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Archive for May, 2005

Wiring and Instant Soup

Tuesday, May 31st, 2005

Wiring, a sister project to processing, is a programming environment and electronics i/o board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible […]

Entropy & Motion Graphics

Thursday, May 19th, 2005

Claude Shannon’s Information Theory tells us that any given communications channel has limited capacity or bandwidth. There is a fixed amount of information (measured as entropy or non-repetition) that can be passed thru that channel without introducing errors. Human perception can be viewed as a communications channel, also posessing limited bandwidth. When faced with too […]

Glass Planets by Josh Simpson

Monday, May 16th, 2005

Some amazing glass art by Josh Simpson. Here’s what he has to say about it: I like to pack Planets with more information than the naked eye can possibly see. I’ve always been fascinated by technology. I couldn’t begin to build a micro-chip but some of the spaceships circling my planets probably have as many […]

Anxiety Dream Theater

Friday, May 13th, 2005

From Boing Boing. My favorite, of these print-and-cut Victorian-style paper toys by Marylin Scott-Waters is this nifty Dream Theater. The marble mice are kinda cool too. Aren’t moving parts great?

SquirclePlex

Tuesday, May 10th, 2005

SquirclePlex is a new interactive kaleidoscope of mine that uses images from the Squared Circle group on Flickr. The kaleidoscope uses a recursive rendering method that produces fractal images similar to Marshall Yaeger’s Kaleidoplex projector, which I discussed in my last post. This version is currently for Windows only. The installer provides both a standalone […]

Kaleidocam

Monday, May 9th, 2005

British artist Ian Kirk has created a new app, Kaleidocam, that works with a basic webcam, converting the image into a kaleidoscope. This pattern can also be used as your screensaver. Kirk’s software is an interesting modern variant of Marshall Yaeger’s Kaleidoplex – a 1970s projector that created a kind of fractal kaleidoscope image using […]

Extinct giants

Thursday, May 5th, 2005

While millions tune into ‘A Current Affair’ to watch the latest exclusive video of ‘Bigfoot‘ (i.e. a man in a Wookie costume shot from a long distance), they are missing some interesting video of another creature, which, astonishingly, may actually exist. In the swamps of Arkansas, seven people, including researchers from the Cornell Lab of […]

Information processing and the wolf spider

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

If you didn’t know it already, the Internet is a pretty cool thing. Two days ago, sitting in my office, I noticed a small wolf spider moving across the window sill, and then up the window. Wolf spiders are hunters, rather than trappers. This particular spider had a characteristic kind of motion which I had […]

Collaborative posters

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

This is one of a set of four collaborative posters I am preparing for printing this month. I made this particular image by writing a collection of Perl scripts which arrange photos from the squared circle group on flickr in a fibonacci spiral (a natural way of tiling circles, seen in sunflowers, pinecones and many […]

Three Johns on Randomness

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

If you take a quick peek around this website, you will see a considerable number of software toys which make heavy use of random numbers. Nonetheless, the use of random numbers does not agree with everyone.