Google DevArt Exhibit: Where Art and Code Come Together

By Todd R. Weiss

“Playful Geometries” is a multi-user, multi-screen exhibit that reacts to sounds. The aim for participants using these cheap Raspberry Pi mini-computers is to experiment and have fun with color and light.

“The Giant Map” is a large interactive Google Map in which children can visit and play, causing the map projected inside the room to change and morph with their movements, “as if the children were Godzilla or a giant messing up the landscape.”

This exhibit, called “Art Mining,” is an interactive tool that lets participants generate abstract art in simple ways by manipulating some basic hand controls in the exhibit, like a modern Etch-A-Sketch.

This “Augmented Acoustics” exhibit is all about how touch and visuals and sound interact to “visualize” music. It is built using an audio interface and a wooden surface, which generates sounds when it is touched.

Crowdsourced art is the inspiration behind “Crowd Painter,” which experiments with artificial creativity by using a painting robot to generate art. The robot can take commands from participants.

In this “Freedom of Speech” kit, technology comes to the old-fashioned protest march using an interactive and portable banner that lets picketers send messages in real time to express their views during social demonstrations.

“Infinite Sunset” is an exhibit that uses simple graphical elements to visually describe a sunset seascape that is ever-changing in its sameness, according to its artist creator. The work is designed to run continuously, projected at a large scale, for long periods of time.

The “Color Of World” exhibit is designed to explore the color palettes and patterns of different places around the Earth, by connecting a Leap Motion device and Google Earth data.

“Face Cloud” creates artificial, unique and haunting images of people’s faces that are generated from a hidden research database of scanned real faces. Participants at the exhibit can even scan their own faces to be added to the database.

“Ellsworth Kelly Animated” looks at works of the painter, Ellsworth Kelly, and his often boxy, large blobs of color, and animates them digitally for another intriguing “springy membrane” view of the paintings.

“Light Echoes” uses a laser light that’s projected onto a landscape from aboard a moving train, which is then captured using long-exposure photography. The light is then documented as it reflects off the Earth and soil.

In the “Law of Light” exhibit, light bulbs are arranged to portray a flow of light that is programmed electronically to interact with visitors, time and a magnetic field.

“Dreamsprawler” is an exhibit that aims to map people’s dreams on a brain, like a “global map of people’s dreams,” according to its creators. Participants can share their dreams using text, images, voices and videos for sharing with others.