After doing a little research yesterday into interactive/reactive visualizations of music (I’ll be attending and hopefully blogging Minitek), I stumbled across Blip Boutique – the creative/motion agency behind Interpol’s Rest My Chemistry video:

So it turns out the Artist behind the code-driven visualizations is none other than Aaron Koblin. You may remember him from the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the MoMA, he did the Flight Patterns piece (among others). As this blog post’s title suggests, Koblin also served as the Director of Technology for Radiohead’s House of Cards video. Keep an eye on this one’s work in the near future, his ability to work with advanced code-driven systems in a beautiful and artistic way sets him apart from those that are less comfortable holding a foot in each camp.

Here’s a project I particularly enjoyed called Ten Thousand Cents:

The thing I liked most about this is that he was able to blend an artistic statement with code-driven visuals and also fold into it a human element using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool:

Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created…

It’s very creative/conceptual yet grounded at the same time. This piece has great balance.