Recently I bought my first iPad and have been addicted to it. The paper-resolution screen, form factor, and apps like flipboard make it the ultimate content consumption device. Consequently, it has found much use and the situation got me to thinking about consumption, distraction and attention.

In response I created an app, Speck, that is the extreme opposite; a meditative experience that excavates your own thoughts and content. Each time you load it, a small hazy dot is drawn in the middle of the screen for you to stare at. Through the struggle of staring at the speck on the screen, a new awareness of your internal thoughts is generated. The longer you look, the more things you see as your mind grows weary and drifts, tired of focusing.

Although the project is critical of consumptive culture and technology and its simplicity may lead it to be seen as only a joke, there is also sincerity in its intent. It is a reference to an idea of William James, notable Victorian psychologist, in his Talks to Teachers series about attention.”Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question…” [ p. 104 ]. He suggests that the only way to maintain focus is to study it intently, ask questions about it, and try to understand what it is.

But through this process, the mind takes various tangents and creates new stories and narratives which tend to break associative ruts. The tiny, hazy, abstract speck is surprisingly effective as it elicits various trains of thought which often collide with other things I’m thinking about and send them in a new direction.

After submitting the app for review to Apple to be placed in the store, the following response was received which only proves my position:

“Apps that are not very useful, … or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected…We found that the features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough, or your app did not appeal to a broad enough audience…”

Sample images below:

The Really Real filter system consists of a custom-written Photoshop filter plugin which sends the image to a remote computer which displays it on its screen, creates a physical, visible effect over the screen, snaps a photo, and sends it back to the user, none the wiser. The three effects demonstrated in the video are ripples, perspective shift, and fog.

Stemming from an interest in replacing computer-generated effects with natural ones, I created an “unnatural natural” system that hides behind the veil of the familiar Photoshop user interface. As the beach ball spins and the user waits for the computer to finish, it is actually triggering physical movement and reactions in a remote location to “compute” the resulting effect.

video stills

As the users mental activity increases due to computer usage, the screen blurs to make it harder to see and use. By meditating and closing the eyes, alpha waves increase and the screen becomes sharp again. The system creates a frustrating feedback loop that prevents normal computer use.

The documentation video below is a screen recording of me using the program while attempting to create a presentation about Brain Blur.

Foundation of Venice 2011

11×14 inches, map of venice with shattered luxury brand logos embossed into paper. Sidelit photo

Field Abstract 2008

Biomachinery  2008
Photo and digital drawing, Giclee print on Canvas 28″x18″

Radiation 2008

Chasing Circles 2007

Unravelled
In this portrait triptych, a continuous thread winds its way throughout the face. The delicate structure progressively becomes unraveled leaving a series of chaotic, disconnected points.

Imagined Systems is an interactive sound installation creating a virtual space filled with imaginary machines and objects. As visitors passed under spotlights in particular ways, for example in a counter clockwise motion for a large turbine wheel, the virtual devices would respond with appropriate sound. Drawing on everyday sounds collected over the years—a potato hissing in the microwave, unintelligible radio babble from a cab in Queens, an alarm at the airport, oil dripping in the pan of a cooling engine—the sounds are remixed into a scene that cannot be placed, perhaps vaguely reminiscent of Pittsburgh’s industrial past.

The work was created for 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The visitor is presented with a darkened, empty room illuminated by three spots of light on the floor. Hidden 3D cameras fed video to computers running custom computer vision, physics, and sound synthesis programs driving a four-channel speaker system.

Below is a brief sample of the audio from one point during the piece’s lifetime.
Imagined Systems by ukle

2′x2′x.75″ sheet of particleboard, CNC Mill* custom-programmed to make small donuts and fire them at me to keep me awake while reading

*A $200,000+ industrial, computer-automated machine typically used to mass produce everything from furniture to snowboards.

Click to visit the gallery on flickr.

I designed the perfect bare-bones, no-frills computer system that would still enable me to do the essence of my work without unnecessary distractions. Furthermore, it solves one of the most difficult problems those in creative fields have to deal with—knowing when to stop. When the counter hits 999,999 and finally, 0, I know I am done.

Materials: Aluminum gutters, custom electronics and software, pump, plumbing.
Dimensions of the entire system are approximately 16x16x3 feet and variable.

The process of constructing the system involved continually running water to find leaks in the system and then attempting to control them with more gutters. Adding more pieces tended to shift the existing structure creating more problems, however. The result is patch on top of patch, fix on top of fix. Pots, bowls and cups are employed to catch the remaining leaks, and yet, water still escapes and floods the floor.

Democratizing security one citizen at a time. Built with lasercut hardboard, iPhone 4, and custom html5 app.

Organic Processor #1. April 2010. Wood, glass, Porifera, jute, custom electronics, custom software.  9x9x10 inches

Organic Processor #1 is the first in a series of sculptures exploring cognition and the characteristics of empathy in imaginary organisms.  The organism comprises several “neurons” in software, each responding to stimulus in the immediate environment, within itself, and remote information such as messages on twitter.

Sample video of OP #1 deep in thought.  The software is still under development. I’m working on a number of different animated gestures that convey emotion.  As it processes sensory information and browses twitter, it will respond by displaying different moods (happiness, depression, anxiety, calm, etc.)  The video shows a generic animation for “thought” to indicate new information is being processed.

