I wanted to post some of my progress before it evloves even further. I feel like I have made some major breakthroughs in my ultimate goal of making art from code. Not a new concept at all, but Picaso wasn't the only painter.
Here is a test I ran today. The image this is based off is just something I grabbed off flickr, was just for testing, and won't be used for any final prints (credit: Lars Stephan).
To summarize how this was done; I use a source image (such as the one from flickr), and wrote code to add "brushes" to the stage. Each brush randomly moves around the "canvas", picks up the colors of the pixel from the source image, and paints a series of shapes to the stage and each shape jitters around and scales to help add some randomness.
I have already evolved the script past this point, but more to come later.
I decided my next step with the webcam was to attempt some motion tracking. After a couple nights work I managed to get something working fairly well.
The short explanation: I created a grid of squares over the webcam input, and each square is checking to see if there is a bright light under it. If it sees a bright light then it tells a green square to move to that position.
I am going to keep on posting my explorations with BitmapData until someone stops me.
My latest iteration turns the input from a webcam (or video) into a haltone effect (an idea given to me by Brandon Breaux). The squares analyze the intesity of the color they are over. If they are over a dark color they will get smaller, and if they are over a light color they will get bigger. This naturally causes a halftone effect.
As I promised I integrated the webcam into my last BitmapData test. I also decided to add some repulsion to the mouse so that you can push the squares around, and they will eventually return back to their origin.
Furthering my explorations with the BitmapData and classes, I came up with this effect. It's surprisingly easy to change one or two variables and have it give off an entirely different effect. I think my next step will be integrating this with your webcam.
I have always had it in the back of my head that it would be so handy to have one HTML file that could display and SWF file that you pass it. Very dynamic, I know. This concept came to necessity when I realized that Wordpress's upload feature automatically lower cases all your file names which obviously breaks the associations between the html, swf, and and .js embed files you might have (ActiveContent or what not). So i went ahead and built one.
Doesn't look like much, right? Well the good stuff is there, trust me. You just have to pass it a couple parameters like the path of the SWF, and the height and width. So a final URL would look like this:
It may look long, but most of that is just the path to the SWF file. Go ahead and play around with changing the height and width. If you want it to be the size of your browser window just change "percent=false" to "percent=true".
Lately I have been forcing myself to get better working with classes, and BitmapData in flash. So my tests have been including a little bit of each, and I wanted to post up some of the odd results I have gotten along the way.
Having a week off from work will do weird things to a person. I assumed I was going to sit around being as bored as I could possibly make myself, but I found it actually had the opposite effect. I ended up starting up a bunch of random projects, and I think the most interesting ones that came out of it was my flash Morse DeCode projects.
In my pursuit for taking code outside of the computer, I bought an Arduino board to start playing around with circuit boards. Once I got one LED light blinking I started thinking about what you could do with one flashing light. The first thing that came to mind was morse code.
This video I threw together explains the rest of the Morse DeCode project.
My future plans include optimizing it to read at a faster rate, inserting spaces between words, and eventually turning it into something that could theoretically be used by certain disabled people to communicate. I am sure there is a lot of other technology out there that is more advanced, but there is something special about the idea that anyone in their home can create the technology to help others communicate.
Someone tipped me off to these videos by Glenn Marshall that were coded entirely in processing. Not only are they visually stunning, but they also feature the music of my favorite duo of all time; Boards of Canada. The man has good taste.
So it has been a little slow on Blog lately not only because of life obligations, but also because I have been focusing some of my free time in creating a new division of Visual Advance called Labs. Seems like these labs are all the rage these days, so I had to have one. Actually the decision came more because I all the sudden had an obsession with making these random clock concepts and I needed a good place to distribute them.
Give them a look and feel free to download any of the screen savers. Hopefully there will be some more Chronometer projects on their way.
