I had a nice chat with a nice woman living in Berlin. I was asking question about the perception of city and media. I said that you theoretically don’t need any big city, unless you can satisfy your need via media (not only print and web, but also physical media like concerts etc..). That women agreed that reading a magazine can generate an feeing of “urbanity” inside you while sitting in a chair at home. Her strategy of not getting lost in Berlin is: not reading thouse magazines too often and simply stay at home.

What about the web? I completely lost the overview. E.g. the netlabel scene. There are so many netlabels, so many blogs writing about music and netmusic. Where is the starting point? Where is the center? Where the orientations signs? In which direction all this moves? What strategies do we have to navigate in this richness?

I think it’s only fair that if André goes to Korea I will come to Singapore in 4 weeks.

I’ve just been invited to hold two presentations on the Macromedia MAX conference 2005 in Singapore on November 10 + 11. In one session I’ll talk about programming advanced visual effects, in the other I’ll deconstruct a VJ system I’m developing. I’m very excited that I’ve been given this opportunity and I’m looking forward to this event!

And for those who haven’t noticed it yet - I will also be speaking on the Spark Conference in Amsterdam, November 16 - 18. I still remember the FlashForward 2001 in Amsterdam as one of the best conferences I’ve ever visited. And as Steward McBride who was one of the organizers back then is now responsible for Spark I have no doubts that this conference will become a full success.

Today Karsten (aka Toxi) made me notice this interesting resource for Information Visual Designers. And I'm glad that my Flickr Tag experiment had been put in the list.

Jon Snydal has used software to visualize the improvisation style of three jazz greats in Davis’ composition All Blues. I’m learning to improvise in blues a bit myself,, so I find this fascinating. I could see how live visualizations like this could assist students in learning different styles. Nice work.

via futurefeeder

My decison to concentrate more on grafical aspects grows stronger and stronger. I just have all this pictures in mind and they really want to be out! Besides this work you can have a look on Baumanns portfolio I designed to figure out that I have evidentally a real candy phase.

hmm like candyland

clouds001 are code generated clouds that float from left to right. Size and speed interact. The clouds are distributed on four layers and make a real parallax-scrolling effect.

My decison to concentrate more on grafical aspects grows stronger and stronger. I just have all this pictures in mind and they really want to be out! Besides this work you can have a look on Baumanns portfolio I designed to figure out that I have evidentally a real candy phase.

hmm like candyland

clouds001 are code generated clouds that float from left to right. Size and speed interact. The clouds are distributed on four layers and make a real parallax-scrolling effect.

Vision Factory is an application I began to develop in April 2005. It allows me to quickly prototype interactive animations (loaded as plugins) by providing a context in which external datas (such as webcam feed, microphone input, …) can be retrieved and analyzed according to what a particular scene decides to use. At some point, I was really frustrated to copy&paste blocks of code each time I wanted to rapidly build a new animation. Vision Factory now acts as a kind of shell and is intented to be a kind of platform in the near future to perform live visual shows by allowing transitions and real-time scenes parameters tweaking.
One month ago, I was invited to a “street-artists” show in France called ‘Le Lapin Electrique Tour’ and was asked to present an interactive piece. I used Vision Factory to create a particle effect controlled by movement detected in front of a webcam. Sprites were drawn by Eko and Supakitch, it resulted in funny particles popping everywhere on the screen.

Video.
Other Videos here.

Hollyoaks is an almighty torrent of feculence It’s rather like the film Signs.

I was wrong it seems. Mobile Processing can do precision math with some very odd functions. Still can’t get a gravity simulation working on it though. However, have worked hard on motion-capture and figured out how to roll waves across a grid (archive).

Have squatted me a name on livejournal.

Hrmm, I was about to complain that I don’t get linked. My ISP provides me with statistics of who refers me though.

