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Lumia, images and links to other sites where people are creating dynamic visual art.

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Lumia are dynamic graphic pieces that combine color, form and motion to affect audiences as music does.

This piece introduces the ideas of scientists, inventors, and painters who imagined a visual art as powerful as music.

Links to the sites of others working on lumia and related arts.

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'weDDDing' is an interpretation of the David Bowie instrumental "The Wedding." It opens with polygons pulsing in 4/4 time and changing color to echo the peeling of bells in the music's opening bars. As the intensity of the music builds, the polygons begin to move, leaving trails of color behind. They change color and disappear. When they reemerge it is as saturated lines floating on three clearly distinct planes. Each line, responding to a percussive event, becomes yellow and heads to the center of the space to join the others. Resolving a tension in the music, the star-like cluster becomes a new object comprised of polygons rotating in complex phase relationships with one another, a tribute to abstract film-maker John Whitney. The saturation of the structure changes to scultp a 3D surface that shifts from convex to concave in response to Mr. Bowie's vocalzations.

While I was working on this piece, Cliff Pickover dropped a pair of Chromatek 3D glasses on my desk and wondered out loud what I might do with them. The glasses work by shifting warm colors forward and cool colors back and moving less saturated colors toward the center plane. Both of these effects are used, particularly in the latter half of the piece.