by pixelpusher on Sunday 27 April 2008
[Software, Blog]
Originally uploaded by da mad pixelist on flkr
I’ve been playing with the offsetcircles patch from before, and came up with a whole bunch of nice results. Taking a page from Claude, I made the drawing recursive (hmm… makes me want to use Scheme…) and rendered out these two short videos. These are fun experiments in basic, rotary motion. Its really amazing what fun you can have with simple math, rotations, and some blending.
There’s also this one.
Here’s the actual sketch plus code (the last version, anyway):
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 25 March 2008
[Software, Blog]
You’ve probably heard of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia. If you haven’t, and especially if you have, and you happen to live somewhere near London, go directly to the Tate Modern to see their new exhibition of their combined works, do not pass go, do not collect $200. This exhibit is so chock full of major works that you can easily get lost, or worse, distracted.
From the Tate Modern exhibition website:
In the 1920s Duchamp ostensibly gave up making art works to play competitive chess. But he was fascinated by the idea of creating virtual forms. Helped at times by Man Ray, he experimented with stereoscopic views and built a number of devices that generated the illusion of seeing a drawing or design in three dimensions.
The devices that “generated the illusion of seeing a drawing or design in three dimensions” consist of what look like CAD drawings on circular plates; circles of increasing diameter nestled inside one another, filling the whole disc, or filling part of the disk along with the skeleton of a 3D cylinder, and other fractal-looking drawings composed of similarly nested, self-similar shapes. The discs (there are many of them) are aligned in a grid pattern, and each slowly rotates. Staring at them gives the impression of a 3D objects slowly spinning on an off-center axis.
I was a bit blown away by this concept, dating from not long after the invention of electrical machines. I’m not a great art historian, but a friend called this Op-Art and I agree with that classification. Now, the brilliant thing about having computers around to do drawings for us is that we aren’t limited to making a simple disc of optical illusions spin at a constant speed. First off, we aren’t even limited to a single version of that disc. I can make an almost infinitely variable sketch of rings-within-rings, and spin them at a variable rate based on a simple software program (Processing; source code included).
I showed this to a few friends the other night at one of our OpenLab OpenSalons (a fairly casual get-together where a few of us show some works in progress, drink, eat, and geek out), and Robert Atwood pointed out that there’s no reason to limit the sketch to rotating the entire disc - we can make every inner ring of it spin independently. As we discussed what it might look like, Claude quietly made this happen (using Pd/GEM).
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by pixelpusher on Friday 1 February 2008
[Software, Blog]
I’ve been a bit obsessed with John Maeda’s book, Maeda@Media. It’s a very visual journey through his works and artistic process. I find his work very minimalist, which is fitting for a man who wrote a book called “Simplicity.” Not only is it minimalist, but essential, in many ways - stripped to the core.
At first glance, I thought some of his works were too simplistic, and uninteresting, but the more I look at them the more I understand about the ideas underneath. Like all great art, the presentation is a function of the concepts flowing beneath the dark waters.
Speaking of dark waters, I wrote a little Processing program to duplicate some of his works, so I could manipulate and build on them. These explore the concept of negative space vs positive space in an image, and what sort of interfering patterns can be created from them. This is a first study, and my goal is to add these images with transparency in the negative (black) regions to my pixelist set as interfering, spherical, overlapping worlds that I can manipulate live using the wiiremote.
John Maeda’s website is http://www.maedastudio.com/ and is books are well worth a look. Apologies for “stealing,” but as Picasso said: “Bad artists copy, great artists steal.” And I’m such a great artist (cough, cough)…
NOTE: If you actually look at the source code, you’ll see that instead of simply drawing shapes, I used a very basic and rough animation class to do the drawing each frame. This makes the code a bit more complex to read, but it also implies that there are animated versions of this code that exist somewhere… In fact, it started out as an animation, and may well end up that way. I used Perlin noise at first to generate random interference patterns, but didn’t like the results as much as a considered, algorithmic approach.
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by pixelpusher on Wednesday 21 November 2007
[images, Software, Visuals, Blog]
I’ve been playing with this excellent program originally done by Josh Nimoy for an installation with GRL (Graffiti Research Labs). It’s a chunky, colorful, NYC-graffiti-style painting tool that works cross-platform and is open source. I’d been kicking around this idea in my head for awhile about creating a live performance painting tool, which isn’t exactly an original concept - see Golan Levin’s Yellowtail, Zach Lieberman’s Drawn, and the very hypnotic SuperDraw, for example. I’ve never seen Yellowtail live, but I did see the very early version of SuperDraw performed to some robotic German techno in the basement of the old Tonic club on NYC’s Lower East Side. Fantastic! Who thought that drawing abstract, floating shapes in time to music could be so engrossing?
Read on for more and download link
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