sentence art? (ish)

Okay...so George has been teaching me a little bit of processing and with his amazing help (and I mean AMAZING) i've created this. basically when you press keys to type up sentences the blocks change and make pretty colours! i was wondering how words could be turned into pictures and this was a good start.

Fractal work

Something I cooked up today at uni and at home.



I modified this to create my own version. It uses a simple movieclip to create a fractal like effect, each branch spawns 2 smaller versions of the movieclip. A random hex RGB value is generated each time to keep it cycling colours.

It started as just looking at the source code from phong and then I just kept editing and adding things to it, much like the 'Play' method Matt Jones conjured up.

My fractal works better in full screen, so click here to see it in all its glory!

Source code.

Wrong Mirror

We use mirrors everyday to check our appearances without thinking twice about the high resolution image we see in it. I've coded up a quick and dirty mirror that blurs when you look into it. Approach the camera and the screen gets blurred.

Maybe it can make you think again about the everyday.

Surveillance

Using Google we can find many webcams which are publicly accessible. With a little digging around in the HTML code I realized that I could write a shell script repeatedly calling wget (a nifty command line program) which could grab the most recent frame every ten seconds.

I then processed the sequence of webcam images from each location to create a series of duo tone images. I'm thinking that these outputted images could be the seeds for an algorithmic music composition.

This is the output after processing the footage from a camera at Mason School of Business Graduate Lounge in Virginia:



This is the output after processing the footage from a camera at 51 High St in Ware:




This is the output after processing the footage from a camera that appears to be in a call centre in Argentina:



And here is what my screen looked like when the app was running:

3 experiments for the price of none!

I've been a bit lax with updating, so here's 3 experiments I've done so far with a sly promise of more to come.

First off is a project that I did for another module, but liked it so much that I continued to play with it. It's a flash application that uses a genetic algorithm to 'evolve' the collection of blocks to a specific colour. At the moment it evolves towards red because I forgot to implement a colour changing option, but that's easily implementable if I feel that it needs it.


Here's the source code for if you want to look how it works (actionscript 2.0)

Second is the 3D rotating box that I showed in one of the previous weeks.


I got most of the code (AS3) from a tutorial and then edited it to spin around without user interaction, so I can't really take credit for this one. Looks neat though!

Finally for something analogue, I've been going through a bit of a pixel art phase so I put these together using some Hama beads, an iron and a lovely assistant who shall not be named.



The mighty pirate's foot has come off, but otherwise I think they look great. Also make for a great conversation starter.

Edit: I just noticed that embedding swf's completely messes up the formatting of this page. HA!

Slightly gone wrong experiment number 1

For the first week I took a clip from the first season of The Wire where Omar is trying to gun down Avon. Unfortunately for Omar, Wee-Bey turns up at that moment and shoots Omar. As Wire watchers know there is a whole load of squabbling over space in the show - specifically over the corners, which is where the drugs are sold. This scene is a little different as Omar is out for revenge after his boyfriend has been tortured, mutilated, and killed by Avon's gang. Omar is one of the finest TV character I've ever seen. He is an armed robber who only ever steals from drug dealers (usually the Barksdale gang), he takes his Grandma to church once a month (she believes that he works at a diner in the airport - he believes she'll never pop in to check that) and uniquely in a show where everybody is a muthaf**king muthaf**ka he doesn't swear.

So in homage to the mighty Omar, I filtered the clip through a Processing app to bend the output from the regular intent of a piece of video. The app looped through the pixel array replacing the pixels with letters drawn from the phrase "Omar shoots Avon". The colour of the letter is taken from the colour of the pixel that is replaced.

By mapping the character size to the brightness of the pixel it could be argued that a spatial dimension is being added into a linear piece but I'm not entirely convinced on that as it is still displayed in a two dimensional screen.

There are parallels with space and the re-appropriation of space by its users which is often significantly different than that which it was designed for. This is more interesting and gives more scope for investigation. From this point of view the experiment can be seen as re-appropriating Quicktime or as de Certau might have said we have a tactical practice toward Quicktime, we are Omar while Quicktime is the Barksdale organisation :)

There is a technical problem with this experiment which is that the original clip loops a number of times. I think this is because the original clip has been compressed with H264 and the processing app is not actually grabbing each individual frame properly. If I look at this again this is an issue to check.

I doubt that this will be the experiment that I take to a further level.