Episode 012 - Marius Watz

Marius Watz drops by the studio for our last episode in DUMBO. We talk art, twitter, The Algorithm Thought Police, programming, java, processing, python, Modelbuilder, weak and strong typing, and more. 

A note from Marius:

Download it on iTunes!

Show Notes

1. Marius Watz’s personal website

2. Follow Marius on Twitter

3. Marius has presented multiple times (see here and here) at the Eyeo festival, a super-cool annual event for bringing together computational creatives started by Jer Thorpe and others

4. Marius is listed on WIRED’s list of “pretty much everybody who’s anybody in [the computational aesthetics] racket” along with a bunch of architects

5. In 1996 Marius co-curated Electra, a major media art exhibition in Oslo featuring the work of Diller + Scofidio and Greg Lynn, among others

6. Everybody loves triangles

7. In 2009 Marius presented at Carnegie Mellon dFab’s CODE, FORM, SPACE symposium along with Casey Reas, Ben Pell, and MOS

8. Art is its own site

   1. Unless of course you’re talking about Richard Serra

9. Layar is an app for making interactive augmented reality experiences

10. Marius did VR in 1994 so he’s not impressed by your Oculus Rift

    1. Hey remember how Facebook bought them?

11. Electric Objects is a platform for taking screen-based art out of the gallery and bringing it into your home

12. Gifpop takes animated GIFs out of the internet and makes them physical through the user of lenticular printing

13. John Powers is an American sculptor who creates large pieces based on algorithmic assembly strategies. Antony Gormley works in a similar manner

14. The Grasshopper forum needs to get its shit together

15. VBScript, seriously?

16. Back in the day having (or not having) Kai’s Power Tools for Photoshop could make all the difference

17. Marius caused a bit of a stir in 2012 when he published the tongue-in-cheek article “The Algorithm Thought Police,” which argues that heavy use of standard algorithms without personal flair or underlying understanding is bad for you if you wish to consider yourself a computational creative

    1. Along similar lines, David Rutten integrated an easter egg into Grasshopper that appears when the Voronoi component is overused

    2. The algorithm though police live on in 2015

18. Hella Obvi is Brian's Scandinavian name

19. Marius has taught parametric design classes at NYU’s Tisch ITP (code from the fall 2013 class on GitHub, photos on Flickr). He also teaches regularly at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)

20. Marius authored a Processing library Modelbuilder (source code on GitHub) which extends the core functionality of Processing to construct valid triangulated 3D meshes for 3D printing in the STL file format

    1. Similar libraries included Toxiclibs and Hemesh

21. POV-Ray (“Persistence of Vision”) is a freeware raytracer

22. Marius originally programmed in C then Java. The latter provided him with the ability to write applets for browsers

23. Oracle essentially killed the Java applet with their repeated security holes

24. Oracle again pissed everyone off by winning an appeal for copyrighting APIs for Java

25. Steve Jobs killed Flash

26. Ben Fry and Casey Reas, co-creators of Processing, came out of John Maeda’s Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab

27. Processing was born out of John Maeda’s application Design By Numbers, which ran through a Java applet and allowed users to code designs within a 100x100 pixel space

28. “Setup and draw” are all you need to get cooking in Processing

29. Cinder and openFrameworks are open-source libraries for creative coding in C++

30. jQuery is a web functionality library for JavaScript that makes certain high-level web tasks more user-friendly

31. Processing.js ports the Processing visual language to JavaScript

32. Millennials like weak typing

33. Polymorphism is a computer science concept of the provision of a single interface to entities of different types

34. A timeline of the for-loop syntax in various programming languages

35. Triangle strips and quad strips are means of sequentially connecting vertices to define contiguous poly faces

36. Aesthetics is the main thing driving parametric architecture

37. Sex sells

38. The Cooper Union building by Morphosis is “architecture as a weapon”

39. DFM (Design for Manufacturing or Design for Manufacturability) is the technique of designing an object with its method of manufacture in mind

40. Marius was the first MakerBot Artist-in-Residence

41. Leander Herzog creates beautiful organic forms through laminated lasercut pieces

42. The fun things you can do with a defocused laser cutter

43. You can't, or shouldn’t, really claim authorship for basic algorithms

    1. But you can try to patent geometry

    2. And then defend yourself when everyone is furious with you

    3. Which can lead to a pretty fruitful conversation

    4. Which in turn leads to a clarification of the initial defensiveness

44. The 10 best Twitterbots that are also net art

45. Do you have FOMO?

46. Speaking of FOMO, don’t miss this work by Jonas Lund

47. You're not a man until you've avenged the death of your father

48. Wait, who killed Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru?

49. We’ve all had a mullet

50. Generator.x was an influential and early (2005) conference, exhibition, and blog created examining software and generative strategies’ role in art and design

    1. Similar sites/events include FORM+CODE (2010) and scriptedbypurpose (2007)

51. “...you’re an angel investor, most artists are broke. The power imbalance is not endearing.”

52. The creation of Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) was a seminal moment in non-hierarchical web content classification through folksonomy. Hashtagging on Twitter is an example of folksonomy

53. People who are bad at hashtagging

54. Sterling Crispin is a well known net and digital artist and Twitter personality

55. Bating: See trolling

56. Trolling: See internet cesspool 4chan

57. The Trolls Among Us

58. Reddit moderator Violentacrez (pronounced “Violent Acres”) is considered to be “the biggest troll on the web.” Read more here

59. Golan Levin is one of the most successful of the new media artists and teaches at Carnegie Mellon

60. Is there diversity in architecture?

61. Data is not objective

62. Even Westvang teaches a class at AHO called Internet Carpentry 101 on “the material circumstances of the internet and how this informs how we may design for it”

63. What is an IP address?

64. Doomsday Preppers are people who are certain of a post-apocalyptic scenario and prepare accordingly - this is an overwhelmingly American phenomenon

65. This Chrysler commercial is extremely upsetting to Brian

66. Marius is an autodidactic and a polymath. Just like Leonardo da Vinci

67. These days, you’ve got to be a full-stack employee

68. Relative silhouettes of all podracers in the Boonta Eve Classic

69. A look back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust

70. Should everyone learn to code?

71. Malcolm Gladwell is annoyingly accurate

72. Were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs just lucky?

73. N55 is a Copenhagen-based studio that open-sources their designs

74. Can you be an idealist and still make money?

75. Print the Legend is a Netflix documentary on the desktop 3D printing revolution and maker movement

76. Autodesk may have more power to direct architecture than architecture itself

Lightning round:

1. What book(s) are you reading right now?

   • A lot of books about genocide

2. What music are you listening to right now?

   • Dancehall with a UK Grime influence

   • New Orleans Bounce

   • Big Freedia (caution: a lot of twerking)

   • Speaking of twerking, remember Nolia Clap?

   • Anything over 140 bpm. 140 bpm is a good place to be

3. What’s your favorite retro-game?

   • Lives close to Barcade

     • Barcade Brooklyn high scores

   • The Nokia snake

4. Have you played Mountain?

   • No

5. What’s your favorite childhood cartoon?

   • X Men

6. Describe your productivity ritual.

   • Stay up until midnight

7. Pronounce the name of that crazy Icelandic volcano

   • How to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull

On Designalyze, we analyze what makes thought leaders in design technology tick through informative, insightful, and often humorous interviews. Designalyze is hosted by Zach Downey and Brian Ringley and recorded in DUMBO, Brooklyn. For design technology tutorials and content visit us at http://designalyze.com