Enttec - Intersection of Art and Light

I am honored that ENTTEC features my work, Nature Pix, on their website.

Nature Pix explores how technology can deepen our engagement with the natural world, illuminating subtle relationships that often go unnoticed. Working with ENTTEC’s systems offers an opportunity to experiment with light beyond its functional role—positioning it as a dynamic, interpretive force within the installation.

I am grateful to ENTTEC for engaging with my work and sharing it with their audience. It is encouraging to see recognition for projects that explore the intersection of art and technology, and I appreciate the chance to reflect on this collaboration through their feature.

Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár, a pioneering figure in early computer art and algorithmic visual arts, passed away at the age of 99, leaving behind a profound legacy of influence among contemporary art practitioners. Since developing an interest in algorithmic art during my twenties, I have extensively studied and shared her remarkable work with students, often using it as a creative coding challenge or assignment. The New York Times has provided a thoughtful write-up on her enduring impact and artistic contributions.

New York Times Article

On Algorithmic Art

Recently I was invited to speak at the Dali Museum in St. Pete on the topic of algorithmic art. In this post I’d like to share some of my code examples from that talk and offer up some pointers for getting started in creative coding.

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Talk at Dali Museum on Algorithmic Art

Talk at Dali Museum on Algorithmic Art

lecture: algorithmic art 

july 27 @ 6:00pm – 7:30pm

New to algorithmic art? Join presenter Mikhail Mansion as he dives into this emerging form of digital art that uses code as a medium for artistic expression. During the lecture, get an overview of the history and practice of algorithmic art and a glimpse into how it can be created. Mikhail will be showcasing algorithmic art’s use in both his and other artists’ work before concluding with an audience Q&A session.

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Grids in Nature, Design and Generative Art

Grids have been used for centuries to transform ideas into tangible designs. They offer a simple, but effective framework, for organizing space and breaking down information into quantified units that we can more easily reckon with. As a generative artist who uses code as a medium, I rely on grids as foundational objects for building complex computational drawings. In this article, I’d like to explore how grids can be observed in both nature and culture, and how I use them for creative coding. By the end, I hope you will take a new perspective on the nature of grids, and gain practical insight for how grids are used in creative coding to make generative art.

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Code as a Creative Medium

Most of my work requires some level of code—either creative visual or sonic output, or to bring a kinetic sculpture life. Creative coding is wide.

According to Golan Levin and Tega Brain, experts in creative coding pedagogy for over 30 years, “It’s difficult to overstate the importance of computational literacy in the 21st-century life. Computer programming, once an esoteric skill in engineering and business, has now acquired broad applicability in fine arts, design, architecture, music, humanities, journalism, activism, poetry, and many other creative fields.”

If you’re interested in this code and computation in an arts context I invite you to read my article on using code as a creative medium, written for Creative Pinellas Magazine. There I discuss my practices as a creative coder and highlight other artists who inspired me to discover code as a creative medium.

https://creativepinellas.org/magazine/code-as-a-creative-medium/

2023 Prof Artist Grant and Artist Laureate

I’m excited to announce that I've been awarded the 2023 Professional Artist Grant from Creative Pinellas. I was also selected as this year's Artist Laureate, which is such a wonderful and surprising honor.

As part of the Artist Laureate program I’ll be showcasing my works in a solo exhibition at their beautiful gallery space located at the Florida Botanical Gardens, in early 2024.

Thanks to Creative Pinellas for supporting and promoting the arts and cultural sector in the Tampa Bay for over a decade!. You can read more about their work, and about this year’s grantees here:
https://creativepinellas.org/opportunity/professional-artist-grant-23/

2023 Muse Award for Art + Technology

I’m honored to receive the 2023 Muse Award for Art + Technology from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance. I’m grateful SPAA’s founder John Collins, as well as the many local artists, who collaborated to making this area a leading arts destination. I'm always amazed at the level of support the community here gives to its artists; it's rewarding to know that my contributions are too becoming part of that legacy.

https://stpeteartsalliance.org/muse

Mikhail Mansion in front of Fairgrounds St. Pete, an immersive art and technology museum he co-founded and designed.

