blprnt.blg

Switching Over

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:22:00 +0000

Today is the day.

I'm switching this blog over to a new design and a new server, so as of this post this blog has gone stale.

To find the new, mould-free one, go here:

http://blog.blprnt.com

For the new RSS feed, point to here:

http://blog-blprnt-com.bryght.net/node/feed

Don't fear change.

blog.blprnt.com >> Beta version

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:18:00 +0000

I am testing out a new version of this blog - with more features and driven by a much more robust system than Blogger.

Please, have a look. If you have any comments, or find anything that isn't working (I'm sure there are tonnes of things!) post a comment here or over there. It would be very much appreciated.

If all goes well, the new site will launch before the end of the week.

Index for X: An Experiment in Mass Collaboration

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 04:36:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to be asked to build a piece for the Winter issue of Born Magazine. The poem, Index for X and the Origin of Fires is a truly beautiful work by Ander Monson.

What I wanted to avoid in this project was forcing the reader into one particular interpretation of the poem. I think the beauty of verse lies in its ability to speak in different ways to different readers.

With that in mind, I built a semi-intelligent engine for this project that interprets the poem by accessing the massive database of images that is Flickr. Images are gathered for each line of the poem, and are displayed semi-randomly, appearing just long enough to register and then fading again into the background. As the viewer progresses through the poem, a collage of images is present in their memory - enough, along with the poem itself to build a unique interpretation of the work.

This 'collective interpretation' changes in two ways: First, because Flickr is constantly being updated and because the engine is stochastic, you will never see the same set of images twice. Second, because Flickr users can tag images with the word 'indexx' to have them appear more often in the project, the generated compositions will (hopefully) become more focused over time.

So, go and check it out.

Yunsil.com

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 17:31:00 +0000

Keeping on my trend of posting about cool sites by bright young women, here's Yunsil.com. There is a pile of great projects in here, including some really nice explorations into tangible computing.

Of particular interest is the techniue used in Tadpole and DrawDisk, in which the computer's printer cable is rigged to control first a set of LED lights, then a small robot used to draw physical compositions. Great idea.

Sensescape

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 04:25:00 +0000

sensescape is a nice little collection of digital art done in Processing and Flash. Not surprisingly, I really liked her work with L-Systems, which are rendered beautifully. The sketches also make excellent use of sound - recordings of the Tagalog Alphabet are combined generatively as the L-systems grow.

Geraldine Sarmiento is a student at ITP NYU, which seems to have a lot of very interesting courses in their schedule. I am particularly upset that I never had the opportunity to take a course like Nature of Code, which looks fairly comprehensive (the course site has some great reviews of fun things like particle systems, autonomous agents and genetic algorithms).

It's good to see students producing such interesting and creative work. Kudos!

blprnt in Budapest

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 21:10:00 +0000

My tree.growth project has been accepted into the Process Revealed exhibition, part of the EvoMUSART workshop in April, in Budapest. From the website:

EvoMUSART 2006 is the fourth workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2006 is to bring together researchers who are using biological inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area.

I am honoured to be a part of this exhibition - and excited about a trip to Hungary! If anyone has any good travel advice or must-sees in Budapest, I'd love to hear it.

Retrievr

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 02:01:00 +0000

retreivr lets you query Flickr's image database by drawing a rudimentary sketch of what you're looking for. I had good luck drawing simple things like an apple, but when I tried to draw my dream girl it kept on giving me a giraffe. Maybe that's saying something.

I have my own Flickr-powered project launching next week. It's super-secret so I can't link to it yet but I think it turned out pretty well. It doesn't involve and fast multiresolution color searching but it works nonetheless. Stay tuned.

flower.trees

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:33:00 +0000

Two more desktop images for you:

Flowering trees... I think I'm pining for spring.
1024x768
1280x854

Protobytes

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:19:00 +0000

If you're in the mood for some pretty algorithmic pictures, check out Ira Greenberg's Protobytes. From the site:

Prototypes are algortihmically generated (iterative) virtual forms, based on nested mathematical expressions and programmatic drawing methods.

The results are really pretty, and would definitely stand up as large-scale prints.

While you're over at Ira's place, check out the rest of the site, too. There are a lot of interesting projects kicking about. Nice work.

Hamsters, Hamsters, everywhere!

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:42:00 +0000

My friends and number one link source over at Generator.x led me to this clever little MIDI project - which is controlled by hamsters. That's right! They're not just for biting through your thumbnail anymore! Something tells me that my colleagues over at Industrial Brand will be making an after-holiday shopping trip to the local pet shop and Radio Shack.

