Dessine moi un mouton...

Okay, so first of all, there were some pretty cool winners in the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2006, or The Seevcees as the awards are known in the business.

Things like the first place Illustration winner, realistic digital still life of five 'well-known mathematical surfaces', by Luc Benard:


From left, clockwise: Klein Bottle; Symmetric 4-noid; Breather Surface; Boy's Surface; Sievert-Enneper Surface;

But the favourite find has to be California media artist Aaron Koeblin. His piece Flight Patterns, below is an ethereal little animation built on air-traffic data.



Then I go to his website and find that he's been doing some way more far out stuff. How about his meat simulator project Eat you up?

Eat you up is an interactive installation in which the user answers a series of questions about their lifestyle. From this information a code is created which contains an approximation of the levels of amino acids present within their system. This code is used to create a synthetic meat flavor which is then presented to the user.

This is completely crazy. I'm sure the actual taste of bbq Beckstar can't be simulated so simply - it's not just amino acid level that determines a meat's tasty flavour is it? Still - a fairly disturbing idea.

And then there's Earworms - a software app that writes little mnemonic songs based on user-generated data (to-do lists and other memorization aids being the likely commercial applications). The video is the height of corporate camp. Watch it just for the scene of the parents writing a goth-techno song to teach their teen to drive. It's teentastic!



One other cool project before Scott gets home and we sit down to chili and homemade cheese bread courtesy of the best roommate ever - The Sheep Market, where Koblin used the online task service Amazon Mechanical Turk. His human itelligence task? Draw a sheep facing left. For 2 cents. 10,000 sheep later, he's got an interesting visual experiment on his hands.

All in all - some cool experiments in technology/art/humanity, and definitely someone to keep an eye on.