Natura Machina at INTERSECT by LEXUS

In an increasingly connected world, it can be easy to forget the importance of connecting ourselves with nature. The artist collective Natura Machina believes there are many subtle and poetic ways to experience the natural world – and we explore how our connected technologies can help us do it. 

Natura Machina develops works under the theme of newly discovered "nature" and connection with the surrounding environment through mechanical devices. Our latest artwork is based on their recent exploration of thermoacoustic phenomenon using Rejke Tubes, which converts thermal energy into air vibrations.

Our installation "Ethereal Cycles" provides an experience through its unique way of converting electric energy into sound. Since our concept resonated with Lexus’ efforts to deliver innovative and amazing experiences through electrification, we teamed up to deliver a unique experience at INTERSECT BY LEXUS - TOKYO.

INTERSECT BY LEXUS -TOKYO will exhibit "Ethereal Cycles," a spatial installation work using thermoacoustics and light, from October 28, 2022 (Friday) to January 25, 2023 (Wednesday).

Please visit Lexus Intersect to learn more.

https://lexus.jp/international/brand/intersect/tokyo/garage/ethereal-cycles.html

Sense Island - Japan

Island of Senses - Island of Dark Art (感覚の島- 暗闇の美術島) is open. Visitors can come explore the uninhabited island of Sarushima (猿島, "Monkey Island") at night to experience a range of new media art installations that will stimulate your senses and imagination.

今週末から横須賀の無人島・猿島で「Sense Island -感覚の島- 暗闇の美術島」が始まります。

Exhibition runs for 22 days (Sat. 22 Jan - Sun. 6 Mar, 2022). Tickets are available online:

https://senseisland.com

I’m excited to announce that this year "Soundform No. 2" is being featured at Sense Island!

In 2019 we debuted "Soundform No.1" at Ars Electronica, an investigation into the use of heat-actuated air columns made of glass, utilized as an alternate form of generative media and creative sound synthesis. In 2020 the work was featured at the Tokyo-based Miraikan Museum for Emerging Science and Innovation, winning the Japan Media Art Festival’s excellence award.

Continuing our exploration, we adapted the artwork for the outdoors, and installed it on the island of Sarushima, Tokyo-bay’s only uninhabited island. Its durability quickly tested as it became temporarily submerged by a tsunami, caused by an underwater volcanic eruption near the island of Tonga!

This artwork is a collaboration between Mikhail Mansion, Yasuaki Kakehi and Kuan Ju Wu—collectively Natura Machina.

Natura Machina is an experimental artist collective that theorizes and explores a new aesthetic convergence between nature and machine through the advent of new media art.

Drawing on nature for inspiration, input and source, Natura Machina seeks to uncover new modalities of experience, communication and creative expression. Through research, design and fabrication of new media arts installations, the group explores forces, ephemera, patterns, perception, interactions, sensation, motions, spaces, sounds and numerical relationships between natural environments and artificial systems and machines.

Now Published! Art + Tech Report

I recently had the great honor of contributing to a comprehensive 2-year research initiative sponsored by the NEA, and in conjunction with the NSF, Knight and Ford Foundation, on the topic of Art & Technology. 

I believe the recognition of technology as a creative medium (by cultural and scientific institutions) is a positive step towards better supporting innovation and interdisciplinary design practices. 

The survey goes into depth on the nature of code, computation, data, and tool-building as being paramount to technology-centered artistic practice. Furthermore, findings show how creative and technological flexibility is a boon in times of social upheaval, such as our necessary adaptations to developing creative work during the global pandemic. 

 The culmination of this research has now been compiled, and a report published. I’m humbled to be counted amongst so many wonderful artists and peers.

https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Tech-as-Art-081821.pdf

Flashback! 2021

2021 marked an end to an era when the Flash Player finally reached “end of life”. For me, it was moving. Technologies come and go. But the animation and publishing software known as “Flash” changed my creative course and helped shape my career as a creative technologist.

