This dude made the greatest Halloween costume ever – a low poly-count version of himself. Here’s the technical details, and a flickr set.
Massive Attack – “United Snakes” by United Visual Artists. Starts simple, then gets bonkers. I’ve gotta get deeper into Open Frameworks…
Built using Scriptographer, a scripting plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. Jonathan Puckey is part of the team behind Scriptographer, and this particular plug-in is still in development.
If you’re on Twitter, I can’t recommend Tweetdeck highly enough. It’s currently in beta for Mac, Windows and Linux, and aside from a few tweaks and features I hope show up in the near future, it’s a sexy piece of software that will prove to test my willpower and focus for the foreseeable future.
I’m not a tremendous gamer (with a few notable PS3 exceptions) – and I’ve tried a few games on the iPhone but end up losing interest rather quickly. Eliss, on the other hand, has me hooked. I won’t explain the point – it’s more fun to figure it out – and it should be noted that the vector-graphics design brings back fond memories of a childhood spent in arcades spending quarter after quarter on Tempest. Bonus points go to a suite of tools from processing.org that went into making this. Lovely.
Chris Bird and Matt Clark of United Visual Artists are lecturing for UCLA Design | Media Arts this coming Tuesday – February 10th at 6pm:
Broad Art Center
240 Charles E. Young Drive, Room 1250
LA, 90095
(more info)
(map)
Hit me up on the email if you’re thinking of going and want to meet. This should be pretty cool.
I’m currently lusting over Erik Natzke’s generative work. These two reminded me of details from early Jackson Pollock, before the drip paintings.
Word of the day – “Guilloches”, which are the geometric patterns typically found on money, diplomas and other official paper.
Ministry of Type has been busy plugging nasty looking formulas into the Mac application Grapher to create images like the one above, and there’s also Excentro as a stand alone app.
I’m now off to start my own currency.
via Kottke
We Feel Fine – “An exploration of human emotion on a global scale” – is a Java applet that scours the internet for the text string of “I feel” or “I am feeling”, thus cataloging the “feelings” of millions and calculating a breakdown across a series of demographic filters. It’s all a bit like peeking into a stranger’s diary that you find lying in the street. Clicking on “Murmurs” presents quotes in a newsreader format, and proves comforting and eerie simultaneously.
Aside from all of that, it’s truly a beautiful site. Go there now: wefeelfine.org
Cool applet built in Processing that uses a bit of particle system code to create visual maps based on DIVs, links, images etc.
Here’s the difference between this site and espn.com:
I’m following a series of Computer Science courses at MIT OpenCourseWare, and while doing a bit of research on some of the topics, I found a fascinating presentation by Dr. Alan Kay. I had no idea who he was, but it would seem that he’s in part responsible for a/ the personal computer as it exists today, b/ object-oriented programming, and c/ the very idea of a graphic user interface (you know – the thing you stare at all day). Wow. The presentation is from 1987 when he was an Apple Fellow, and follows the advent of graphic interfaces. Its obviously crude by today’s standards – where were you in 1987? – but he’s talking about and showing working precursors to CAD, video iChat, hypertext (the web) among others – from the early sixties.
The presentation is in two parts, in RealPlayer format from UC Berkeley. Both movies are about 45 minutes each. (The movies are from a comp-sci course, so they start with a professor in a classroom before the presentation starts.)
An alternative to Processing, Nodebox is built around Python as a scripting language and is in release candidate status. Go and get your algorithm fix.