Mark making can be broken into three categories: addition of material, removal of material, and the modification of a material (although there is a fair amount of overlap between the categories).  Examples of addition were to clamp a bead onto a passing string, to add a blob of glue, or to add a drop of water. Removal of material could mean cutting away, notching, or burning a substrate as it passes. Modification could be knotting the material as it passes, staining it, raising the temperature, etc.

Most media strive to be precise and permanent. By soaking portions of a passing rope with saline, these regions can be detected as they pass “listeners” further down the line. Due to the capillarity of the rope, however, the saline spreads out in several directions which causes slight conductivity and more gently ramping (as opposed to digital) signal. Due to evaporation, the signals get weaker and weaker as they progress through the system yielding unexpected results. Looping everything back around will allow one continuous rope to be used.

Additional possible methods could use a heating element to apply varying amounts of heat to a passing wire. As the heat spreads, the crispness of the signal is diminished and bleeds into adjoining signals. As the heat is transferred to the environment, the overall signal diminishes and returns the wire to its original state.

Saline on Jute by ukle

The Sound of Vapor from Luke Loeffler on Vimeo.

The first piece I have made to explore this concept features invisible wind chimes. When a person walks through the space occupied by the virtual chimes, they begin to ring. Should the actor stop to explore the source of the sound, he will uncover a fine-grained, predictable, knowable system. Using computer vision techniques to detect movement in a space, real, physical objects are able to interact with virtual, “physical” ones. Although not concrete, they are still physical because a physics simulation ensures the individual chimes still hang behave in ways we know and expect. They hang from the ceiling by strings, collide with each other (causing them to ring), swing and respond to gravity by eventually settling back to rest, and respond to touch by a soft body (muting any ringing).

Invisible Chimes is an intangible, interactive system that prompts us to consider how we acquire knowledge of complex systems from limited experiential data. The chimes, though installed in a space, cannot be seen, and while they can be touched, they cannot be felt. The only indication of their presence is the sound they make. Nevertheless, the system is still very much a “physical” one, in that the chimes are governed by the laws of physics. Although they can be appreciated by simply walking through them, further interaction reveals that the individual chimes can be separated, muted, and lifted, and that they behave in a predictable, understandable way. The inset video reveals the physical model the custom software uses to create the interactive system.

The persistence of the lines could be affected by altering the opacity and the radius of the contour lines could be changed by setting the thresholding point, which is the cutoff point or “line in the sand” by which we determine what white and black are. Imagine flooding a mountainous area with water: everything above the water line is considered “dry” and everything below, “wet.”  If you walk along the shoreline, or contour, add more water and then walk the shore line again, you will find a much smaller ring the second time.  If you were to plot the path you took for each of these rings, you would have a topographic map.

Continuing with this idea, I automated the process and drew all the contours on each image, leading to a series of images like this:

Next I added all the points to 3D space and set up some basic camera controls to allow exploring the mesh and ended up with a video like this, which felt a lot like those old-school flight simulators from the 80′s.  There’s something very amusing about flying over your face…

If you’re interested in a technical description of the code, read on. The main hurdle to getting this completed was implementing a fast “nearest neighbor” system. From the chroma-key footage (“green screen” as it’s often called), I threshold it (which means turn it to black and white). Next, I perform edge detection which leaves just the outline to the dancer. By altering the edge detector’s “kernel,” a mathematical term for a table of numbers, I can degrade the outline so it is a series of dots rather than one solid line. Next, I go through the image and make note of the locations of all the points. All that’s left to do is to connect them with a continuous line. However, if you simply connect the dots in the order they were found (top to bottom, left to right), you will get a zig-zag line that fills the area of the dancer. The next logical step is to take a starting point and ask for it’s nearest neighbor and connect the two. Then continue the line to the nearest neighbor after that, and so on. Unfortunately, this naive approach does not scale well and takes an enormous amount of time to compute. Enter the KD Tree, a method of storing the points for fast retrieval. I had started to write my own implementation last year and got distracted. Thankfully, I found a simple implementation for Java which worked perfectly. It’s beautiful to see a series of techniques converge to produce something entirely new.

The source code is provided in two files: dancers_outlined.pde and Tree.java for reference. Please be warned–it is very rough and not intended for public consumption, although I tried to comment as much as possible.

Chromacolony is one of my earliest generative works. The complex hierarchical structures are generated by custom software which models the cellular processes of division, multiplication, and differentiation. The unique appearance of each scene is derived from color palettes submitted by users around the world to the Adobe Kuler website.  Left to “grow” overnight, each unique color culture results in several diverging colonies, and the most successful ones are selected the next day.

Additional images in this series may be found in my flickr stream.

New Landscapes

New Landscapes seeks to model the formation of patterns in the earth caused by constant shifting and erosion of soil through natural forces. Rendered as a series of simple hatch marks, the resulting patterns are intended to be cut or etched into large slabs of earthen materials such as iron, clay, stone, or glass, and placed in the center of a field creating a dialog between what is natural and man-made.

The complete series features images from early versions of the code as well as images illustrating the drawing algorithms.

Abstract Architecture