Recent content on Vladimir Mitrović
Pomak (pron. poh-muck) is an abstract focus timer More on this elsewhere. for Mac and Windows. It’s small, fast, and written in Rust. Controls: [A-Z] enter interval name [Enter] start/pause work interval [-] (minus) mute/unmute the sound [Cmd+Q] (Mac) / [Alt+F4] (Windows) close the app Configuration is read on startup from: [Mac] /Users/<your username>/Library/Application…
Majka (The Mother) is an augmented reality monument dedicated to unconditional love, installed forever in front of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade See the location on Google Maps. . It cannot be moved, removed, defaced, or altered in any way – she will always be there, watching over her child. To view the monument in situ, you need a device which can perceive this virtual layer of reality.…
I’ve started a series of abstract still images called Wraiths, inspired by the phenomenon of exponentially degrading recollections of dreams. Check them out on Sedition. Details from full-res (5K) artworks below.
Sixteen overlapping volumetric noise functions, distressed by aperiodic vector fields, summoned into existence with Lorensen & Cline’s incantations, fading into and out of form by way of hard-clipped noise cutoff functions driven by sixteen phase-shifted oscillators. A perpetually regenerating amorphic healing totem. Turn off the lights, put the headphones on, play your favorite slow album,…
Talog (Serbian for residue or sediment) will be my dumping ground for interesting images recorded during the process of creating the work. My Instagram feed is also a place where interesting bits and pieces are posted as stories.
I was invited by Marko Radojković and Ivan Lončarević to do visuals for a single from Klavirsko Nebo #2, a compilation of piano music composed by local artists. Ana Anastasov’s Exolvuntur is a beautiful, somewhat minimal composition which has a three-part structure, so I thought it would be great for a little abstract story. The beginning and the end of the song have the same melodic theme,…
I was invited by FRAMED and Dong Gallery Taipei to adapt three of my artworks for display on a 95m LED wall. The projects were on display from November 2019 up until January 2020. On show are: Support Itinerant Aesthetic Engine The project was a blast since I had very little time and I had to bend Unity’s video recorder a bit in order to record the videos in such a crazy resolution 11520 x…
Unwelcome Gaze was on display at the KC Grad gallery from November 4th to November 17th 2019. I would like to thank my friend Jovana Tomić for helping me with the organization and for finding the technical sponsors for the exhibition – Comtrade System Integration – who were kind enough to lend me three brand new 4K displays to use for the triptych. The exhibition would not run without computation…
I was cleaning up some folders on my laptop and found a couple of interesting high-res screenshots of Itinerant in early stages of development. It’s interesting how temporal distance causes you to re-evaluate the stylistic choices you made for the final version of a project. Whenever I revisit old screenshots after a project has been released I have a looming sense of screwing up any number…
Support is an abstract piece for which you have to adapt your senses in order to experience it fully. In most situations, we spend very little time studying things around us in depth and paying attention to details. I wanted to create an art piece which would force you to look at it for a while, in order for details to start coming out. You would have to give it your full attention.
Since releasing Itinerant I’ve been working on two new projects in parallel. I’ve been slow to post on the website in the past couple of months, so I thought a quick research update is a good way to break the silence. Memoization I’m currently researching memoization related to visual processing, with plans for it to be the main feature of a developer tool I’m currently…
Our visual perception system, with its 20+ billion neurons, is processing more information than all of our other senses combined Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Colin Ware . Its pattern-matching capabilities have evolved immensely over the centuries, giving us the ability to detect both larger patterns and intricate details within milliseconds. We are wired to detect shapes and…
⊕ My apologies to the Internet for bringing to life yet another Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Wikipedia derivative. I got tired of nitpicking on DejaVu Sans Mono, Menlo, Hack, etc. It had to be done. Github repo & downloads
I thought writing an explicit end-of-year sitrep for myself might be a good idea, so here goes. Thoughts on past year, plans for the next one. Unwelcome Gaze 2018 has seen me release Unwelcome Gaze as a series of prints, but unfortunately with little success in setting it up as an installation in a gallery. I’ve contacted at least a dozen galleries in Belgrade, and heard nothing back from…
Drawing, as a basic form of visual human expression, has been around for more than 30,000 years Drawing, Wikipedia. . Its evolution into writing, painting, and other forms of art has taken many centuries, but don’t worry – I won’t delve into a shallow discussion about that. I am mostly interested in the mastery of each of these forms of expression. Mastery versus dabbling. Take…
“Squint your eyes to see clearly, blur reality to make it real.” — Meshuggah - Rational Gaze Google, Facebook, Amazon. How frequent is your daily interaction with them? Google’s ads are almost impossible to miss unless you’re using an ad blocker, and virtually any question you have or research you’re working on begins by visiting google.com. Gmail is also widely…
⊕ ⊕ ⊕ ⊕ In-depth scans have completed, I now have around 30k nodes to work with and am very close to wrapping up the visuals for Amazon’s part of the triptych. In other news, I’ve bought a 4K TV which I’m currently setting up as my main canvas. I’ve also started applying for gallery shows in 2019 (applying a year in advance seems to be a thing in the art world).
⊕ I did a preliminary traceroute scan of all IP ranges belonging to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and am experimenting with visualization styles. I had to significantly narrow the ranges for each subnet, lest my scans take weeks to complete. Currently I’m working with a neat subset containing around 2500 network nodes, while a fuller scan is currently running in the background, limited to the…
⊕ ⊕ ⊕ ⊕ ⊕ ⊕ Moving on to the second piece.
