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What are the chances?

Patricio González Vivo

patricio.io | @patriciogv

Hola, EYEO! Mi nombre es Patricio Gonzalez Vivo. Es un honor esta acá con ustedes... Hello, my name is Patricio Gonzalez Vivo. It's an honor to be here. Big thanks to Dave, Jer, Wes and Caitlin for inviting me to share my work today. Also thanks to my wife, Jen Lowe, who is my collaborator in all things, including this talk. [make sure sound is on] I thought I'd start by showing my most embarrassing work on the internet, just to get it out of the way.
Ok, that's enough of that.
I'm a developer currently based in New York City working at Mapzen, where I'm helping to build a 3D Map engine and experimenting with maps & shaders. But 7 years ago I was a psychologist and expressive art therapist in Buenos Aires. I'm going to talk about the synchronicities that led me here.

At the very end of 2009, I was an expressive art therapist in Buenos Aires building a website for my business. The site was "arte para sanarte", which is a world-play meaning "art to heal". I built it in Flash, and thanks to The Wayback Machine, I recovered it here in GIF form : ) This is the second of a few embarrassing things I’m going to show you, but it’s appropriate because this talk is also going to spiral.

While I was building my website, I needed to figure out how to work with XML files... ...so I searched for “processing XML,” and in the first of many synchronicities, I ended up here...

… to a webpage that I’m sure is familiar to a lot of us :) and it took me a while to understand what was going on on this page... that this was a community of people making ART with CODE. I felt like I’d tapped into a world of misfits like me, and I wanted to use these tools for expressive art therapy…

…so let’s spiral back to art therapy for a minute. The expressive art therapy approach flows between different artistic languages like music, painting, sculpture, and dance... to discover, amplify, and transform emotions and processes in the body. It feels like being in a state of play... but these non verbal languages allow you to dive very deep. Each different language gives you the ability to express your interior landscape in a different way.

Sculpture is about letting shape emerge...

While painting is more like a sedimental process where meaning deposits in layers... one after another...

And movement lets you embody a feeling and transform it over time.

Lygia Clark

In South America, we can trace these kinds of activities to the pioneering work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.

In the 1970s she created interactive works that directly involved museum goers in collaborative sensory experiences. In the late 70s, she shifted from creating artworks to working as an art therapist.

Expressive art therapy is usually done together with others. It is a very experiential, organic and intense process...

often we end up constructing a collective mandala... as a way to tie the individual experience to the group.

Because I was already working with all of these expressive languages, when I discovered the Processing community, I was moved by the use of CODE as an expressive language.

I emailed all the artists I could find who were working in new media, asking them if they knew anyone working in Argentina... And Chris Sugrue emailed back, introducing me to Diego Alberti... I got in touch w Diego, and he suggested that I should apply to interactivos Telefónica. (At the time, Telefónica was like the Eyebeam of Buenos Aires.)

I applied, and here we are in interactivos 2010. I made great friends there, like Tomas Rawski, Joaquin Aras, Javier Bilatz, then Jorge Crowe, Guido Corallo, Leo Solas and Cris Reinaga.

At that time I was also working as an art therapist with a group of kids at the CALOS community center, and that really influenced the project I made at Interactivos...

...with the kids in mind, at Interactivos I worked on a collective drawing installation. I made a device to try to promote interaction between people instead of alienation. But I found that the installation didn't get people to interact in the ways I'd imagined... Kids used it to discharge all their energy and anxiety. While grownups were interacting in polite ways, almost afraid to break the table... I felt that the technological feel of the installation had too much gravity - people interacted much differently with this digital collective mandala than they did when painting a collective mandala on paper.

These reflections led me to make my next project, efecto mariposa (or "the butterfly effect") I wanted to make a more sensitive installation, where technology was hidden beneath a more natural interface.

The kinect was new back in those days, and I did a realtime simulation of the different spheres of an ecosystem,
programmed in such a way that the ecosystem suffers if people interact with it in an aggressive way... Then they had to wait until the system regained balance to interact with it again. This forced a gentle experimentation with the system. Another synchronicity happened while I was making Efecto Mariposa, but to explain it, and to explain what I mean by synchronicity, I'm going to spiral back to psychology

I'm from Buenos Aires, which, together with Paris and the Upper East Side, is one of the last places in the world where people do Psychoanalysis. Among Buenos Aires therapist, everyone was into this guy: FREUD. But I was into this other guy, … his archenemy. Carl Gustave Jung. Like most archenemies, they use to be friends. In fact, Jung was Freud's favorite student.

