in NanoExpo, at University of Wisconsin-Madison NetMedia, a technology company, purchases a product Josh Nimoy bought from them and hacked. Tucson, Arizona Work featured in PageDown issue #10. Manila, Philippines LAWEEKLY shows the buckyball project, featured by UCLA in an article about a nanotechnologist. Los Angeles, CA Interpolated Oval Letterforms, MiniPong, and Zerowave win in JAMe[jaemi], Inje University Digital Interaction design competition in Korea. Winner in JAMe[jaemi], Inje University Digital Interaction's design competition in Korea. Exhibit at 38Nine in Long Island City, near MoMa QNS & PS1. Curated by QVille. New York, NY Exhibit at SWIM in manhattan, with other ITP Students. New York, NY Interview with Josh Nimoy on Philweavers.net Work published in EXPERIMENTAL Magazine Josh Nimoy featured in NewsToday by BoyInStatic Zerowave in New York City in the American Museum of Natural History as part of the ArtSci international symposium. Josh Nimoy featured in HVEDEKORN Poesi Kunst Published in HVEDEKORN, Denmark WebCamXtra/Myron BETA 1.0 released Textension exhibited in ART FUTURA in Barcelona, Spain. Josh Nimoy moves to New York, starts at NYU ITP Textension reviewed by Giselle Beiguelman in "The Book After the Book" Liquid Texts; published in LEA/MIT Press n0time saver exhibits in Brazil at PACO DAS ARTES in Sao Paulo. Also published in Internet Art Digital Culture, a catalog for Festival Internacional De Linguagem Electronica, in which Nimoy presents work from back home. Zerowave premiere in Australia at the Biennial of Electronic Arts in Perth. Flattering review from Rhizome: No Time For A Screensaver What do you get when you cross a networked screensaver, Buckminster Fuller's quasi-cosmic tetrahedron worship, Richard Dawkins' evolutionary cybernetics, and a whole lot of computer down time? You get n 0 time, software that attempts to embody practically every major wired theory put forth in the last 25 years. Networked, customized, imploding, meme-laden tetrahedral avatars! "n 0 time-sharing" community protocols! Auto-generated e-mail invitations to exclusive online implosion re-enactments! And you thought it was just a screensaver.; Textension wins READ_ME 1.2 In terms of aesthetic enjoyment,Textension is a clear winner. It is delightful, exciting, fantastic to play with. It points in many directions at once, suggesting that hypertext could be fun and beautiful and profound in all kinds of new ways that it isn't today. Interestingly, the way to this development is pointed out by the typewriter, which produced beautiful things through the physical action of metal. Textension is the first piece of software to pick up effectively this very lost thread.; Review written by Ray Thomas of RTMark when Textension won in the READ_ME 1.2 Festival (Macros-center, Moscow, 2002) Josh Nimoy presents work with Sylvia Borda, Brody Condon, Shane Hope, and Sylvia Rigon at Digital Utopia/Digital Dystopia: Rendering the Art Object Textension featured on THOUGHTSHOP Portrait in Acrylic on canvas hangs in the Capital building in Wash. D.C. BallDroppings game included in FILE 2008 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. FILE is a beautiful thing so please check it out. A Javascript port of BallDroppings is part of Google Chrome Experiments along with some very interesting projects by names you know. BallDroppings on the front cover of Processing.org exhibition. The Black Eyed Peas video is released .. big congrats to everyone who was on this project. Extra props to coders Keith Pasko and Ryan Alexander. Hooray for Motion Theory. The grl graffiti brush source code is now available in OpenFrameworks format for all you curious OF coders out there. Scribble Variations ported to C++ OF and now works fullscreen on PCs and Macs. Website has a tag system now. Easier to find stuff you're interested in. Tagging all the work took me a week. GRLBrush able to manually choose colors with popup dialogs. Thanks Paolo Berto for suggesting this. Bye Quicktime, Hello Vimeo. No more plugin headaches on my site, plus 2 projects I missed from the ITP days. Enjoy! "withDRAWal" a new software piece about making scribbles. Please try it out and tell me what you think. Pirouette, my first wxWidgets app, is now available for your enjoyment. Send me your screenshots! Marley Carroll's new album Melanaster uses Pinch software to generate album graphics. The color of art is #A79F94. At The Public in West Bromwich, UK - a few of my pieces on touchscreen + projections, including premiere of WithDRAWal Interview on the Making of "Boom Boom Pow" video for Black Eyed Peas Art exhibit with a few of my pieces gets extended til late January 2010 at The Public in West Bromwich, UK Okay, this is from 3 years ago and i just forget to post it. Generative neuron work for a Gatorade commercial. BallDroppings now available for Android. Buick 'Behind the Beauty' - TV commercial I worked on at Motion Theory during the winter holiday. me so codey. me program long time IBM Data Baby - a new tv commercial has been posted to my portfolio. Hey Code Artists, Cinder is kind of a huge deal. Kink Different. The magician of the future will use mathematical formulas. -- Aleister Crowley, 1911 Record less; experience and remember more. Here is a new web meme I just finished. I hope it makes you say hmm. new electronica album "jijiji" from The Nimoys, available from iTunes, Napster and even as real CDs. Enjoy. something I did with Charlex last November. I will give a talk at LA Hacker News this Saturday, 26 Feb I finally published those juicy tron details i promised you. generative neuron art rendered with a real renderer Imagined Overtures generative sound visualization silk screened album for Los Angeles Electric 8. Ooo shiny! on June 10 at Media Temple in LA, I'll be presenting work at Creative Mornings. I'll be featured in Hacker Monthly, Issue #15 (August 1). Soundrop (Balldroppings for iPhone) showing in New York MoMA "Talk to Me" oops, google bought my company. BANDWIDTH premieres in Art of Noise at The Public,in West Bromwich,UK 21 Oct 2011-15 Jan 2012 BANDWIDTH - new open source sound toy available for downloading. 6 relaxing modes of musical synaesthesia. Enjoy! I'll be speaking at FITC Amsterdam 2012 Design, Technology, Cool Shit. Feb 27-28 Bandwidth added to Rhizome ArtBase. Thanks to the voters. 4 ports of BallDroppings open sourced on Github. Please help me compile for Lion. Software art "Pinch" now open source under creative commons and on github. Enjoy a working jttoolkit. I will be speaking at Resonate in Belgrade, Serbia 16-17 March, 2012 I will be speaking at FITC Toronto April 23-25 Scale it like a raster. Check out IdN Extra 07. Designing Data.