In case you didn't know, pixelpusher (evan.raskob) is a live video performance artist, or "pixelist" based in London, UK. Click the Info button above for hiring and contact info.
I decided to take the plunge and develop an Android app. We’ve got a good idea for a game for all ages. A really good idea. I could have started on a iPhone/iPad app, but I am put off by Apple’s “curatorial” ways and can’t afford, as a small developer, to be denied or held back from developing my app. That, and I don’t have an iPhone (yes I am the only media arts person in London without one, it seems). I have a semi-ancient Google G1 running on T-Mobile, and I love it because it has a thumb keyboard and usually works well as a phone.
It also runs WikiNotes, where I keep all of my notes and diary. WikiNotes is a free-form notepad-like tool (a wiki, like Wikipedia) that I can organize (or dis-organize) my thoughts and notes into. It really needs an update and some more features, but even without things like undo and revisions it still beats the pants off anything else out there, as far as I’m concerned.
Moving on – developing Android on Eclipse is so easy to set up I thought something must have been missing. Especially on OS X. Instructions are well-written and organized on the Android developer’s website. You can also use Processing to develop to Android but my aging phone only runs Android OS 1.6, and Processing supports versions 2.X and up. I understand the need for forward-compatibility, so I won’t complain. Most new phones run 2.0+ these days. Rumor has it that the G2 is due out soon from T-Mobile…
After writing a simple “Hello, Android” app, I looked for a Java games engine and found the AndEngine project.
It’s open source and has some good, clear documentation, including this excellent 5-minute video that takes you from 0 to an app. Rock. Done. The physics examples are great, too. More to come…
Drawn together is an interactive installation project, exploring creative crowd sourcing in hand drawn music videos. It allows groups of individuals to create a music video by asking each of them to visually interpret small sections of music, and combining their work. This particular video came from the collaborative results of about 80 people drawing 211 individual drawings (frames of animation) that each interpreted a frame of audio (at 12 frames per second, that comes to 66 milliseconds).
That’s roughly half the frames we needed to make s smooth video, so the result is pretty jerky, but I thought it was interesting to show it as a work in progress. I could have filled in the rest of the frames myself, or with my friends, but I chose not to because that would destroy the spirit of the whole project. Instead, I will show this again in Brixton in early September where we will finish the video completely with another crowd.
My first impression of all the participants was how seriously they took this project! Some of my skeptical colleagues predicted that, at a festival, many people would be all loosened up and draw anything from Jackson Pollack-infused doodles to a variety of softcore porn and low-quality graffiti. Well, the results are in and only one phallus appeared, and that was from one of our neighbors in the next tent with my permission (*someone* had to draw the first one).
Our tent neightbor, Sabrepulse, from the 8-bit radio show One Life Left, interprets, uh, dragons
The rest of the people thoughtfully bit their lip and produced a variety of sometimes abstract, sometimes representational, sometimes intricate drawings that represented the short, abstract sound looping through their headphones. A few of them put on the headphones and looked at me with questioning eyes – “I think it’s broken? There’s only this crunching sound.” Then, after listening thoughtfully, they went to work on it and produced a surprising number of pictures, like the bicycle by a country road (above).
What did we learn from this?
First, that next time I show this, I will have people sit in an “isolation booth” (which was the original idea, changed for budgetary and time-related reasons) so they are more free to doodle whatever comes into their minds. Drawing is not a social act, it is something very personal, and the headphones and looping sound make it even more so. It also takes time, and I didn’t want people to feel rushed.
Which brings me to lesson #2 – this takes a lot more time per person than I estimated. I figured, from my personal tests, that people would get into the flow of it and knock out a few frames each in a few minutes. I didn’t count on 1) having to explain it individually to 80 people and convince them it was well worth their time instead of watching Thom Yorke or hitting the Money Shoulder treehouse bar, and 2) that people would take so much time drawing extremely detailed, intricate drawing such as man-eating dinosaurs and what appeared to be a realistic rendering of the burning bush that spoke to Moses back in biblical days.
Regarding #1, I misjudged festival crowds – my experience with installations is that people go in a steady stream, but our tents (and the stuttering schedules for bands and events) produced clumps of people at odd intervals. Plus, I had to use my second computer for BulletTime (see below) so the economy of scale possible with this project was reduced to a single choke-point. No problem, that’s what the first test run is for!
With #2, I was really inspired by what I observed. This proved that simple black and white line drawings, with minimal brushes, could not only be expressive for a wide range of people (kids to parents to general revelers), but also be so immersive as to drown out a blaring, midday festival, and hold their attention for up to 15 minutes in some cases. After seeing the project with real participants, I can think of all sorts of ways to improve it, including activating the “onion-skin” mode where people can actually see the frame drawn before theirs, and the animation isn’t random but sequential starting from the beginning of the song. I would have loved to have tried this, except for lack of time and equipment. Will definitely revisit this at a future date.
