Yes. It’s a birthday! This blog becomes one today. 365 days ago I thought about 10fingertippen, and just like I said at this time, this still remains true: “Brain2Web Plugin ist noch in Arbeit.” I started bloggin with my collegues at the node3000 art and research collective. We’ve started blogging out as a experiment, to keep the individual members constantly in touch. And it really worked well and still does. The experience of blogging lead to my philosophy of sketchbooks and blogs as a research tool. And then straight to the hardbloggingscientist-project. One year ago the term “web 2.0″ was still future.

We are still very entusiastic about blogging and I really think that this is still the beginning of a deeper cultural change. An indicator for this is first: the number of conferences dealing with blogging. And the second: countless blogs I contribute to: phlow, hardbloggingscietists, digitalcouch and my doodlebox.

I am recently at the last stage of my diplomathesis, that deals with “living on the net, livin in the city”. This blog was a good researchtool for this purpose. In the future I will concentrate with this blog much more on digital tools and creative code.

My previous experiment with the selective color transforms made me think a bit more about creating masks from colors and its applications. I wondered if it is possible to use a similiar technique to calculate green screen or blue screen masks in realtime for Flash video. And indeed - it works.

I’ve programmed a keying technique similar the Color Difference Key known from AfterEffects or other video editing programs. This kind of keying allows for finer control and better transitions than for example a simple chroma key.

A very important factor for successful keying is good lighting of the fore- and background and as I don’t have a studio at hand for this demo I allowed myself to use the example clip from this Macromedia Video Tutorial featuring Tom Green - I hope that’s okay for this purpose. I’ve converted the original 20MB quicktime movie to a 1 MB FLV (wow, isn’t that on2 codec great?) - and there is definitely no more alpha channel in there. Alternatively you can try to use your webcam, but if you don’t have good lighting and a decent background the results will be only so-so. But I can imagine that the same technique could be used for example on still images to mount peoples’ heads on avatars.

Here is the demo:

Demostrando una vez más que la pregunta de Zappa (Does humor belong in music?) era retórica, Max Tundra (que tiene una relación más profunda con el hombre del bigote que la música graciosa) se descuelga con una versión magistral del “So long farewell” de la película Sonrisas y lágrimas. A medio camino entre el Jazz from Hell y algunas gracietas de Squarepusher. Memorable y gratis (gracias internet).

Descárgatela aquí junto con otra marciana reinterpretación de terry riley.

I was asked if my ColorMatrix Class can be used to change only a certain range of colors within a bitmap. Well, that’s mathematically not possible, but nevertheless there is a way to make this work with Flash - it just needs a few more steps and some temporary helper bitmaps.

In short it works like this - if you only want to change the orange parts of an image you first isolate those parts by replacing all other colors with 100%transparent pixels, then you apply the ColorMatrix filter to it and finally draw it over the original bitmap.

Here is the part of the code that creates a mask from a given color range - as you see I’m using several consecutive threshold commands for every color channel.

mask.threshold( original, rect, zero, "<", rmin<<16,0,0x00ff0000,true);
mask.threshold( mask, rect, zero, "<", gmin<<8,0,0x0000ff00,true);
mask.threshold( mask, rect, zero, "<", bmin,0,0x000000ff,true);

mask.threshold( mask, rect, zero, ">“, rmax<<16,0,0x00ff0000,true);
mask.threshold( mask, rect, zero, ">“, gmax<<8,0,0x0000ff00,true);
mask.threshold( mask, rect, zero, ">“, bmax,0,0×000000ff,true);

mask.threshold( mask, rect, zero, “==”, 0xff000000,0xffffffff,0xff000000,true);

I have expanded the concept a bit and added a few tools to clean up and adjust the resulting mask. Check out the demo here:

Over at Computing for Emergent Architecture, I just posted an overview of the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme I help out with at University College London.

At present there is possibly too much emphasis on originality; on being totally different to what has been before. When somebody is praised for saying something absolutely new, it’s a bit silly because there are as many stupid new things to say as old ones…

Nada que añadir. Lo dice Mary Midgley (a quien no tenía el gusto de conocer) en este artículo del observer (que no tengo el gusto de leer). Me tomé la molestia de leerlo porque lo refirió cityofsound (a quien si consumo vorazmente) y citaba a uno de mis héroes.

You’ve probably read it all over the blogs today - Microsoft has discovered a security vulnerability in the Flash Player which seems to affect almost every version. The good news is that Adobe has published a fix already. And it sounds to me like you really shouldn’t wait too long to make that update - it might become quite ugly out there in case someone finds out how to make use of this exploit.

I see two possible consequences out of this issue, as soon as this news hits the mass media:

a) Panic - people disable their Flash Plugins alltogether
b) Chance - 99% penetration rate for Flash Player 8 within weeks

Of course I am an ambassador of alternative b - especially as it is the much more logical consequence - ultimately the exploit has already been found and been fixed - it’s not some unknown danger lurking in the depths of your system. All you have to do is spend maybe 2 minutes for the update. How about doing it right now - I’ve prepared a little ExpressInstall swf which should do the magic almost automatically - if it doesn’t ask you to update and shows you “Flash Player 8.0.24.0 installed” you are fine. (If you are beta testing the new 8.5 player you’ll have to tread a bit more carefully for a while).

Of course this will only update your browser plugin. For the standalone player, the debug player or other version you should consult the Macromedia update page.

Processing (BETA) 108 released

In keeping with my New Year’s Resoulution of being a better open-sourcer, I’ve decided to go ahead and lauch my first version of DarwInstruments.

The result of a lot of research into and playing around with Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms, DarwInstruments are little multi-sound instrument that you can evolve into whatever sound combination you like.

I am speaking with Gary Stasiuk of LiquidJourney.com in Vancouver on March 29th. The event is titled Art by Numbers: Generating Dynamic Art with Flash, and will be held at 7pm at the Vancouver Film School.

My presentation is Creativity Through Code: Generative Art and Design, and will be the first part of the evening. It’s a slightly-modified version of my FFWD Seattle talk, complete with a launch-version of DarwInstruments (which should go live early next week). After that, Gary steals the show with his 3d creature madness.

Seen at the streets of Berlin and the web.
1cm.de

Seen at the streets of Berlin and the web.
1cm.de

A very nice visualisation of GPS-Data.