by pixelpusher on Thursday 5 June 2008
[Blog, Software]
A software art project that remixes the skylines and sights of cities I’ve lived in and visited. Download at: NYLONCityBlob
Awhile back, in 2006, I put my lifelong obsession with New York City’s buildings to good use. 2006 was the year my wife and I moved to London to start a new life as expatriates, reversing the colonial journey that started our home country in favor of the old country on the edge of a new, powerful-again Europe.
Leaving New York, I felt like a traitor. New York is in my family’s blood. My grandfather loved nothing more than to take us around the sights - the Empire State, the Twin Towers, Macy’s, the countless delicatessens shining as culinary diamonds in the rough preserve of Mexicans making Chinese food and Chinese baking Pizzas. My grandfather spent all his years in New York, knew every inch of the serpentine BQE (Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway) slithering over and through industrial Brooklyn on its way up north to upstate and sweet oblivion, finally exploding into the Hutch, the Cross-Bronx, and the Bruckner.
Not that he would have ventured that far north - he hated grass, and crickets. Especially crickets.
I don’t want to give the impression that my family is parochial; they’re well-traveled and world-wise, but they always come back. I still haven’t returned.
I ‘ve turned my world travels into an art project - just as the skylines of all the places I’ve visited and lived get jumbled in my head over time, this software remixes them and rescales them and blends them into a chimera of a city. I’ll add to it over time but right now it is NY (New York City) LON (London). Sometimes it gets intimate, and small places crowd out the big, important, impersonal ones. Use the mouse to navigate. Mac-only (for now). Enjoy.
If you’d like to show it somewhere, please contact me at pixelpusher@flkr.com, I’m open to the idea.
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by pixelpusher on Monday 25 February 2008
[Blog, Software]
I was playing around with doing some object tracking and movement recognition when I started playing and came up with a quick sketch that turns detected movement into bubbles. It’s a good starting point for a series of interactive works, I think. I can see adding image textures to the bubbles, as well as making them react a little differently as time goes on…
The maxmspjitter patch in a zip archive:
movement bubbles sketch
MovementBubbles (all non-cv.jit portions) by
Evan Raskob is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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by pixelpusher on Friday 1 February 2008
[Blog, Software]
I’ve been a bit obsessed with [tag]John Maeda[/tag]’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 [tag]Processing[/tag] 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 [tag]pixelist[/tag] set as interfering, spherical, overlapping worlds that I can manipulate live using the [tag]wiiremote[/tag].
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 Tuesday 25 September 2007
[Blog, Software]
I’ve been working on some new collaborative visuals software for performance, and finally finished the first version of it. Basically, it’s a modified and stripped down version of my main performance patch, Sine-Rave, without the audio analysis and effects. read on for screenshots and more
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