Formations

source: syntfarm

Formations is a short film created with the use of software code. While traveling through real data satellite imagery and traversing constructs of synthetic cloud formations, the audience is invited to play the role of an astronaut, observing slow changing audio and visual textures on various macro and micro scale levels in an alienated but familiar setting. Always, these cloud-like formations look very ungraspable and cosmic and must be observed from a greater distance.

The very slow and subliminal changes of the image allow the observers to pay extra attention to the formal qualities of steadily emerging patterns. This ongoing immersion is only interrupted by sudden change of scale in the ever-moving image.

About image:

Satellite imagery was collected from the xplanet.sourceforge.net server over a period of time by a server side cron job and script.
These high resolution satellite images were used for the first five scenes as animated textures using frame buffers and a simple blending shader. Using a textured sphere in OpenGL and variations of blend effects gave us a semi-transparent even x-ray look-a-like look of the projected cloud landscapes.

Zooming very closely onto the sphere resulted in clouds seemingly and very closely passing by the eye or in this case the camera of the viewer.
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source: infrabodies

Formations by Syntfarm

Formations is a great coded video art piece by Syntfarm, founded by Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic in 2007. Satellite imagery was collected from the xplanet.sourceforge.net server over a period of time by a server side cron job and script.These high resolution satellite images were used for the first five scenes as animated textures using frame buffers and a simple blending shader. Using a textured sphere in OpenGL and variations of blend effects gave us a semi-transparent even x-ray look-a-like look of the projected cloud landscapes.

Formations is a short film created with the use of software code. While traveling through real data satellite imagery and traversing constructs of synthetic cloud formations, the audience is invited to play the role of an astronaut, observing slow changing audio and visual textures on various macro and micro scale levels in an alienated but familiar setting. Always, these cloud-like formations look very ungraspable and cosmic and must be observed from a greater distance.
The very slow and subliminal changes of the image allow the observers to pay extra attention to the formal qualities of steadily emerging patterns. This ongoing immersion is only interrupted by sudden change of scale in the ever-moving image.