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The Digital Artists Handbook

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art.

The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: Sgraffito in 3D

Voor het eerst zijn 3D-reconstructietechnieken uit de industriële wereld losgelaten op museumstukken. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presenteert (25 okt 2008-4 jan 2009) zijn prachtige verzameling sgraffito-aardewerk uit de collectie Van Beuningen-De Vriese op wel heel bijzondere wijze. Kunstenaar Joachim Rotteveel ontwikkelde een nieuwe manier om het aardewerk te scannen (MRI Scan), archiveren en driedimensionaal te printen.

De tentoonstelling maakt de archeologische collectie zo op spectaculaire wijze toegankelijk. Sgraffito in 3D wordt getoond in het vernieuwde entreegebied van het museum, dat voor iedereen gratis te bezoeken is. 

Source: Boijmans Van Beuningen

ASCII Art

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) Art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) charactersdefined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general.

ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such asCourier for presentation.

Source: Wikipedia

3D Icoon uit Pasfotohokje

De Icoonmachine werkt eigenlijk net als een pasfotohokje. In plaats van een 2D foto wordt er een 3D scan van je hele lichaam gemaakt, die vervolgens door een 3D printer uitgeprint wordt. Een project van kunstenaar Scott Klinker, waarvan hij verwacht het in 2009 te kunnen realiseren.

Robert Graham: The Virgin Mary

The Virgin Mary that presides over all who enter the newly dedicated Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles stands eight feet tall and weighs 1,000 pounds. With braided hair, simple clothing and bare head and arms, this Virgin Mary varies from the traditional, as did the methods used to create the statue.

The Virgin Mary is the work of sculptor Robert Graham, who also created the Cathedral doors, which are 20 feet tall and weigh a combined 25 tons. Graham’s L-shaped outer doors frame cast-bronze inner doors depicting various manifestations of the Virgin Mary. Topping the doors is a tympanum, a gilded architectural detail on which the statue stands.

Graham is noted for his large-scale work, including the Olympic Gateway for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and statues of American icons Joe Louis, Duke Ellington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the Virgin Mary, he started with a 30-inch sculpture made from plastilene, an oil- and wax-based clay that holds detail but does not harden. He then created a mold and polyurethane cast that was used to design the Virgin’s clothing. Once this version was approved by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, it was taken to Scansite in Woodacre, Calif, to be scanned and digitized.

Before the scanning, the polyurethane cast was painted gray to ensure a flat, even scan. The figure was scanned using a Cyberware MM laser scanner for the head and a Cyberware MS3030 for the remaining body parts. Once the point-cloud data were collected from multiple scans of the entire piece, we cut the figure into pieces for detailed scans of the head, body, arms, hands and feet, says Noriko Fujinami, director of Robert Graham Studios. Scansite merged data of varying resolutions from each of the scans to create a highly detailed point-cloud model of the entire figure. The final file contained more than 1.7 million points.

The point-cloud data were organized and input into Geomagic Studio software from Geomagic. Geomagic Studio is used for 3D photography, the process of capturing a physical object and automatically turning it into a digital model for design, engineering, mass customization and web-based marketing applications.

Scansite created a polygonal file of the statue in Geomagic Studio. Engineers at Ctek, a service bureau in Tustin, Calif, also used Geomagic Studio to enlarge the figure from its original 30-inch size to its final 8-foot height. 

• Geomagic
• Amazon
• Wikipedia

Robert J. Lang: Origami

Modern origami is a unique sculptural art. Each origami design must be individually folded; there is no mass-production process. The designs of Robert J. Lang are folded from selected papers, some of which he made himself, each paper chosen to complement the design and composition. All of the art pieces on display in the galleries are his own compositions. Robert J. Lang

Wim Delvoye: Chapelle Mudam, Luxembourg

Laser-cut corten steel, vitraux (Link)

Frozen: Sound as space

Frozen (part of Off Media festival) is an exhibition of experiments in the representation of sound in media beyond the auditory. It examines the sound signal as a virtual space, presenting possible mappings that visualize or interpret the structures contained within the soundwaves.

Frozen was proposed and commissioned by Jan Hiddink and the 5 Days Off Media festival in Amsterdam, and consists exclusively of original work. It was conceived with Generator.x 2.0 as a conceptual reference (all four artists in the show were also involved in Generator.x 2.0), but with a clearly defined focus: The representation of sound as spatial structures, realized as physical objects through the use of digital fabrication technologies.

For more information, see the documentation in the Frozen Flickr set, Leander Herzog’s FFT set or the blog posts by Benjamin Maus and Andreas Nicolas Fischer.

5 Days Off MEDIA was part of the 5 Days Off festival for electronic music from Wed 2 through July 6 in 2008. 5 Days Off MEDIA presents three themes: Crosswire, Frozen and Roots. Locations: Melkweg, Paradiso, Dutch Institute for Media Art and Heineken Music Hall.

(Marius Watz: Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto). Rapid prototyping object based on FFT data from the song “Oslo Rain Manifesto” by Alexander Rishaug.) 

Source: Generator.x