Cool Java art/experiments?

November 29, 2005 5:25 PM

Cool Java art/experiments?

Looking for recommendations for sleek Java interactive art or experiments. Fun, beautiful, compelling, surprising, time-sucking, eye-opening...whatever. Show me whacha got.

posted by diastematic to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Recently posted to MeFi: Random blue lines. There's probably more in the post. I can't find it though.
posted by panoptican at 5:28 PM on November 29, 2005

Thanks! I've been thinking about that one for the last week or so -- great stuff -- and it's the post that actually got me thinking what else is out there? Hope there are more nuggets out there on the internets.
posted by diastematic at 5:33 PM on November 29, 2005

A whole bunch of stuff by Ken Perlin. I'm fond of A Webwide World, Adventures in robot path planning, and Little creatures forming colonies.
posted by chrismear at 5:35 PM on November 29, 2005

The MIT Media Lab Aesthetics & Computation Group is a great place to start. Its director, John Maeda, and some of its students have produced some work you'll enjoy- Golan Levin in particular has made some striking pieces. They also created processing, which you might be interested in if you're looking to create your own interactive art.
posted by MonkeyMeat at 5:40 PM on November 29, 2005

I like btsim, a BitTorrent simulator. Explains the nature of the protocol visually and interactively.
posted by revgeorge at 5:53 PM on November 29, 2005

Ben Fry (from the above MIT Lab) does some cool visualization stuff and is one of the guys that created processing.
posted by mkn at 5:56 PM on November 29, 2005

Along the same lines as Ken P, John Maeda, Ben Fry, is Martin Wattenberg. He works at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. And he's a viz (as in "information visualization") guy and java rockkkkstar! His personal site is bewitched.com. He recently built a java app for seeing baby names over the last 100 years.
posted by zpousman at 5:57 PM on November 29, 2005

Isn't processing technically Java?
posted by metaculpa at 6:08 PM on November 29, 2005

Okay! Not so much with the reading other comments. Sorry about that.
posted by metaculpa at 6:09 PM on November 29, 2005

Have you checked out the Exhibition page on Processing? I love Jared Tarbell's work.Amit Pitaru's Sonic Wire Scupltor is also great.

And if it doesn't have to be Java, check out Messa di Voce which I think is done in Jitter.
posted by hooray at 7:09 PM on November 29, 2005

I used to see some interesting stuff at www.nikkki.net.
At time of writing the website loads very s-l-o-w-l-y and I've lost patience. Maybe you guys might find something there.
posted by arrowhead at 12:53 AM on November 30, 2005