Dynamic Systems of Engagement by Scott Murray

My thesis projects, Practice and Cheeky, will both be featured this Saturday at Alchemy, the annual interactive art party. Hope you can make it!

Practice, my MFA thesis project, will be set up for you to explore this Friday in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Practice is both a work of interactive video art and a design research project.

Unlike most other works of this medium, it does not reward bodily motion and exaggerated gestures, but encourages patience and self-reflection. In so doing, it explores the tension between emotional engagement and the uncomfortable ambiguity of not knowing what will happen next.

Friday, February 12

About 9:00 – 11:00pm

16th St. and Guerrero St., NE corner (Map)

In the event of rain, the piece will be installed the next night, Saturday, 2/13.

I’m very excited to announce that I will be co-teaching a two-day introduction to Processing at the new Gray Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco! The workshop is the first in a series on creative coding, and coincides with Gray Area’s grand opening celebrations and initial exhibition, featuring work by C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback, and Stamen Design.

The Gray Area folks have created an amazing space downtown, and this workshop is an exciting chance to learn a ton of great new skills, and even meet one of Processing’s co-initiators. (C.E.B. will be making an appearance.)

The workshop is scheduled for Saturday, October 3rd & Sunday, October 4th, 1:00 – 6:00pm both days.

See GAFFTA’s site for the complete schedule, details, and registration.

Just launched the new site, er, page for Revamp Salon, and I think it looks pretty cool. Stay tuned for a full website in a few months, and if you’re in San Francisco, call 431-VAMP to get a great new ‘do!

Questions & Answers is my latest project: an experiment in new, non-linear narrative forms, or what I’m calling data-as-narrative. But really it’s just a fun way to explore some of the crazy, interesting stuff people write online.

I generated this image from the genetic code of a California case of H1N1 (posted today by the CDC). I fed the data into my color tools project, and assigned one color for each base found in DNA: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). The colors were chosen by searching ColourLovers for each of those base names and using the top result, i.e. the “best” colors for A, C, G, and T, according to ColourLovers.

The outcome of a conversation with Mike and Jason during class: What would happen if you mapped red, green, and blue to x, y, and z?

Visit the project page >

Watch it in high definition »

A new project I worked on with Cici and Simon. More info on the project page.

Announcing the release of new research on visualizing network relationships. Play with the demo, download the presentation poster, and read the research paper.