Just been pointed to this video that I’d forgotten about showing our Lungs application working using Arduino.
So a loud noise starts the projection (aka the door of the smoking area closing) then the light of a lit cigarette makes the animation run through.
Cheers Gav for reminding me about this video of our presentation!
TwitMosaic has been a great success, I’ve had lots of great feedback and lots of people getting involved….
click to enlarge...
click to enlarge...
I’ve had a couple of ideas for how I can take this further, which I hope to work on over the summer as I’ve really enjoyed the challenges this project has provided me with, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. Especially as my coding skills leave a lot to be desired, I’m quite proud!
So, there’s two ways in particular I’d like to take it……
1. Avatar inclusion – When you tweet the hexcodes, the app wouldn’t just draw a square of that colour as it does now, it would take the tweeter’s current avatar, and apply a filter over the top of the avatar of that hexcode’s colour. Something like this:
This way, you’re can see directly which parts of the mosaic you’re responsible for, quickly and easily! And who ‘interrupts’ your flow! It’s quite an awesome effect that opens a whole host of new doors.
2. Grid assignment – Instead of the squares always filling in from the top left, you could assign each colour to a particular square in the grid! It would be like fighting for territory on a map, or to draw a picture and have other alter it slightly. The grid would start all black, and the tweets would look something like this:
So a hex code followed by a grid reference. This would make drawing a picture a lot easier, with less planning involved! You could even start a game of checkers 
I’m hoping to have a go at these developments over the summer before I start my placement. I’ll post any updates on here!
Well, apologies for the jump in development, but while I have been fighting with Flash these past couple of days I have forgotten to screenshot my progress and therefore have no step-by-step to show you…. But right now I don’t mind because TwitMosaic is ONLINE and WORKING at it’s current state. Here’s a picture of the interface:
And then the page where all the magic happens…..
CLICK THE PICTURE BELOW TO VISIT #TWITMOSAIC!!
CLICK HERE TO GO TO TWITMOSAIC!
Please please, if you have a Twitter account, do go and give it a whirl!
The one main issue at the moment is that the page doesn’t autorefresh to check for new tweets, you have to manually refresh the page to see the updated mosaic which is annoying, should hopefully have that sorted by the presentation.
Just got to get more people involved now!
It WORKS!
I managed to get it to work!!!! I can safely say my knowledge of AS3 is not as strong as I thought it was! But by jove it works. And that’s all that matters to me right now!
A child is born!
TwitMosaic
I’ve come up with a flowchart for how the TwitMosaic will work that will say it better than me trying to explain with words…..
click to enlarge....
I’ve found the following code to extract a twitter search….
var myXMLLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
var myXML:XML;
function loadXML(e:Event):void{
myXMLLoader.load(new URLRequest("http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=%23HASHTAGHERE"));
myXMLLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, processXML);
}
And I’ve made a pretty logo:
click to enlarge
Now all I have to do is try and code this badboy in Actionscript! Wish me luck :/
At the end of this module, I want to have a fully working application that uses Twitter to create a form of artwork. I’ve thought over many different ideas on what to make, but my main issue is aiming too high. I haven’t yet had a look at just how hard the coding is going to be to integrate Twitter and pull out of the API what information I need.
As I am most definitely NOT a coder, I know I’m going to struggle with this, so I want to make it as un-complicated as possible whilst still being interactively available to everyone (aka not just using tweets from one account owned by me, it has to be using a keyword or a hashtag) and still make something interesting with a good-looking end result.
So, my basic idea at the moment is some form of mosaic, where Tweeters can change the colour of the tiles simply by tweeting a colour. To keep it simple, the grid size would have to be small, something like 10 X 10 or maybe 20 X 20…..
When Googling ‘twitter mosaic’, the first hit was http://www.twittermosaic.com , naturally!
The guy who made this site made a corresponding Twitter account, and his idea was to save the avatars of his followers to a database, and create mosaics of existing images using just the avatars of his followers as tiles. I love this idea! Here’s some examples:
Before........
After! (click to enlarge)
Before......
After.....
Close-up!
This is such an awesome idea! Urgh…. It’s times like this I realise I really need to get better at coding. I’d love to make something like this!
OK so I’ve been thinking what I can use to generate my art…. I wanted it to be something cool and varied. I looked at XML feeds from news sites, and facebook, and decided in the end on Twitter after coming across some awesome twitter apps that already exist.
