Art Review have placed Ai Weiwei at the top of it's Power 100 list for 2011.

Ai Weiwei has been getting a lot of coverage here in London recently, with his show at the Tate and subsequent arrest in China. In response to Art Review the Chinese government made a statement: "We feel that a selection that is based purely on a political bias and perspective has violated the objectives of the magazine".

An interesting project was posted on CAN today: The Space Beyond Me (by Julius von Bismarck and Andreas Schmelas). In a few words, it's an installation which reinterprets video into a still image. Only it's a bit more than that.

When shooting video, a cameraman or camerawoman tries to shape a scene for their viewers, by framing shots of specific things to include (or exclude). They are translating the rich 3D spatial environment that they happen to be experiencing at that moment into a captured 2D image sequence.

I'll be giving a short talk at the Thursday Club tonight at 6pm. All welcome.

I'll be introducing my work at the arts / technology space Jaaga in Bangalore, and talking about my personal development over that period.

Almost on cue from my last post, CAN have blogged about Marius Watz. He's a well-known generative artist (and he wrote a foreword for the book I'm reading.)

I've been reading Matt Pearson's book recently: Generative Art: A Practical Guide using Processing.

It's a very good read for someone like me. I'm already a strong coder, but looking for discourse, examples, prototypical patterns and suggestions on the topic of generative art.

Last weekend I created an installation for Alpha-Ville 2011. Here it is, ticking along behind Molly Pearson as she recites her poem, 'Picture This':

The entire installation was conceived and built in a week, most of which was on the day itself as a piece of 'Live Art'. What this means is that I arrived that morning, and set about building the installation as visitors milled by -- all with the (invaluable) help of Simon Dell and Hayden Anyasi.

Simple Harmonic Motion is an audio-visual project by Memo Akten. He has shared a little about his process and some sketches on CAN, so we can see that the underlying pattern to this work is based around sine waveforms.

It's wonderfully simple - as points along the wave come into contact with a central line segment they trigger sounds and small visual effects. By slowing and speeding the frequency of the wave(s) and by graduated changes other simple variables, we slowly see natural patterns emerge through the audio / visual indicators.