I like the idea of this, but the practical problems with a bunch of hamsters in narrow plastic tracks mean this is a one-off deal, and not exactly something you'd put in your living room.

What about the same thing, with fish? The ever-popular Betta Splendens would seem to me to be a perfect choice. And, they're pretty to watch. Of course, I demand 10% of the profits.

A Bit Late for X-Mas...

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:31:00 +0000

For your post-holiday, pre-holiday or in-holiday enjoyment, here is a desktop image for you of a new tree-type that I rendered over the holidays. Enjoy!

1024 x 768
1280 x 854

The holidays have been a bit... trying... but I'm back on track for the New Year. There's one more desktop image to go, which I'll probably post later today or tomorrow.

Aqueous

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:59:00 +0000

Talk about tangible computing. Aqueous is Zehao Chang's MFA thesis project. Water droplets fall from the ceiling into glass tubes - calibrated to ring over a span of two octaves. The water droplets themselves are computer controlled, via a system of actuators. The software for the system was developed in Processing.

This is the kind of installation work that probably has to be seen to be fully appreciated. The quicktime movie does a passable job of letting us peek into the experience, but I would really love to check this out in person.

What the site doesn't tell me is where it is. Since Mr. Chang is a student of Casey Reas, I'm going to assume it's in California.

neural.network.soundtoy

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 22:51:00 +0000

I've been researching neural networks for the last month or so and have finally gotten down to building something. neural.network.soundtoy is the first implementation of my brand-spanking new NeuralNetwork class. By clicking and holding the mouse, you can create independant neural networks with random connection weights between nodes. When nodes reach their activation threshold, they play a sound.

Mousing over individual nodes will activate them, and by clicking on a node you can turn it so that it is permanantly on. You can get some interesting sounds going on if you activate multiple nodes at once.

Nodes can have both inhibitory and excitory action on nodes which they are connected to, so any given network can play a variety of tunes depending on which nodes are active.

This is just the start of what I want to do with NNs; next step is to build some learning networks and see if I can figure out some interesting ways to apply them.

I'll be putting the source code up at CodeTree.org in an attempt to be better at open sourcing.

CodeTree.org, and Encapsulation

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:26:00 +0000

Continuing my tradition of being the last to report exciting news, here's a link via Generator.x to an interesting project that aims to create a network of source code for visual programmers working in Flash and Processing.

This seems to me like a very useful tool, since it allows and encourages the community as a whole to share solutions and novel approaches to problems. Which got me thinking about my own creative process, and the value of a project like CodeTree therein:

In my personal work, I tend to avoid seeing what other people have done with a problem until after I've given it a shot. Indeed, try to limit myself to researching a problem in the abstract, rather than trying to see what other people have done in the same medium. I gave a talk at FlashBelt last year outlining my creative process. I called this purposeful separation from outside influences Encapsulation and it's one of six parts of my process:

Simplify
Diverge
Mutate
Transplant
Hybridize
Encapsulate

By Encapsulating, I am trying to encourage novel solutions to projects, which I think arise more freely when I am not influenced by what others have done. This is drastically different from my approach to commercial projects, where time limits demand that I don't spend countless hours re-inventing the wheel. However, in a creative and exploratory project, reinvention can make thee difference between the typical and the sublime.

But is this encapsulation really helpful at all? Or would I be better off biting the bullett and realizing that some of my supposedly innovative projects are downright redundant?

Or maybe I should stop blogging and actually *make* something for a change.

But is it Indestructable?

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:51:00 +0000

Greg Fraser is studying Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Zurich. As his pleasantly clean website shows us, he's been working on a small pile of interesting projects. He's also on the lookout for an internship between March and October of 2006 - so if your company is looking to catch some good young talent, you'd probably do well to give him a shout.

The project that caught my eye was the blackplotbotbox, a rather evil-looking 'small cube of simple intelligence' that translates input from conductive sensors into robot-made pen drawings. Great stuff!

Golem

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 20:59:00 +0000

Golem is a printer. Well, a computer hooked up to a printer. Actually, a program, on a computer, hooked up to a printer. Golem is also an extraordinarily prolific artist, having created 100,000 abstract paintings.

I found out about Golem over at Generator.x, where there's a interesting post on the artist, Jason Salavon, and his shotgun approach to generative art. While you're checking out Jason's site, be sure to oggle the Playboy Centerfolds

Gallery Incomplet

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 03:02:00 +0000

Grant Skinner is kicking ass and taking numbers over at Gallery Incomplet, with a crazy set of Flash 8 experiments. Of particular note are his recent web cam pieces, which are a pretty good showpiece for the bitmap manipulation abilities of F8.