Aphid here has honked the Creative section of my Links page on to his site. Fair enough though. That’s what it’s there for.
Dalek Links of course I sent a mail to about my print.
v3ga’s blob detection library has been mutilated for my Process project.
I’ve no fucking clue how it is I’m being referred from the designers republic, but there’s been 1628 requests. Confuses the crap outta me.
This next one is with out a doubt the weirdest: The Toyota Estima Owners Club. I can’t even fucking drive, let alone do I know someone with an Estima.
I’ve also been linked from some German online porn chat thing. Honestly, there ain’t no porn on my site to refer to. I imagine the bastard has me ear-marked for spam or something.

Apparently I’ve cropped up on Smandom although where I cannot see. Processing and Newstoday I’m a member at.

As for my so called mates on the left under Links, not one of them refers to me in return. Bastards.

William of metaphorical surprises us with a very nice study on "smoky" typography trasforming vectors in fluid movements. Also source files are available!

Here’s a slightly modified version of the particle.swarm .swf from two days ago. Time the agents are acting as drawing points, illustrating the history of the swarm. Clicking anywhere will change color - pressing any key will swap between blur and non-blur.

This example used a modified version of Grant Skinner’s bitmap caching routine to enable a whole tonne of lines to be drawn without hampering the memory. The lines are cached into a bitmap 6 times a second, and then the vectors are cleared from the memory.

There are 60 agents again in this example - a nice demo again of the performance increases in Flash 8. Not quite near the 10,000 agents that I have running in war.paint, but definitely an improvement.

Those of you who attended FlashBelt earlier this year might remember Shad Petosky, and his partners-in-crime from Big Time Attic. As well as making killer animations and character illustrations, the bread and butter of their business is comics. I’m an admitted comic geek, and was thrilled to see their new book in my local shop: Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards.

It’s a great read, and the illustrations are fantastic. Not only that, it’s educational! Sounds like a perfect Christmas present to me… only 81 shopping days left!

Just a little follow-up to the previous post. I’ve put up some screen shots / wall papers of the Shockwave prototype of the aforementioned work project. For various reasons the real thing won’t look anything like it, but I thought it might be quite interesting anyways:

The 3D meshes are created by building a simple (randomly generated) tree structure to define branch hierarchies. Upon rendering each branch is then assigned an individual attractor target and two sine waves to modulate its growth direction vector. Add some glossy texture, some fog and…

Arrgh, how i hate deconstructing…

Why stop at a rectangle when the same method can be used to draw animated lines in any angle? So here is a Marching Ants Path class - I don’t know if it’s of any use - maybe for a lasso tool of some upcoming Flash based “Photoshop Junior” RIA?

BTW - the hardest part was to make the bitmaps line up correctly so that the patterns are moving somehow in sync. There is some under-the-hood stuff going on with beginBitmapFill that I haven’t yet fully figured out. It seems like the fill bitmaps get aligned to 0/0, but when they are flipped they don’t. Or do they?

Whatever, the current version uses a mixture of try-and-error plus in-theory-this-should-work algorithms and funny enough this seems to work well with short, curvy pathes and a little less well with long straight line segments. But you can see that anyway only with the “long” setting in the demo.

Just wondering how the <code> tag works in html with Blogger.

// nothing to see here, just pretending that I've posted some code

for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
println(”nothing to see here”);
}

Does that work? Who knows? I bet it breaks Processing Blogs, but then so does posting images to this blog, for some reason. What’s a blogger to do?

on edit: surprisingly seems to work as long as you stay in “edit html” and don’t flick into compose or preview. Seems well padded with this style sheet though, so no need for leading or trailing line breaks in the code.

on second edit: Oh, and indenting doesn’t show up, but at least it wraps long lines. Can’t ask for everything!

on aggregation: Seems I was right - though it works on the page itself, it doesn’t seem to get picked up by Bloglines or my Processing Blogs aggregator. Looks like it’s missing from the atom feed entirely… I think I’ll post a bug.