Twitter Words Visualization

by pixelpusher on Tuesday 23 February 2010
[Blog, Visuals, video]

A visualization of each individual word used in twitter status updates overnight from 6PM GMT on Feb 22 2010 until 10AM GMT on Feb 23. Movement is caused by the list of words growing, as the program sees more individual words. Words used more often are larger and brighter (they grow logarithmically). There were a few points where the feed was lost, and it recounted the same status update over and over (you can tell where because the same words grow larger) but I decided to post this version anyway, because I still think it is interesting in this state. I have collected more data, such as word ordering, and will work on another version. done in Processing – source code is here (you need to add your twitter username and password)

The video above is a bit fuzzy  – here’s a better image:

A visualization of words used in twitter posts over a single night

Tests for a music video for PJE

by pixelpusher on Thursday 21 January 2010
[Blog, Visuals, video]

I’m working on a music video for a song by PJE called The Employee and doing some tests.  The idea is to create the surrealistic daydream of a 1950’s woman on her first day on the assembly line of a dreary, machine-like typist job.  I’m doing all the visuals rendered in fluxus, cut with some excellent archival footage of office films from archive.org.  This one, a 1950’s film called “Office Etiquette” is singular for having some really nice, sweeping, tracking chots mixed with good close-ups, which work well in a music video.  The original has such a cheery attitude about mind-numbing, repetitive busywork that is practically crawling on its knees and begging to be subverted.

I will first cut the video as a straight music video, with close/wide/tracking shots and clean cuts to the beat, then add in the surrealistic, colorful 3D animations done using fluxus and bit by bit break down its sanity.  Look here for more…

ICE_SNAKE==NOISE

by pixelpusher on Wednesday 13 January 2010
[Blog, Visuals, video]

Recorded from a live performance.  My first audio-visual (not just visual) work in about 5 years.  Created for NOISE==NOISE and The Curiosity Collective’s JohnnyMass on 28 Dec. 2009.  Uses Fluxus & SuperCollider.

Smooth Hands

by pixelpusher on Tuesday 5 January 2010
[Blog, Visuals, images]

hands-smooth-inner02

Originally uploaded by da mad pixelist

I’ve been experimenting with extruded shapes, with the end goal of fabricating some interesting ones using a 3D printer at the University I teach at, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (UK).

So far, it has been a long learning process – first, making extrusions of my hands using Fluxus and a custom-written OpenCV-based image-outline-tracer in C++ (using some OpenFrameworks); then, using Dave’s extrusion functions in fluxus mixed with my live-drawing sketches, coupled with the OBJ-file export, and finally imported into Blender (for some nice ray-tracing).

The trouble is, I can create 3D shapes but hey have no “solidity,” which means their outlines have no thickness. Apparently you can’t 3D print objects and just hope that they are thick enough, or tweak it on the machine, as I’d hoped. No, as with all computers and electronic devices, they only do EXACTLY what you tell them to do, and nothing more or less.

The image here is a reject from Fluxus/Blender, where I created an inner shape by duplicating the original shape and growing it outward along its normals (used for lighting, normals are perpendicular to the surface of the object, meaning they point exactly outwards and are useful for expanding shapes). The problem is that my shape is so complex, I can’t get away with simply growing it. I’m going to need to do some horrible maths, I can feel it…

Still, I really like this image.  I’m a big fan of Salvador Dali (don’t laugh) and the infinite blue background and contrasting, surreally-melted hand shape in front lends this image a particularly Dali-esque quality, I think.

messing about with solid 3D geometry

by pixelpusher on Thursday 10 December 2009
[Blog, Visuals, video]

Just a sketch, playing with “extruded shapes” – basically, 3D geometry in a big long cheese log, doped up with some sinusoidal harmonics.

Some code:

(require fluxus-016/shapes
scheme/list)

(clear)

(define l (build-list 20 (lambda (i)
(vector 0 0 (+ 10 (* -1 i))))))

(define w (build-list 20 (lambda (i)
(* 1 (+ 1 (sin (* 3.14156 (/ i 20))))))))

;(define w (build-list 10 (lambda (i) 4)))

(hint-wire)

(define (sinuside circ complexity)
(define (_ c n)
(cond [(< n 1) empty]
[else
(cons (vadd (car c) (vmul (car c)
(* 0.3 (sin (* (* complexity 3.1415) (/ n (length circ)))))))
(_ (cdr c) (- n 1)))
])
)
(_ circ (length circ))
)

(define circle (sinuside (build-circle-points 80 1) 16))

(define pe
(with-state
(rotate (vector 0 0 90))
(build-partial-extrusion circle l 1)))

(recalc-normals 1)

(define (draw-extr e)
(with-primitive e
(partial-extrude
;(* (length l) (+ 0.5 (* 0.25 (+ (sin (time)) 1))))
(length l)
(sinuside (build-circle-points 80 1) (round (* (time) 16)))
l
w
#(0 1 0)
1)
)
)

(define (animator)

(draw-extr pe)
)

(every-frame (animator))