The first awesome app I found is called Portwiture, which takes your tweets and turns them into a gorgeous piece of mosaic tile art. The site works by taking a look at your most recent tweets, and pulling out your most used keywords. Using those keywords, Portwiture then matches your tweets to interesting photography from Flickr to create a “serendipitous visual representation of your Twitter profile.” Here’s my Portwiture mosaic from my @xx__J3SSi twitter account:
Portwiture for @xx__J3SSi
Another cool app I found is called TimeTweets… It’s an infinitely clever Twitter mashup that turns tweets into a clock. The site searches for tweets with a number corresponding to either the hour, minute, or second and then places those tweets into a clock by accentuating the numbers. It looks awesome and updates automatically, producing a very easily readable clock.
For the 2009 Tour De France, Nike worked with LIVESTRONG and created the Chalkbot. Twitters users could tweet messages of encouragement which (after being approved) were sent tot he Chalkbot and written on the road. Here’s a video about it:
This is a really cute bot that I love the idea of, called @mybestdayever. It searches for tweets containing the phrase ‘best day ever’ and retweets them anonymously from their account. The result is a list of public happiness, which makes for good reading (with the odd bit of sarcasm thrown in). Here’s a screenshot of their twitter feed:
And one more, the Murmur study. This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below. I find this really interesting, because like the Chalkbot above, it brings the digital world into a physical form….
Sorry this post is going to be really disjointed and with no descriptions in between…. I’m basically using it as a place to dump all my research for iDAT211
Click to visit amazon.co.uk
Tracks candidates on an advanced driving course run at the Metropolitan Police Motor Driving School. This film provides an insight into what it takes to be an advanced driver. It complements the “Roadcraft” handbook, and would aid those drivers who want to improve their skills in preparation for an advanced driving test.
——
http://www.drivingfast.net/
^^ fast driving aka racing, track…
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“Generative Art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which was set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to, or resulting in a completed work of art”.
Phillip Galanter, What is Generative Art? 2003
“Artwork that is automated by the use of instructions or rules by which the artwork is executed.”
Geoff Cox, Generator, 2006
OK so a few weeks before Christmas we had a lecture on generative art. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently…. especially after reconsidering my artefact. I wasn’t happy with it, there wasn’t enough depth. I flirted with intervention, and decided against it. So I was reminded of our generative art lecture when I stumbled across this:
http://www.subblue.com/projects/butterfly
It’s just a cool little interactive art butterfly that you can change the numbers that go into the equation to change it’s appearance.
I went back to the lecture notes and remembered about “AARON – the Cybernetic Artist is an artist in the truest sense. AARON’s approach to art, color and composition are authentic and reprensent the life’s work of Professor Harold Cohen. AARON paintings have hung in museums around the world including London’s Tate Modern Gallery, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Washington Capitol Children’s Museum to name a few.”
http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/history.html
One of AARON's paintings
I think I’m going to change my project to generative art….. maybe including some sort of human interaction…..
I found a lot of cool generative art projects here: AbandonedArt
And I found that the original generative art is fractals. A fractal is an image that exhibits self-similarity, aka it’s built using reduced versions of itself.
“Fractal geometry is a language used to describe, model, and analyse the complex forms found in nature. Conceived by Benoit B. Mandelbrot, the amazingly complex and sometimes very beautiful imagery is efficiently generated by the computer using mathematical formulae.”
The Digital Canvas, Jonathan Raimes, p.16
Fractal
These images are awesome, they’re known for being psychedelic and instantly recognisable. There are a number of online fractal generators that do the math for you. For example: http://www.easyfractalgenerator.com/mandelbrot-Set-Generator.aspx
There’s also an online community and a touring exhibition called GeneratorX, which is a blog-based website with a lot of awesome posts regarding generative art. I love this sculpture by John Powers, called God’s Comic (click the picture to see generatorX’s blog post):
OK So over Christmas I’ve been thinking about this intervention thing, a kind of social experiment, keeping in mind ‘The Fun Theory‘. And I’ve come up with a relatively-doable idea………
HOPSCOTCH!
Yes, my idea really was hopscotch.
Basically, like in the video above (from the C4 TV show, Green Wing), if you draw a hopscotch in a narrow corridor, will people walk over it as normal, or try to follow the hopscotch pattern?
I know this is less like the Fun Theory in that it’s not making an every day mundane task more fun, but more a social experiment. Will people hop the hopscotch only if they think no one is looking? Will they try their best to walk around it, not over it?