Early Flash Experiments (~2005), Mikhail Mansion

Early Flash Experiments (~2005), Mikhail Mansion

Flash is where I learned to apply code creatively. Using it, I experimented with everything from making animations and generative graphics to building sculptures that talked to the internet or controlled electronics inside kinetic sculptures.  Flash was good to me. For a time, I earned a living building websites, animations and games. I also taught design and programming courses on Flash and ActionScript. It was a really cool skill to have and opened up for me a new world of opportunities.

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“Flash made a big impact in my creative development, so when the Flash Player finally reached its end of life in 2021, I wanted to pause and flashback! ”

Starting out, Flash’s interface roped me in. I found it intuitive and easy to use, but not in a limiting way. It felt familiar to other things I had learned, like video editing and digital music production tools. Flash had a timeline, keyframes and tweening tools for animation. It let me import all kinds of media, and build interactive stories from them. With Actionscript—Flash’s ECMAscript-based programming language—I could take my work to the next level. Though artists had been creating for the web prior (check out Rhizome’s archive of net art) it wasn’t until Flash that I was personally introduced to the creative empowerment of multimedia web-authoring.

Circus, Animated Short for MTV (2008), Mikhail Mansion

Circus, Animated Short for MTV (2008), Mikhail Mansion

In a broader context, Flash was revolutionary for its time. It gave designers and coders tools for authoring animated and interactive content for the web and beyond. Long before browsers offered native support for things like video, audio and vector drawing and animation, Flash offered these capabilities.  It took browsers years to catch up! Also, the Flash Player meant visitors could have the same experience viewing content no matter which browser they used. Today, cross-browser compatibility remains challenging—in the early 2000s it was downright nightmarish. Providing a consistent user experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript was frustrating and hard. It often required making different versions of web pages for each browser, especially when browsers introduced non-standard features, or intentionally not following standards that other companies were abiding by. This led to a very fractured web experience and made it difficult for individuals and companies to reach their audiences. Flash was innovative and amazing because it completely solved cross-compatibility issues while making publishing to the web creative and fun. 

As web technology advanced and shifted to mobile devices, Flash became less relevant. By around 2009, rumors of its demise were underway and the demand for Flash development declined steadily. For a while the platform found a niche in mobile game development, until Apple’s CEO criticized the Flash Player and banned it from their mobile iOS devices. Today, Flash is completely dead, but it leaves a legacy that shaped our modern digital landscape. And sadly, for over a decade artists and designers used Flash to build interactive media that is only viewable now in an emulator at best.

Evolutionarium Puzzle Game (2007) Mikhail Mansion

Evolutionarium Puzzle Game (2007) Mikhail Mansion

During my years as a Flash designer and developer I created a lot of projects. One of my favorites was a game called Evolutionarium. An independently released, single-player, puzzle game,  Evolutionarium challenged players to keep a character alive in a rapidly evolving primordial world. At each level you were allotted 5 tools that could be used only once. Further, the tools needed to be applied in a particular order to beat the level—leaving 120 possible arrangements (5*4*3*2*1 = 120). The game was difficult, but offered visual clues in the environment to improve player odds. The app took months to map out on paper, design and animate. I also wrote all the ActionScript game code. The process taught me a lot about game development in general, and after its release I got to work on some big projects with big brands like MTV, Samsung and HBO.