At the beginning of the 1900s it was fashionable for psychiatrists to keep dream diaries. Jung had one where he wrote about and drew his dreams. Jung was very interested in the mythological content of dreams. Freud thought the unconscious content of dreams came from personal memories, but Jung believed that the unconscious content came from a place deeper than personal memories... Jung believed that every person's unconscious goes deeper into a collective source of unconscious material, the collective unconscious

Jung also used this idea of a collective unconscious to explain meaningful coincidences that seem to be connected by more than simple cause and effect. Like dreaming about an event before it happens... or witnessing something where it seems the "world" is trying to speak with you. He differentiates this concept from chance, or randomness, by using the word synchronicity.

It's hard to say CHANCE or RANDOM with out pointing to the work of Casey Reas... Casey in this book, together with his collaborators points to the complexity behind perfect computer random. For example in GLSL Shaders, a parallel programing language designed to run in the graphic card, there is not a native function for random.
Here is a recode of 10 PRINT maze algorithm in to a shader... between lines 14 and 16 you can see how I'm constructing a pseudo random from a sine wave. Not particularly symbolic. But if I want to open this random to the Jungiang concept of synchronicity, I should use more a symbolical source than a sine wave... something that's more open to the complexity and serendipity of the collective... like the wind.

wind direction                       wind speed                     temperature

Here I modify the previous code to use wind direction, wind speed and temperature. Collected from the US NOA servers during the last two months. I would like to thing that Jung will like this gesture.

Back to the collective unconscious... Jung was noticing that he was having recurring vivid nightmares.

Nightmares about floods.

Nightmares about volcanoes. To the point he worried that he was becoming schizophrenic. He also noticed that many of his patients were having similar nightmares, and he worried that he was somehow "infecting" his patients with his own nightmares. When the first World War started, he found another explanation for the collective nightmares...

"On July 31st, immediately after my lecture,

I learned from the newspapers that

war had broken out.

Finally I understood.

And when I disembarked in Holland on the next day,

nobody was happier than I.

Now I was sure that no schizophrenia was threatening me.

I understood that my dreams and my visions came to me from the subsoil of the collective unconscious."

C. G. Jung, July 1914

Yep... Jung wasn't a great guy... All happy about his discoveries while war breaking out... These collective nightmares he was noticing became his support for the idea of a collective unconscious. For him, this nightmares were feed by the subsoil of the collective unconscious, tapping in to a future vision that war was coming.

In June 2011 (five years ago)... after 50 years of lying dormant, and without any notice, a volcano in southern Chile called Puyehue erupted.

This eruption ejected around one hundred million tons of ash and sand.

A satellite view.
Wind, embodying chance... moves the volcanic plume hundreds of kilometers away. All the way to Buenos Aires, where I was living. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES that this happen?? right? The ash brought destruction, the airports were closed for weeks, supermarket shelves emptied.

everything... felt... fragile.
This eruption happened while I was making efecto mariposa. I had planned to use sand for the installation, but instead I used Puyehue's ashes. The ashes made the work more significant for those who experienced it, and the eruption motivated me to tune the algorithms simulating different layers of the ecosystem to make it more complex... and less linear... more temperamental and sensitive to interactions. [stop the video] The synchronicity of the volcano influenced both the form of the installation and its function; it reacted in unexpected ways. To make Efecto Mariposa, I had to learn how to code in GLSL shaders, in order to do the simulations in realtime.
I absolutely fell in love with shaders. I love shaders because of their constraints and simplicity. - There are no libraries - only mathematical functions - The input is images... and the output is images... It is code from the perspective of the pixels... the individual elements that compose an image. I think of them as similar to haikus. All you have to do is describe an image in a few sentences of code. This forces me to think of algorithms from the perspective of the pixels... the atoms... the minimal components. And I'm not there yet, but I think the simplicity of shaders can be an expressive language.

So anyway, I grabbed all the layers of simulations I was doing with shaders for efecto mariposa. I broke them into modules... and put them together into an openFrameworks addon. My first openSource contribution was ofxFX.

It got very popular and helped others to incorporate shaders into their work.

Thanks to that addon, I met Molmol Kuo and Zach Lieberman.
And thanks to Zach, I applied to parsons, and moved to NYC : )

Fast forward two years and in 2014 when I was working on my thesis... I was working on a series of projects about awareness and the tools we use to see the world around us. This machine in particular prints a large-scale horizon showing the transition between the city and the mountains.

To construct a continuous horizon I was scraping google street view data.

Finding ways to stitch the panoramic images together.

Then I found this depthmap data in their API

Having z allows me to add up point clouds.

The results were for me like inventing photography again...

I have to choose a location, put my camera in focus, and then wait for the calls to come back from the server with points of light.

These images of public spaces emerged slowly from the depth of a private database.

I worked with the style until I felt the results were honest about the nature of the process.

[interact with it... show around] I tried to prepare some new point clouds for this talk, and found that Google's changed their API.

So sometime since 2014, Google made these images into limited editions.

This is an intrinsic fragility in working with proprietary tools.