Bullet Time
My two (now former) students from Digital Screen Arts at UCA Farnham, Benjamin Burdock and Christopher Belcher, came to me a little over a year ago with a crazy idea about creating a portable rig for shooting Matrix-like Bullet-time movies on the cheap. After a solid year of hard blood, sweat, steel fabrication, and coding, they finished it in time for Glastonbury. The Big Chill was the first time I got to see it in action, after some email-enabled coding and debugging sessions with Ben. The very talented Dave Morgan (another UCA grad) replaced Ben for this trip.
The result was well worth it. Bullet Time drew a good crowd every day, especially at night when we invited people to do acrobatics inside the all-seeing arc of Xbox cameras, frozen into a movie of all the cameras capturing in sequence, spinning around them like budding Neos dodging digital bullets, and rear-projected the result instantly on the side of the tent for passers-by to see.
I also learned a lot in the process, especially about how difficult and unpredictable it is to run 30 USB web cams off of 2 computers, be they shiny new MacBook pros, PCs, or Mac towers. (Test results say you can only run 6 cameras per USB hub per USB bus, for a max of 12 per laptop, in case you are crying out for an answer).
Other Highlights
MadLab (Manchester Digital Lab) and their robot building/racing exhibition; Olly Venning and his stop-frame animation workshop (and my tent-mate); and finally Tristan Brady-Jacobs and his gang doing long-exposure photography, and helped perform using a long-exposure inspired Processing sketch during Nick Rothwell’s set:
Thanks to Julia Dempsey for organizing The Swap Meet (the overall area of the festival which we were a part of) and Lewis Sykes for organizing the Cybersonica camp.
Drawn Together allows groups of individuals to create a music video by asking each of them to visually interpret small sections of music, and combining their work.
This particular video came from the collaborative results of about 80 people drawing 211 individual drawings (frames of animation) that each interpreted a frame of audio (at 12 frames per second, that comes to 66 milliseconds).
The experience begins with a piece of music broken into short sections, be that a slice of a drum break or a sliver of a synth warble. Individuals are given a black screen, a digital drawing tool and a looping, random section of the music. They are encouraged to draw their own visual interpretation of that sound. Once satisfied with their handiwork, the drawing is saved, linked to the sound it represents and becomes a small section of the music video. When all the sound clips have a visual representation linked to them, the video is shown.
Like the early 20th Century animator Oscar Fischinger, participants are encouraged to draw in black-and-white line drawings, giving them a free range of expression within strict stylistic constraints.
Drawn Together builds on ideas of collective consciousness and puts a modern spin on the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse – where artists would draw body parts and conceal them under folds of paper, before passing it to the next person to add to the mystery figure.
Like in Exquisite Corpse, participants in Drawn Together do not get to see the video until it is entirely complete. Cards are handed out with details of how they can see it online, or in a private viewing.
A Bit More:
At the same time, Drawn Together is a completely Open Source production (developed in Processing, graphics created in Inkscape) and the source code will be available after The Big Chill on this website.
Additionally, Drawn Together explores the idea of factory production in art by dividing up an artistic task (e.g. creating a music video) between a collection of anonymous, interchangeable strangers. The result is uncertain – is it stronger or more interesting than a conceptually coherent work by a single author? Is it more interesting because of its complexity? Or is the result something different, entirely? Answering these questions requires us to use the software and judge the results.
The medium of production, e.g. the Open source software, constrains the artistic possibilities of the images (black and white, with limited ability to create complex shapes). Yet, the Open source license of the software allows anyone to create a derivative version with more visual possibilities built in. The trade-off to this approach is that the more specialization and complexity are built into the visual tools for the software, the more the participants are constrained to the software’s authors’ version of visual possibility, resulting in a production model more like a traditional factory where the creative power is in the hands of those who design the system, not those who carry it out.
Contact:
If you’d like more information on Drawn Together, or to show it or other pixelpusher projects, or to schedule an interview with the artist Evan Raskob, please contact pixelpusher at info@pixelist.info.
I hacked up an example of doing depth-of-field in Processing, based in part on the Bloom example that comes with the GLGraphics library, and heavily in part on Memo’s pervious experiment with DOP. It does depth-of-field based solely on the brightness of the pixels, and relies on the fact that the background is white, but heck it’s decent. I’ll use this for an upcoming black-and-white realtime Processing project. Note: this won’t run on an old minimac or Macbook or netbook, I tried and it fails because of lack of OpenGL shader support.
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
