art

The Covid Chronicles – A concept album about covid and how it changed our perspectives

May 4, 2022 — Leave a comment

As a musician, I really enjoyed the collaboration with other musicians. Playing with multiple musicians, and bands, exploring new rhythms, musical genres, and places. That was not only exciting but also rewarding. The reward always came through learning from others. I honestly think, the more you play better you will be, the more you play with other musicians better we all will be. 

Before the Covid pandemic, I had a band and we were playing music about climate change. The project was great and so much fun to do it. It was an audiovisual project where when playing live the songs would be synchronized with a video. The plan was going accordingly to the expectations but then Covid arrived with lockdowns, uncertainties, and only virtual music. 

To fulfill my creative needs I started a concept album telling the story of how covid changed our lives (for better or worse). After a lot of work and effort (and of course fun!), finally, the 1st song of my Covid Chronicles album is out. I recorded during the pandemic and it is about the pandemic (kind of inception). I played all instruments and my friend Aybars recorded the drums. Because I really like the multimedia concept below you can check the video:

Video of Icarus dreaming, the 1st song of the album Covid Chronicles.

The second song is planned to be released in the summer so stay tuned!

Using Cellular Automata and Climate Data to Generate Visual Art

August 21, 2019 — Image — Leave a comment

After the recording of the first demo with my band Mundo Kumo where we create music inspired on per reviewed papers about climate change, it was time to create some of the videos that we will be using on our live show. My initial idea was to use computer generated art combined with real climate data. I had experience with coding and complex artificial intelligence algorithms however not much experience using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate art.

The code used here was developed using the python language and it can be downloaded freely on my github repository called AlgorithmicArt. Although this was the initial idea about the videos,  the idea changed a lot after and we are not using all the videos explained here. However they are still a really good starting point.

When doing a little bit of research on the topic i found that Cellular automata was probably one of the easiest way to start. The concept of cellular automata was created by the mathematician Stephen Wolfram and some of the rules are very similar to the majority vote model used widely on statistical mechanics.

The first intuitive step is the use of the one-dimensional cellular automata (the easiest to implement and understand) . Thus picking a cellular automaton rule, it is possible to create a picture similarly to the pictures found on the internet.

Frame248.jpeg

 

To make things a little bit more interesting, a video can be made showing the evolution of the cellular automata grouping sequential gifs. This can be done using different alternatives. For example using ubuntu and the imagemagick package:

convert -delay 20 -loop 0 *.jpg myimage.gif

The final video is a thing like this:

The second step is to add the climate information in the code and combine with the cellular automata. I used global temperature anomalies from NOAA. I maped the colors based on the range of temperature anomalies. Thus, the colors (global temperature anomalies) and the evolution of the cellular automata are connected:

Next post I will talk about two-dimensional cellular automata.