Modding Video Games

Months or years after a release people always design and send out mods to popular video games.  I for one think that video games are art by themselves but some do not agree with me.  This game had an incredible landscape originally but these people have released mods that make the graphics even better.  It is not just one person either, each mod is created by a separate programmer.  The community that surrounds this game is quite active and they produce great art all the time.

Normally this game looks pretty good but these add ons have created such an amazingly beautiful 3D environment that it is somewhat hard to believe they are real screenshots from the game!

Such amazing landscapes are created through the games engine and they are breathtaking.  The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is a game that has an environment that takes hours to walk across for your character.  This means that if you were to transfer it into human scale it would add up to some serious mileage.  And the whole environment gets transformed into one big explore-able fantasy realm.  

This really shows why video games should be considered art.  Why are simply 3D images considered art and then entire worlds that get created get thrown to the side?  I think that these worlds are much more impressive.  They truly show the potential for the future of video games as well computer generated art.  

Digital Blasphemy

Ryan Bliss started a little online site called Digital Blasphemy in 1997.  His goal was to create 3D computer generated images and sell them as backgrounds for desktops.  He put his site up in 1997 and started doing projects that had odd "outer space" characteristics.  His older work was pretty awesome for the time in how realistic it looked given what software he was using.  As time rolled along his software and his art became much more realistic looking and much more complex.

His early work looked like this:

While his newer stuff is much more detailed and real life looking: 

Once he created the site and started putting up his backgrounds, he received quite a following quickly.  The gaming community really took a liking to most of his work and began spreading it through the internet.  I first learned about his work in the early 2000's and really took a liking to it and almost always had one of his images as my desktop background.  His work really speaks to me because it is all stuff that does not really exist and yet it looks like something that could be real.  

He does have a "members section" that allows for people who donate to get special pieces and newly released stuff but almost all of his work can be found for free.  I am not sure if he makes enough money from his backgrounds to live off of or if he has another job but I would be curious to know.

Either way, his work is really cool and I oftens till find myself adding them as my backgrounds.

Microscopes for art

Along my travels on the interwebz I have discovered yet another cool form of scientific art.  It turns out that people are using microscopes to look at very small stuff and then simply taking pictures of them.  It might not sound like a form of art but I assure you that the images they collect are quite stunning.  They are colorful, complex, and wild pictures of stuff so small that they can only be seen by instruments that man has created.

In specific there is a Japanese artist named Susumu Nishinaga who happens to be extremely talented in this line of art.  I really enjoy his work with humans more than anything.  He has taken the task of getting extreme close ups of blood vessels, veins, arteries, and other small pieces of the human body.  But some images I really like are these:

These are all pathways for blood in the body.  But the photos are taken at such a small scale it is somewhat hard to believe.  This man is extremely talented with a microscope and camera combo.

The coolest part is that none of this would be possible without advanced technology.  The cameras being used we only developed recently and the microscopes have been around for a while but getting them to be able to photograph on such a small scale is an extraordinary feat of men.

3D printing! ... famous sculptures?

3D printing has been all the rage in the past few years, especially with dropping prices and the ability to own personally becoming available.  The ability to print almost anything is a very cool idea that is certainly worth the effort to produce.  3D printing is one of those things that really changes the way people imagine creating new things and making items from scratch.  It is as simple as scanning an item and then pressing a button and having an identical looking thing produced in any scale you would like.

Up to this point 3D printing has been used for few things: construction, hardware, and art.  Artists have really started to get the hang of 3D printing and some really cool things have been produced so far.  One thing I found recently though has caught my interest.  It is not "new" art and yet it will change how easy it is to get cool pieces of art that played a role in history into our homes rather than in the museums only.  New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has started scanning all their sculptures into a database and then selling the files through their gift shop so that people can print out their own masterpieces at home!

This is really cool for a lot of reasons but what I really like about it is that if I wanted a small scale version of some piece in the future I could probably find it online somewhere or through a vendor, pop the file into my 3D printer, and have my own little sculpture to place at my whim.  Super cool idea from the high art community on this one!

http://gajitz.com/3d-print-your-own-famous-sculptures-from-the-met-at-home/

The Apple Tree Youtube Video

My last post talked about a type of video that has become incredibly popular over the past few years around the web.  In searching around for these type of videos I came across one that really blows all the rest oout of the water and I felt compelled to talk about it.  It is called "The Apple Tree" and it is a music video of sorts.  A fan of the Electronica band The glitch Mob spent around 200 hours editing few second long clips from a huge range of movies to remixes of the Glitch Mob's work.  It is an idea that has been done many times before, however this particular user has created this video with some high tech editing software and some serious time consumption.  He has made the video to jump from clip to clip at just the right moment and have some action event appear every time there is a hard sound.  This makes for the effect of having ever small clip flow with the music.  The music chosen is quite fast and heavy most of the time and certainly fits a lot of the explosions and fight scenes chosen by the creator.

This piece is really col simply because it has both an extremely appealing visual element as well as having great audio to back it up.  In my opinion it is the best edited clip/music video I have ever seen.  His hard work has really paid off in the final product as everyone I show it to has been impressed with it.

Here is the link to the video: (watch it in HD) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gP_Q2myNWo

Landscape/ Time Lapse/ Music Videos

Watch this for a minute or so first before reading: http://vimeo.com/51430433

It seems as though over the post year this type of video has been popping up more and more around the internet.  I have seen roughly a million, give or take a few.  I find them to be extremely relaxing sometimes and other times they pump me up like no other.  I have really taking a liking to the "TimeScape" video that have some sweet electronic song thrown in to them and simply have time lapse captures from nature running across the screen often to the beat of the music.  They entrance me in a way that I really enjoy as the visual and audio stimulation combine into some sort of awesome artistic work.

Many different styles of this video have been emerging and all of them seem to have a certain target audience.  Some are for people who like harder, faster music and give off the vibe of pump up videos while others are much more serene and peaceful.  This is a cool dynamic that simply by changing how fast images switch and what music is in the background a completely different feeling can be derived from the same images.  I have seen a few times where the exact same footage is used in two separate videos and the music is only changed and it gave a completely different feel!

I am always impressed with what people can do with a camera and some music.  These videos are incredible simply because of how much editing it takes each artist to create their few minute video.  Overall, my impression is that videos like this are pretty awesome!

Marmalade: High Speed and Tech Advertising

Marmalade is a company that produces visuals for high end ad clients.  But what they end up producing is surely a beautiful form of art.  They use high speed cameras on extremely fast tracking robotic arms to capture amazing shots that seem impossible to not only make happen but to capture.  If you have seen a shot of a wine glass falling off a table with wine spilling everywhere and it beautifully crashing on the floor all in slow motion and perfect pixelation you have probably seen the work of this company.  They are the go to guys for anything like this.  They will take the idea of splashing molten chocolate and milk together and turn it into one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen using their engineering and cinematic skills.

These guys are the masters of filming anything in beautiful slow motion.  Here is a video showing a lot of their work: http://vimeo.com/43455552

I think they are quite influential to not only the advertising market but possibly to the movie and tv market as well.  The technology they have created to make some of these ads is simply amazing!  There is room for them to do side projects and create pieces that involve much more complex animations mixed into the video they capture.  This could result in some extremely interesting short films, music videos, etc.  I think they can really find a niche to fit into and produce some almost unbelievable video.  I love what they do and am really excited to see some future side work productions outside of the realm of advertising.