Category Archives: Journal

Baker Tilly Comp

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I’m going to pitch some HDR photographs to Chartered Accountants Baker Tilly. The concept is to show Manchester financial architecture, new and old, in stunning HDR.

I visited the site of Baker Tilly’s offices last week to get a feel for the place, it’s around Hardman Square in Manchester. I only managed to take 2 shots before being moved along by a security guard. It was still useful to get some test shots and have a look at the site. These aren’t actually HDR, but are “pseudo-HDR” generated from single RAW files.

BtAnim: Processing Animator + Bluetooth V1

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I’ve spent a couple of days this week working with Processing – a programming environment designed for artists and designers. I’ve found it surprisingly fun. It happens very rarely with software, that you just identify with it straight away. It happened with me and Ableton Live, and that has culminated in my album.

Anyway. I’ve managed to create something – currently extremely unimaginatively titled BtAnim. As with a lot of my work it is really just a framework for something else to happen. How it works is this;

To begin with BtAnim just displays the starting image on the screen. Anyone who sees it can add their own frame to the animation, by taking a photo on their mobile phone and bluetoothing it to the computer. If you watch the video example here, you will see that as time goes on, more frames are added (although the video is just from my own testing) just as they will be when people are contributing their own images.  That’s it.

I thought it would work really well in a public place like a shop window or something.

Technically it is my usual mish-mash of hacking together some code in Processing, using BlueSoleil for the bluetooth component and PHP to monitor incoming files. Watch this space.

Cube Competition Entry

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I’ve entered this photograph into a competition that Cube are running.

I’m doubtful whether the image will win – but apparently all of the submited images will be shown, and I think it would work well as part of a collection like that.

Wheelie and Wheels

Wheelie and Wheels

Keeping Busy

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I need to keep busy over the Christmas break from University. Although the year is normally split into 3 segments, this year (the final one) is basically split in half. And I’m at the halfway point. So I need to keep up with making things, writing things and formulating what I’m going to do at the end of the year. Here’s a few things that I want to get on with.

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Distributed Video Feedback

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Feedback is an immensely interesting subject with many philosophical facets and a massive array of applications.

I’d like to set up a feedback loop that is distributed among remote locations. For it to work I’ll need to have two computers, each equipped with a camera and an internet connection. The screen on computer 1, will show the live video feed (streamed through the net) from computer 2. The screen on computer 2, will show the live video from computer 1. The cameras attached to both computers would point at the screens.

Adding some kind of moving subject infront of either camera would possibly produce more interesting results.

It would be ideal to increase the number of computers in the chain. The more distributed (and global) the better. Degredation of quality, however, would probably ruin the image after a few iterations – though maybe it would actually create something really good.

Web Server Art

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If you run a website, or put a web server online, it shouldn’t take long before you start getting hits. Most of the hits are from automated bots, but still you get them. Following on from my previous post, I thought it might be interesting to have a custom web server that produced sound directly from the HTTP requests that it got; whilst still delivering the HTML content to the requestor.

Hmmm.

- Update, I’ve just hacked together a webserver that will make my laptop beep everytime there is a hit on it. So- if you’re reading this then make my PC beep by clicking here.

Sound As Data & Data As Sound

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I’m going to explore the audification of data. It would be fantastic if I can get ‘inside’ a data set by audifying it. Daniel Cummerow’s work with algorithmic music is really fantastic and revealing, and working with mathematics is attractive.  I may take maths as the starting point – its easy to transform maths into sound, they go hand in hand – but ultimately it would be nice to have some kind of more Universal generator that can take in any database and with minimal interference produce a sound work.

One possible approach would be to use web activity as the data source.

How about a website that produces a tone. The frequency of the tone could be denoted by the number of visitors – or some other factor that is effected by the visitation. Java.. Get Sam to help!

ASUS P5N-E SLI Slow Boot Problem

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Just thought I’d post this incase anyone else has the same problem but can’t identify what to do to fix it. I came back to my PC today, having turned it off earlier. It appeared as if the computer was still on (despite me having shut it down) but wouldn’t respond. The same problem may happen under other circumstances also.

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