from september 24th to october 11th, Liberty Hall, an iconic building located in centre of Dublin, was turned into a 50 metre, low resolution display, similar to the famous Blinkenlights project in Berlin: 330 windows, powered by energy efficient LED lights, became giant rgb pixels, ready to broadcast digital art across the city skyline. In order to provide the needed contents, a competition was held and I replied to the call for works. In those days I really had little time to start and develop a new piece of code, but , in the weeks before, I did play a little with metaballs and thought I could reuse some of those experiments: metaball algorithms scale nicely to every resolution, are easy to implement in the selected platform (Processing) and, most important, the idea of huge sticky balls, bouncing inside a 50 mt glass box in the middle of Dublin, just sounded fun. So I sat down and created the “World’s biggest lava lamp“.
the competition is going to end in a few days and I don’t think I’ll have time to submit something else, so these are probably going to be my last tiny sketches.
…an open challenge to artists and programmers to create the most compelling creative work possible with the programming language Processing using 200 characters or less.
This competition has a lot of features i instantly fell in love with; to name a few:
1) all the submitted artworks will be open source
2) it works on the idea that limitations can catalyze creativity and applies it to creative coding
3) it’s sponsored by Rhizome
Needless to say that, about 5 minutes after seeing the call for works, I was working on my processing IDE. Here’s the my first submissions (click on the thumb to link to the live sketch):
You can notice I was having serious sleep disorder from my witchy haunted hair and my somewhat lost expression
What people at the university labeled with the word “INNOVAZIONE” (= innovation) in a bulgy, solid impact font, was a light, quick and dirty alternative to optical flow: tracking movement (ie: differences between 2 video frames) inside different sensible areas, I was trying to build little contrallable interface bits to be used in situations where lightness on the hardware was more important than precision (ie: old hardware, embedded, tiny parts of complex software, etc.).
[after the jump, another couple videos and some aftermath...] Continua a leggere
I finally had some time to rehandle the chromaSampler:
I mainly made some minor tuning in the code (mouseless colour picking, timed snapshots of the ongoing painting, live thresholding adjustment). Since some people were interested in the source code, i posted it here; it’s licensed BSD, so you can use it as you wish, just drop me a line if you decide to make something cool out of it . Continua a leggere
Recently I worked for FHNW University as an interface designer for the eMotion project, a psycho-geographic experiment where the architecture of St. Gallen’s Art Museum, the art objects and the visitors’ biological feedback (via biometric sampling) are mixed together to create the topographic representation of an experience. Continua a leggere
a couple nights ago i read bryan chung’s lessons on augmented reality and optical flow; i loved the reading and felt the urge to code something similar.
after a little casual tinkering, i found myself playing with an optical flow algorithm, a couple trig functions and a basic flat physics mini-engine; “wait a minute”, i said, “this is arkanoid!”.
my monkey headed friend is currently working for Aegis Media Agency; the other day, after a day at the office, we had a chat about data visualization, relative platforms and possible charting models. i digested our talk for some time, then i came up with a metaball based tag cloud visualizer.
imho, sticky balls are a good model to describe semantic clouds: setting the relative stickyness between two clouds you can map relations in an easy to read way.
One of the last toys i made: it basically samples the color from one or more objects in the video stream and uses them as virtual brushes. I’ts conceptually similar to what happens in long exposure photography, but with a twist of real-time and selective control. The part I like the most of this thing is it’s totally impromptu mood: it enables you to create graphic textures and brushes using whatever you have in your pockets.
coding life-like critters always intrigued me: i loved my norns and, while other kids spent their time on tetris, i was tuning my crobots.
yesterday night, feeling this synth-life mood picking my head, i tried my hand at simulating biological movement; i was inspired by robert from flight404’s incredible snakes and ended up with a few simple, calligraphic swimming bugs. (click the image to run the code)