Grant is one of those people who gets more done than your average 10 person development team... I have a theory that he's actually triplets. Either that, or there's something in the water up there in Edmonton.

Facade

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:52:00 +0000

Facade is a new type of gaming experience - in which the entire narrative is generated on the fly depending on user interaction. From the website:

Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed a five year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective.

To me this seems like a very refreshing break from the way that narrative construction is typically handled in games. It also increases playablilty - by making a much more diverse set of possible outcomes, you encourage the user to play again and again.

Unfortunately, it's not available for Mac, yet, so I can't tell if it sucks or not. it is, however, free.

Instant Soup

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 23:09:00 +0000

After a few weeks of frequent mailbox checks, today the mailman brought me my Wiring board. It's much smaller than I thought, which is great! There are all kinds of parts that look very delicate. Maybe I should have ordered two.

My project over the holidays will be to build something with it. What? Well, that is yet to be determined. But, I stumbled upon Instant Soup, which looks like it will be a big help. From the site:

InstantSOUP is a path into electronics using an approach of "learning by making", introducing electronic prototyping in a playful, non-technical way.

The summary of all this is that you can create robots that can be controlled by Flash! Finally all of this ActionScript I've learned has a purpose that my 10 year-old self would think was cool!

Strange Attractors

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:20:00 +0000

Nathan Selikoff says:

For the past three years I have been experimenting with imagery generated by strange attractors, visual representations of chaotic dynamical systems that can be intuitively understood as a pendulum tracing its path through space.

The result is his Strange Attractors Explorer, written in C++. The app gives users the ability to explore a variety of mathematical attractors, and to modify variables in real time and change the way the systems are rendered.

The results are beautiful. Thanks to Nathan for posting in the forums, which have been a bit slow as of late. So if you haven't signed up yet, please do - my hope is to grow a community of people doing interesting things with computers and to give them a place to brainstorm and share. In related news, I'm hoping to move the forum (and this blog) over to Drupal before Christmas, which should make for a better experience for everyone.

London on the Go

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:19:00 +0000

Tom Carden, keeper of the mighty Processing Blogs, has posted the results of an interesting project which came as an offshoot of the OpenStreetMap project.

This movie shows the movement of eCourier employees as they jet from place to place in London, delivering no-doubt important parcels. The result is a pleasantly periodic movie that just begs to be set to music.

I'd like to see a similar movie made out of the paths of bike couriers in Vancouver, complete with their end-of-day mass migration to The Cambie.

Flightplan Visualizations

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 18:30:00 +0000

Flight Patterns is a beautiful visualization of flight data from the FAA. Aaron Koblin from UCLA used Processing to parse the flight data and render the frames - which were output in AfterEffects. The result is stunning - several different renderings of aircraft flights in North America, captured in video form. Link via Future Feeder.

Daily Links

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 18:22:00 +0000

There are a few sites that I check out every morning, after eating breakfast and trying to get through about a litre of water (hydration is key!). Here are my morning regulars:

DataIsNature
Generator.x
Future Feeder

And, of course, I check up on the news and look to see if a new batch of posters has arrived over at GigPosters.com.

What are your daily sources for inspiration?

ActionScript 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 17:59:00 +0000

I was looking at AS 2.0 this morning, hanging from it's pretty wooden hanger in my closet. It seems like just yesterday that I brought it home, gleaming white and smelling the way that only a new scripting language could smell. It was so new! So charming! So full of new features! But this morning, it felt... different. I could see some scuffs around the buttonholes, and it's once rigidly starched collar was looking a little limp.

That's when I decided it was time for a new version of ActionScript. It hasn't arrived in the mail yet, but I know it's on it's way, travelling through some foreign lands and making it's way to me.

With sealed classes, runtime exceptions & types, regular expressions, a data type for integers and *gasp* ECMA Script for XML... I might need a bigger closet.

Yahoo! Maps Beta

noreply@blogger.com (blprnt) — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 03:27:00 +0000

The Yahoo! Maps Beta is done entirely in Flash. One of their developers has posted some interesting info about it on his blog.Of interest are the pile of APIs available... including an ActionScript API, and a whole bunch of others which seem to make the whole thing extraordinarily integratable. This is of interest to me, as I'm developing a few sites that are currently launching Google Maps windows in HTML. The prospect of being able to leverage a robust mapping system in Flash is pretty nice indeed.