AR Experiments wit FLARToolkit, Mikhail Mansion

AR Experiments wit FLARToolkit, Mikhail Mansion

In the mid-2000s, the FLARToolKit was released as an ActionScript port of NyARToolKit, which was a Java/C#/Android port of the original ARToolKit. The toolkit was an early augmented reality tracking library developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato, and first released in 1999. Working as a creative technologist at Vogue Magazine in New York, I helped build several Augmented Reality prototypes with Flash. The idea was to explore how the nascent technology of AR could transform storytelling and lead to novel audience engagement. I designed experiments with printed AR markers that could be tracked by web cameras to interact with graphics on screen. One project we developed was for live events, where we integrated markers into VIP guest passes. The markers allowed attendees to playfully interact with large displays. Some of these early AR experiments helped open my eyes to the range of possibilities for Flash applications beyond the browser. One of our designs even made it to the Vogue pavilion at the world expo in Shanghai in 2010.

Musing Pool Sculpture (2011), Mikhail Mansion

Musing Pool Sculpture (2011), Mikhail Mansion

Pendulum Rippling experiments in ActionScript

Pendulum Rippling experiments in ActionScript

Music Pool Sculpture (2011), Mikhail Mansion

Music Pool Sculpture (2011), Mikhail Mansion

As I delved deeper into the capabilities of Flash, I discovered ActionScript supported the use of websockets. This TCP communication protocol provided a way for any Flash app (running on the Flash Player) to communicate with the physical world by exchanging bidirectional data with connected devices. Ultimately this led me to experiment with inputting environmental sensor data—for instance measuring wind, waves, sound or light—into my Flash animations. I built several sculpture prototypes that utilized this method. This inspired me to move in a new direction for making interactive art!

With Flash’s ability to communicate over websockets, I built several swinging pendulum sculptures. In these works I used accelerometers (a type of motion sensor) to measure the swing of a pendulum arm, transmitting its data data for use in a Flash application whereby it affected graphics on screen. From these, I created the Musing Pool. Viewers could swing a pendulum arm over a digital display. The motion would generate dynamic ripples on the screen—like a simulated pond. The larger the swing, the more the virtual pool’s surface would get distrubed, causing letters to bubble up from the bottom. The letters eventually settled on the surface, forming words, and then phrases. Over time phrases would evolve with user interaction, leading to a generative form of poetic expression.

Asteroids remake, teaching creative coding (2010), Mikhail Mansion

Asteroids remake, teaching creative coding (2010), Mikhail Mansion

I’m a lifelong learner and tinkerer and I find it rewarding to share the things I learn with others. So for a number of years I taught courses on Flash and ActionScript at Rhode Island School of Design. Flash was excellent for teaching beginners to code! Students could immediately jump into publishing media to the web by using the drawing tools and timeline while getting slowly introduced to coding concepts in ActionScript. With the integrated scripting panel they could start making their creations come to life, building more dynamic and sophisticated apps. I found that art students could grasp abstract programming concepts quicker—versus starting from a pure textual format—because of how Flash structured its media library into symbols and instances, which are akin to how classes work in object oriented programming. In my advanced courses I taught game programming with ActionScript; during a 12-week semester students would learn to model and program their own classic arcade style game— Pacman, Centipede, Space Invaders, Pong, Tetris, etc. As a case study, I’d walk them through the creation of game Asteroids, focusing on drawing  geometric shapes, using trigonometric functions and simulating forces. 

Coding fractals in ActionScript, Mikhail Mansion

Coding fractals in ActionScript, Mikhail Mansion

When I started learning Flash back the early 2000s, it made a big impact on my professional development as an artist: it empowered me to design and publish media, animations and games online; provided a means of creating interactive media art; encouraged me to get more advanced, by learning to program ActionScript; and challenged me to better synthesize art and technology practices. So when the Flash Player finally reached the end of the road in 2021, I wanted to pause and flashback! For me the biggest takeaway is that good tools matter! They become an extension of our creative hopes and dreams, as we use them to shape the world — and in the process they begin to shape us! I’m grateful that something like Flash existed when it did, and that I had an opportunity to learn and grow from it. And while it's sad to see it disappear into the history books, I had already moved on from it long ago. Yet as a creative coder and new media artists, many things I learned with Flash and ActionScript are still relevant. No matter what the tool, I encourage everyone to discover a skill that inspires you, and then stick with it long enough to inspire others.