What's Your Approach: Justin Windle

by Carl Camilla Lane

This post is sponsored by Levi’s. Find out how you can make your mark here.

Meet Justin Windle, an interactive creative developer who creates boundary-pushing, experiential digital work, currently at the Google Creative Lab. Justin’s work in the digital arts community not only utilizes, but progresses and reforms some of the most cutting-edge technology available on the market. His Chrome Experiments have become some of the most referenced and impressive pieces in terms of innovation and advancement for what is possible on the web today. In his free time, Justin is an active contributor to other collaborative projects such as the Levi’s® #MakeOurMark interactive social project.

Here Justin describes the Chrome Experiments project, which he calls The Engine, in his own words:

“In the past, the processes that formed an object were often evident in the object itself. Today, process is often hidden behind a veneer — behind ever smaller circuitry and glowing screens whose pixels appear contiguous. The Engine will attempt to illuminate the enigma of meaning, creativity and engineering in the text and audio submitted by its participants by creating a realtime — and potentially infinite — kinetic visualization…”

Like other artists who cut their teeth in the digital space, Justin’s approach to his work is defined by openness and collaboration. Many of his projects, for example, are open source and freely available online for anyone to build on or manipulate. On Justin’s personal blog, he claims his aim is to “provide a platform for sharing work and ideas and, wherever possible, provide source code and information to support this dialogue. He maintains that “this policy of openness and sharing promotes a healthy progression within whatever disciplines one might work.”

If you haven’t already checked out Chrome Projects series yet, you absolutely should. You can manipulate the flight patterns and inclinations of a digital flight of birds, or create your own recursive root structure. By fiddling with various tools and variables on a control panel at the top left of the screen, your browser becomes a kind of canvas for unexpected and wonderful visualizations.

It’s not a coincidence that these two examples of Chrome Experiments happen to draw inspiration from the natural world. Digital art, after all, is an excellent tool for testing how discrete variables interact with each other to affect systems. Users can determine, for example, the degree of cohesion or separation within a simulated flight of birds in the case of flocking, or the thickness and density of root structures in “Recursion Toy.”

“Recursion Toy”Creating a pretty visualization is one thing, but the boundary-pushing work happening in the digital space today isn’t relevant simply because of its design implications. Instead, digital experiments like Justin’s are relevant insofar as they help us generate new meanings, ask better questions, solve problems and explore new frontiers yet to be discovered.

Justin’s latest effort is an interactive social project — in collaboration with Levi’s — wherein social media users submit tweets and Soundcloud recordings to the #MakeOurMark and #Approach hashtags, answering the question: “What’s your approach?” The submission could be a simple tweet or an individual statement of purpose. It could be an audio recording, or even an original composition. As the community responds, their submissions will be gathered forth to create a “realtime visualization that showcases the diverse characteristics of the words and sounds themselves.”

Collaborate on this project by hashtagging #MakeOurMark #Approach through Twitter and Soundcloud. Learn more and get involved with the global art projects at levi.com/makeourmark.