Sound is an influential part of our state of mind and dramatically influences our mood. When I make paintings I always play some music, sometimes loud and sometimes soft. When I was coding my project for Dan O’Sullivan’s ICM finial, I decided to use only two variables to create some art work using code. One variable being the array of colors read from an image and the second being the sound at the time the art work was created.
I combined some of Daniel Shiffman’s Image explode code and sound code from Marius Watz and Krister Olsson The result is a group of images whose pixel arrangement is substituted by images.
you can download the code here: Wasp processing code.
Here are some screenshots:
I am creating some art with the help of the good old computer.
The goal is to write an algorithm to get variables from a fluxuating environment and take a snapshot of each variable and include them in a visual composition. Some of the variables will include video, audio, a human pulse, temperature and some math.
I chose to use image behavior as the first of my variables to study. This is an interesting program I made which may eventually become part of the final algorithm to create super cool pieces of art work.
Check out this video of a Tesla Coil producing sound with a range of 41Khz. This is inspiration if you are working or researching sound. The Tesla coil’s high voltage discharge act like speakers since the voltage displaces air to produce a certain sound.
The electric sparks produced by the Tesla coil are controlled by a MIDI micro controller which essentially does the same thing that the Arduino micro controller does for the WAM Box I made. The Tesla coil control comes from the frequency of the 1s and 0s being passed via 1 bit square wave modulation. In theory, I could incorporate the interface of my WAM Box and plug it into the Tesla coil to come up with a high voltage musical instrument that is controlled by a user using hand gestures. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Tesla Coil laying around.
The Music box that I have been working on has a name now. We have named it the WAM Box and it stands for Wave Modulation Box. If you are interested in making your own WAM Box you can go to the official web site of the project at http://lightwavedj.com/
You will find full documentation on the project including schematics, the Arduino code and pictures with a description of the project and how it works.
Marius Watz gave a talk about digital media and digital fabrication of art. He is a Programmer that began his career in the “Media Revolution” of the 1990’s He talked about the difference between “Strong” and “Weak” Artificial Intelligence. He talked about non-human art theories and his view of the direction of computer generated art. He is also the person behind Generator X and The Flickr Group Digital Fabrication. This is an image from Marius’ Flickr Web site:
I decided to elaborate on my “Matrix” text rain and hook up some Arduino control to it.
I programmed the Arduino to communicate with my Powerbook using a 9600bps signal. The Arduino was hooked up to a breadboard with 3 sensors; 2 potentiometers and a photocell. I then programmed my text rain to read the 9600bps serial connection with the Arduino and used the variables from the 3 sensors to manipulate the color. The variables are passes from the Arduino to Processing in a 3 byte digital format. Below you can see the result.
For ICM we had to code a Processing file to display a text of some sort. I decided to go a little towards the POP end and create raining letters like in the movie “THE MATRIX” Here is what the file looks like and the code! =)
one of the first things I experimented with when I started learning ActionScript in flash was how to plug in calculus into the darn animations.
It seems like dejavu but I oh well, I need to figure out how to use math in the Processing environment. So here it is, the mighty Sine curve:
Class assignment number two for ICM was to make something move.
I decided to take a silly picture of my self and import it to animate my self bouncing around the screen.