[Drink water]
At Mapzen we work with open standards... using community created and maintained data... like openStreetMap data... Everything we do is open source

I have the privilege of working with a stellar line up of some of the best professionals in the field.

Geraldine Sarmiento (@sensescape)

Like Geraldine Sarmiento, which is here in Eyeo also representing mapzen... [breathe] I work as a graphic engineer.

doing experiments in the open

Experiment on LIDAR + SfM + OpenStreetMap (Python/C++)

Pushing the limits

Of what can be done with maps

Line of Sight

Using open data (This project shows all the satellites overhead at a given moment.) Also working with open source helps build community.

Weili Shi (@shiweili)

these are some projects made using mapzen's tools.

Tyler Green (@greent_tyler)

how much of the community in this room exists because of processing and this book?

This relationship between openness and community... is a solution to fragility. That's why I wrote The Book of Shaders, together with my wife Jen...

So other people don't need to replicate my difficult and esoteric process of teach-yourself-shaders.

this is work from my students at parsons

Kenichi Yoneda (@kyndinfo)

This is some work of Kenichi Yoneda... which is one of the mayor contributors to the book.

Joseph Fiola (@vjzef)

Joseph Fiola. How use this patterns

Joseph Fiola (@vjzef)

on his VJ performance. This happen in the beginning of this year in Montreal
These are some of the people who have joined this project, donating time and effort to help others learn. I'm just so thankful to them. They've translated the book of shaders to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish and French. The Italian translation is on the way. Also talking to them is bringing new voices to the project. I have this feeling that the book is starting to have a life of its own.
So along with writing the teaching metaphors, I found my self developing tools for the book. The embedded live coding editor is crucial. It decreases the distance from reading of a concept to trying it in code. [zoom in] Also the little helpers to tweak and change variables are very helpful to make abstract concept more tangible. For example a vec3 can be a color, a position or direction. This concept are interchangeable in the shader. Because shaders are basically mathematical functions and vectors have that plasticity.
Like this artist, ppl are using the book's editor everyday. I like to enter here every day and see new things appear.

Lately I've been writing shaders for an openFrame I made from a raspberryPi and some garbage in my apartment basement

I've been enjoying the challenge of making shaders harmonious enough to live in my house, and I've spiraled back around to mandalas, my old friends from art therapy.

"Mandala" refers loosely to any symbolic circular form that refers to “the whole”. We can find them in all major religions. [double press here] :)

Jung's diagram of the psychic structure, including the collective unconscious. Note how he deliberately made it look like a mandala.

Traditional Tibetan Buddhist mandalas are made from grains of sand.
They are ritualistically created and destroyed. This seems like a practice of fragility.

Remember Jung's flood nightmares that came from the collective unconscious?

"I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble and the death of countless thousands... Two weeks passed then the visions returned, still more violent than before and an inner voice spoke:

Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this."

C. G. Jung, October 1913

Jung's description of the flood nightmares.

Visions of flooding are already happening in worldwide, and scientists have predicted from about 0.5 meter to 1.5 meter sea level rise by 2100. These are fragile times.

Rio de Janeiro

This is Rio, a beautiful complicated city that I love.

Rio de Janeiro

At Mapzen, we are working in this is a visualization of sea level rising. It is made with our VectorTiles (made from OpenStreetMap data) together with our new elevation raster tiles. Combined it's possible to construct a terrain with world coverage and see what areas are affected by the sea level rising. Although sea-level-rise estimates disagree, and it's hard to find consensus on papers, this map will be useful to help with the communication around climate change.

SFC                                                                 NYC

Like efecto mariposa this are images of fragile and complex system fighting for balance... reacting non linearly... temperamentally... unpredictably
I found in the ephemeral nature of mandalas, the harmony to accept fragility... To be gentle and listen the flow... To be open to others and the whole... I find refuge in synchronicity, in the fact that doing an internet search for XML 6 and a half years ago would lead me here:
[pause] Looking back...
Synchronicity invites me to new york, to be in Zach's class... that lead me to this moment [click]

[pause]
Also lead me to work in the open... which lead me here today with you.
Thanks to every person and every event that interweave a path, a network, a home a family... with me

patriciogonzalezvivo.github.io/eyeo16

Thank you all

patricio.io | @patriciogv

Thanks you
What are the chances? Patricio González Vivo patricio.io | @patriciogv Hola, EYEO! Mi nombre es Patricio Gonzalez Vivo. Es un honor esta acá con ustedes... Hello, my name is Patricio Gonzalez Vivo. It's an honor to be here. Big thanks to Dave, Jer, Wes and Caitlin for inviting me to share my work today. Also thanks to my wife, Jen Lowe, who is my collaborator in all things, including this talk. [make sure sound is on] I thought I'd start by showing my most embarrassing work on the internet, just to get it out of the way.