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Robin is working at CiTu as chef de projet / and CTO TheArtCollider. He is working closely with select artists to realize and implement TAC projects and infrastructure.

His professional experience since ranges from consulting to hardware/software co-development, focusing on Research & Development for installation-art, life and open-web standards.

Amongst others, Robin worked or did freelance work at the Netherlands Institute for New Media Art, Mediamatic, the picnic.nl conference, V2 Lab, Kunst Univesitaet Linz and the San Francisco Art Institute. These days Robin teaches and engineers Media-Art at the University of Paris, France where he emphasises on connected creation.

Robin is technical-director for various sound and film-productions and involved in 64studio.com and ardour.org.

Joining the free-software-movement in the mid 90’s, he became author of renowned GNU/Linux applications and is known in the FLOSS community for running the linuxaudio.org portal since 2005 as well as co-organizing the Linux Audio Conference since 2009.

Mixx, fastmixer and slowmixer simply cycle through all (currently online) video streams. They take a playlist http://theartcollider.net/yp/feed?type=m3u?q=video as input and play outputs each stream for a slightly randomized amount of time (mixx: 10-23 sec, fastmixer: 4-11 sec, slowmixer:20-33 sec).

Mixx is uses by other projects that require an easy-to-use random input and is also comes in handy during exhibition to cycles through available projects.

It’s a cellular automate, much like the "Game of life". However the “initial conditions” (image) comes from a video of the Collider.

The set of rules is quite simple: each amoeba has a single property: “Life-Energy”:

• if the “energy” is > 1000 : it is split in half (reproduction)
• if the “energy” is < 50: it turns from black to white
• if the “energy” is < 1: it dies

Movement to an adjacent pixel costs 4 “energy-points”. After moving to a new pixel it modifies the pixel it moves onto.

There’s 3 Variants:

• amoeba: “eat” color
• crystallizer: “produce” color (increase saturation)
• ash: burns the image (blur effect)

For example the ‘amoeba’ /eats/ 45% of the saturation and add the color-value it /eats/ to its life-energy.

The process is split in two phases:

1. get an image from the ArtCollider and spawn amoebas - spread out in random /nests/ on the image (amount and initial energy depends on the image size)
2. for each amoeba:
   1. “smell” the surrounding area (3×3 pixels) for max food. → chose direction of movement.
   2. if no other amoeba is on that pixel → move onto it.
   3. /process/ the pixel it moves onto
   4. at the end of each iteration, the current image is added as video-frame to the output video.

The “smell” and “process” functions are different for each breed (colorizer, ash); but otherwise the art-piece is the same.

There are experiments with mixed breeds: e.g. some creatures only like and eat “red” and produce blue while others in the same image eat any color and produce “shades of green”,… but those eco-systems are really really really hard to stabilize.

The project was inspired by Joseph Nechvatal. I’ve designed and developed it based on an idea of his “viral works” which he has done in the 90’s called “A-life”. Joseph he gave it his blessing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyUx2v2QQkU

Named after the ”Father of the Deaf” this project animates video-avatars to write text on screen.

It takes text input from the Collider and creates a video as output. Internally there is a collection of avatars - a video of persons /wiping/ the screen so that there is at least one video-frame for each pen-position. Depending on the glyph these video-frames are re-ordered and stitched together to produce any given text.