Certain elements in cinema tend to occur in clusters. I’m talking about groups of tropes that stick together and recur in different films with only minor alterations. Stereotypical characters, repetitive martial arts attack patterns, overwraught exclamations and pithy wisecracks. The big, quiet, intimidating guy who turns out to be clever/nice in the end, the post-slash [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, General, Science-ish, tagged bio-electronica, genes, genetic, information audioization, Music, science techno on May 2, 2008 | No Comments »
I enjoy artistic experiences that communicate some expression of meaningful information.
Maybe this is inherent to all analysis-junkies and artists. Pretty graphs that explain complex data sets. Poignant songs that sum up intricate social and political circumstances. Equations that encompass beautiful realities. Etceteras, etceteras.
In that vein, what could be more meaningful than the blueprints of life, [...]
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A break from the usual tech-talk, here’s a short poem that popped to mind this morning. If your art-glands hurt afterwords, blame the inspiration for picking crappy a poet.
new-wrought buds of leaves
in neon em’rald they bloom
against the concrete
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Posted in Art, Computing, General, Musing, tagged backgrounds, design, desktop, eyes of a chile, Productivity, wonderment on April 28, 2008 | No Comments »
Back as a grade school kid, I was impressed by the array of neat options we had for decorating our desktops on the old Macs. Patterns! Colors! Eventually… whole pictures! “Cool beans” at the times, really. Even back then, I was wondering how we’d be entertaining our eyes in between games of Super Word Muncher, [...]
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Posted in Art, General, Silly, tagged humor, graph, chart, robot, gynoid, research, ghost in the shell, star trek, battlestar galactica, terminator, number six, motoko kusanagi, seven of nine on April 7, 2008 | No Comments »
A graph showing the relationship between the amount of effort humans put into making robots and the amount of sexy female robots found in popular culture.
The graph is fictional, but I’m not convinced the relationship is false.
P.S. Yes, I know that humorous graphs are all the rage these days. I couldn’t help myself in this [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Devices, tagged movies, technology, films, cinema, eye tracking, interactivity, home entertainment on April 1, 2008 | No Comments »
How about using eye tracking technology to enhance your home theatrical experience? If we use information about where a viewer’s eyes are focusing as an indicator of attention, we could shift the audio “focus” of a film in real-time. Since the projected media information would change from viewing to viewing based on what the user [...]
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Posted in Art, Meta, tagged Art, flickr, procedural on March 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
… and I started a flickr account to host my sundry meager attempts at art.
Vain, I know. Practical? Probably.
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, Quantification, tagged Art, Innovation, Visualization, failure, brainstorm, graphing, knots, thought, problem solving, ideas on March 27, 2008 | No Comments »
It would be pretty interesting to visualize brainstorming sessions or problem-solving attempts that don’t quite get the job done.
There’s something oddly tragic and beautiful about the notion of a brain rustling around an issue, prodding it from many angles, and occasionally rebounding with an ache and a “THWRANG” after a head-long charge. If these thoughts [...]
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Posted in Art, Silly, tagged band, band names, Comedy, funny, humor, Music, names, Silly on March 24, 2008 | No Comments »
Sadly cliche, but irresistible. Fictional band names! Rock away.
Malassezia furfur
Uppercut Sunday
Fifth Fraction From Fibonacci
The Complex Conjugates
Evidence of Oreos
The Vile Vials
Doctor Bunsen and the Backroom Burners
Whifff!
Spawn Moore and the Overlords
Stars Seen Behind Your Eyelids
This is way too fun.
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Posted in Art, Silly, Society & Politics, tagged Literature, Art, allegory, parable, story, disgusting, drunk, neo-aesopian, question on March 23, 2008 | No Comments »
There’s a bathroom at a party. It’s not very clean, not totally filthy, but has some toilets, a few sinks, and a big trash bin.
A rich man stumbles into the bathroom, drunk and about to vomit. He goes over to a sink and lets loose. The sink is too shallow to catch the vomit gracefully [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, tagged Art, creative, fMRI, MRI, Music, software, Video, Visualization on March 20, 2008 | No Comments »
The challenge is to condense the multi-format feedback loop that exists between various artists into a single experience. I have two possible solutions, one reasonable, one far-out.
The reasonable idea is pretty straightforward and uses a combination of readily available hardware and relatively straightforward software.
We start with a song, playing on a computer. Maybe it’s something [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, tagged Art, audio, drama, feedback, Music, painting, poem, sculpture, technology on March 17, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Great works of art often inspire further masterpieces, though not necessarily in the same medium as the original.
A musician sees a beautiful painting and composes a song that tells the same story. An abstract artist listens to a masterful concerto and incorporates representations of the music into her next sculpture. A playwright observes both [...]
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I bumped into a neat little iTunes add-on by the name of “Moody.” It helps users tag their songs with color-coded emotional tags that operate on two axes: “Happy/Sad” and “Calm/Intense.” A nifty way to sort your music, but what else could we do with this sort of technology?
How about an application that keeps a [...]
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For a brief period of time, perhaps it was a summer during my early years of high school, I became quite interested in the scientific (or at least the psychological) basis of hypnotism. While I never developed enough skill to moonlight as a pseudo-psychologist or cheap entertainer, I was convinced that altered thought patterns and [...]
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A procedural piece of artwork I’d like to make.
Conduct k-means clustering with 3-4 levels on famous pictures. Then , pseudo-randomly scan through the output and “delete” between one third and two thirds of the clusters through contour-fitting-selection and zero-valuing. Take the centroid color values for the original levels and randomly apply them to [...]
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