Heapspace website redesign in collaboration with the maestro Arsenije. Work in progress. The animated forms are meant to evoke the fluid nature of communities and of their mutual interaction.
⊕ ⊕ ⊕ Working on overall variance in positioning and color.
⊕ I knew that Strange Loop would not disappoint. It was everything I’d hoped it would be – an amalgamation of provocative thoughts and weird characters, organized flawlessly. I met Tyler whose unique perspective on algorithmic art has inspired me to question some of the approaches I’m using in my work (here’s a link to his talk). I met Alex, the organizer of the conference and…
The new project will be a triptych. I’m planning to show it at a gallery If you own or know a gallery which might be interested, let me know! in spring 2018, if all goes well. I’ve spent the past couple of months working on the first piece, which will be turning the lens of perception back at Facebook. The social graph is Facebook’s ticking heart, powering its entire business.…
Systemic complexity is often beyond the threshold of understanding of an individual. Because of this, modern teaching methods use abstraction and modularity in order to bring the subject matter closer to the student as painlessly as possible. For example, while studying anatomy, a student is first introduced to the various systems comprising the human body, and then each of those systems is…
Комплексност система је одавно прешла границу потпуног разумевања од стране појединца. Сваки модерни метод учења користи апстракцију и рашчлањивање да би систем који се изучава што лакше и безболније приближио циљној публици. На пример, анатомија најпре набраја системе у људском телу и објашњава како они међусобно функционишу, па затим детаљније објашњава сваки од њих. То је добро опробани општи…
BRU-12 is a research project for performing realtime processing on volumetric 3D models and presenting them as meshes ready for rendering. The toolchain consists of Cinder and OpenVDB. OpenVDB is an industrial-grade data structure used for parallel processing of very large amounts of volumetric (“voxel”) data. It’s not really intended to be used for real-time rendering, but its…
A volumetric cube decaying from the bottom. I’m experimenting with growth/decay mechanics and visualizing pressure. This is currently a very basic proof of concept for my Cinder + OpenVDB toolchain. Wallpaper sized; right click, save.
On the web, data interpretation is defined by well-known rules. The semantics of data are defined by the system’s creators. Rendering is the end result of the two. But what if? In a web browser, clicking a link initiates a deluge of data, yet we as users remain mostly unaware of this process. Aesthetic Engine 2 is an application which encodes an alternative interpretation/visualization of…
I started programming when I was 11 years old Wait, come back! , using BASIC on my Commodore 128. As soon as my dad entered “PRINT VLADA” into the prompt and the words “VLADA” appeared on the screen, I was hooked. My first experience with computer graphics came a couple of months after that, while I was devouring the Commodore 128 BASIC manual. The graphics chapter was my…
Aesthetic Engine 2 is simultaneously a web browser, a generative data sculpture, and a shape-shifting painting. It is a live visualization of the hidden complexities behind our everyday web browsing. You can read about the process of making it here. AE2 is open-source and available for download on GitHub. Operation Whereas a typical web browser follows strictly defined rules for rendering each…
Spomenik is a recursive city-builder game in which you build a city on multiple levels – in reality, and in its inhabitants’ dreams. The inspiration for the game came mainly from growing up surrounded by 60s and 70s brutalist architecture in Belgrade, and from reading A Pattern Language by Alexander et al. ⊕ The Blok 23 neighbourhood in Belgrade. Unfortunately, the majority of my generation views…
Exactly when I needed a good excuse for doing flow-based generative modeling research, I stumbled upon a ProcJam announcement. I needed a break from Spomenik development, it was early November and I had client work coming up in December so this was a perfect opportunity (yes, excuse). I also wanted to do a small project as a starting point for doing long-term modeling research, but didn’t want to…
AE1 is a gyroscope-controlled abstract wallpaper generator – an aesthetic engine. Type in your input, observe the sculptures, take pictures. An experiment in seeded random generation, uniquely mapping each word to a procedural sculpture. You can download it on the iOS App Store. The code is hosted on GitHub. I’ve also written an in-depth article on the process of developing AE1. Screenshots…
During the late 90s and early 00s I was active in Belgrade’s graffiti scene, and I developed a certain aesthetic taste which has kept evolving since then. For designing this generative logo, I wanted to fuse my love of generative art, system modeling, and Belgrade wildstyle. I started by throwing rough sketches on paper and playing around with potential rules for the generative version. At this…
Medjed is a procedural terrain generator. It has its own mini-site where you can read the development archives. The generator is based on volumetric density functions as a way of describing terrain features. A marching cubes algorithm is used to transform the mathematical terrain description into the meshes suitable for display in Unity. ⊕ The terrain is “chunked” into cubes so the…
Gradovi is a city generator project I worked on while finishing my studies at the Belgrade University. It generates city streets using many of the methods described in Parish and Müler’s Procedural Modeling of Cities paper. The core of the algorithm is built around L-systems, which are used to iteratively “grow” the city. Two types of street growth rules are implemented – radial…
Commission for the Center for the Promotion of Science. Generative logo and brand identity. The inspiration behind the logo was light as the carrier of information and communication, and as the medium of cognition. Humans perceive objects by receiving light bounced off of the objects being observed, and while this enables us the cognitive rendition of our surroundings, light itself cannot be…