Archive for March, 2009

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UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Laser Cutter Glitch

March 22nd, 2009 | Richard Almond

I thought it might be interesting to glitch the laser cutter, but realised I’d probably struggle to get permission to mess around with a few grand’s worth of hardware. So I tried glitching this video of the laser cutter instead.

UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Digital Decay on the Underground

March 21st, 2009 | Richard Almond

It’s probably just that I’m noticing more but its getting a little strange how often things are seeming to malfunction, glitch or decay in the digital realm of my life. Spotted this at Paddington station on Friday.

UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Printer Decay

March 21st, 2009 | Richard Almond

I’ve had a few funny looks recently as I’ve been collecting this printer spool which finds itself spread around uni. There’s an ancient printer in particular up on the 5th floor, which is rather temperamental. Every so often it will pump out a sheet of this code. I presume its the HEX or ASCII of the image it was supposed to print, but it produces some really nice looking graphics.

There is a sort of dialogue that takes place between the user and the printer, an argument almost, as it tries its best to ruin your expensive glossy paper. You have to trick it into printing your image, rather than the page of code. With practice you can learn the combination of buttons to press to get the thing to work, but every now and then it will spurt out a sheet of this code, just as you think it’s started to behave. If I could find out how this happens, and if I could find an old printer, it would be great to do some further experimentation to see what sort of outcome I could achieve. As interesting as it is however, its not ideal the day before a hand-in…

[Click for full set]

UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Structural Decay installation by Chris Coleman

March 19th, 2009 | Richard Almond

Structural Decay from Chris Coleman on Vimeo.

Another project I’ve just stumbled upon which offers a striking resemblance to my ideas for an installation. Chris Coleman is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver and has some fantastic work, a lot of which explores very similar areas to those I’m interested in for this thesis project. On this project:

“The work was created as part of a multi-story one building audio and visual festival called “Murder the Word” in Buffalo NY. Sensors were placed around the building and were activated by the people moving through the space. When activated each sensor would trigger a specific audio and video clip dealing with and pre-recorded and then processed from that particular space. The clips dealt with the decay of the aging structure which is normally abandoned and how the human activity was accelerating its shift to a more entropic state.” [from Vimeo]

UNI [THESIS PROJECT] BRITISH MODE by GOOSE

March 19th, 2009 | Richard Almond

I came across this great video by Belgian Electro-rock band Goose which utilizes some of the ‘Streak Photography’ techniques I mentioned previously, as well as one of those annoyingly confusing spinning optical illusions. Pretty good song too.

GOOSE “British Mode” from Tokib on Vimeo.

UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Toshio Iwai

March 19th, 2009 | Richard Almond

Another Time, Another Space (1993, 1999) is an interactive digital artwork by Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai which uses slit-scanning techniques to beautifully warp and distort the fabric of space-time, displaying the results of a series of large screens.

from The Leonardo Gallery: “Another Time, Another Space (1993, 1999) consists of four video cameras capturing live video images of visitors; these images are then manipulated in eight different ways by eight computers. For example, the images may be manipulated through the scanning of each line in a given number of video frames and altering the time reference, creating time-lapse delays, slow-motion effects and time compression, or through scanning individual horizontal pixel lines within frame stacks and combining these as output.

All of these processes could, theoretically, be achieved using traditional film-editing techniques, but not in real time. Another Time, Another Space exploits the possibilities afforded by computer-manipulated real-time video technology. This live sculpting generates strange and beautiful distortions of time and spatial dimensions displayed upon a rig of eight viewing monitors.”

There seems huge parallels between this work and my initial concept for an installation which explores digital decay. This project could prove seminal in the progression of my thesis!

UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Slit-Scanning with Processing

March 19th, 2009 | Richard Almond

Looking into how I can ‘digitally decay’ video, I came across some Processing scripts which produce this ‘slit-scanning’ effect.

The scripts work on both a real-time feed from a webcam and on a pre-recorded Quicktime movie. Below are some stills from my webcam, going to look into running this script on a movie file tho…

[click for the full Flickr set]

 There are some great pieces of image based artwork on Flong. Im straying a bit off my topic here but Andrew Davidhazy is worth a look. His articles on strip photography and slit-scanning are incredibly interesting.

Bryan Mumford works with ‘Streak Photography‘ which you may recognize, I think it ws on a T-Mobile advert recently or something…

Eddie Elliott seems one of the first to look into slit-scanning techniques with digital video. “As early as 1992, he describes a variety of both utilitarian and playful uses of digital slit-scans, which he called “Video Streamers“. Elliott principally used Streamers as part of a larger visual interface system for editing and manipulating video; later, however, he developed an educational/artistic exhibit (shown at the San Francisco Exploratorium) which computed Streamers from live participant video. Elliott also created playful  transformations of Streamers, such as the folding paper box template shown above. Elliott’s work is extensively documented in his 1994 PhD Thesis, which he produced in the Interactive Cinema Group of the MIT Media Laboratory” [Flong.com]

UNI [SITE + MOTION] – FLASH ANIMATION v5

March 17th, 2009 | Richard Almond

I made some adjustments to the sky animation in the second image. I’ve also altered the button animations on the window panes to create a much more subtle gathering of storm clouds. The idea of ‘Glimpses of the Spectacular’ is very important in my idea, and I would like these glimpses of the more interesting images to be triggered by subtle interaction with the main 5 images. It will not be obvious how to trigger these glimpses, and they may not even be discovered at all by the user, but will require a concentrated, inquisitive interaction which explores the finer details of the main timeline. If discovered, the user will have little control over these glimpses, they will disappear as quickly as they appear.

Image 2 contains a button which offers the user one of these glimpses.

UNI [SITE + MOTION] – FLASH ANIMATION v4 + FTP TESTING

March 13th, 2009 | Richard Almond

A quick test to preview this amended sky animation results are more subtle and meant to give just a hint at something happening beyond the glass. Or is it behind the viewer, reflected in the glass?

Also testing to see if my FTP system is working properly. Might need a pre-loader on this…

UNI [SITE + MOTION] – FLASH ANIMATION v4 TESTING

March 13th, 2009 | Richard Almond

[move your cursor in the white space above]

I’ve been giving some further consideration to how a user will interact with the buttons in my Flash animation. Previously I had the window panes simply fade to black on mouse roll-over but feel something more subtle and atmospheric is probably more in keeping with my project. Here Ive been experimenting with some cursor tracking scripts in an attempt to give the effect of clouds or shadows rushing to the cursor when it is pointing over a button. Although pretty effective, Im finding it hard to incorporate this into my main animation as a button roll-over state…