More Light! More Light!

If you are reading this post in your feed reader, you’ll want to click through to my actual website. Trust me on this one.

I was really impressed with Aza Raskin’s ContextFree.js experiment. I like how the simple rules of a context free art piece generate complex forms. See below, that text will turn into something I can’t exactly predict.
I’ve added a few comments to help you understand what’s going on there.

//all context free art starts with a single rule.  Ours will start with a rule named face.
startshape FACE
//and here is the rule FACE
rule FACE{
//a FACE rule means that we should draw the rules EYE MOUTH and HEAD.
 EYE{}
 // flip an eye over to the other side of the face.
 EYE{flip 90}
 MOUTH{}
 HEAD{}
}

//OH NO! We have two rules named HEAD.  Context free will randomly pick one
rule HEAD{ CIRCLE{}}
rule HEAD{  SQUARE{}}

rule EYE{CIRCLE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3}}
rule EYE {SQUARE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3}}
rule EYE {SQUARE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3 r 45}}
rule EYE {TRIANGLE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3}}
rule EYE {TRIANGLE { s .1 b .5 y .12 x .3 r 60}}

rule MOUTH {SQUARE{ s .8 .1 y -.12  b .5}}

And here is a randomly generated face, all made up of squares, circles, and triangles:

Want more faces? Go mess about with my face generator on Aza’s demo site.

update: in the comments Chris came up with a bunch of great mouths for an even better face generator!
The art is context free because any rule can be executed without knowing the context of the other rules - they are side-effect free. (these are the kind of problems that work well on lots of processors)
It gets much better. If you are using a modern browser, you’ll see that the heading of my website now is using this to generate random art up there in that previously wasted space.
Reload the website, you’ll see different art generated according to a handful of tiny algorithms. If you can see this, you might want to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Safari. They both support the cool stuff that I’m doing, but you can’t see right now.

Steve Lambert put up a nice helpful walkthrough video on Add-Art, the project I’ve been working on recently. Take a mo’ and check out the project and the video.

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

Grafitti isn’t just a bunch of crap tags scrawled out on a building.

Sometimes it is much better.

This is where talk about property rights becomes more interesting. Look at the cross-section of folks who stop to look, photograph and enjoy the street art Banksy put up. How much jail time should he serve for this? How much should he be fined? Why?

I was talking with someone on our ski trip about taking the Garfield comic strip and removing the word bubbles from Garfield as a way to show the true story in the Arbuckle house. Today I found garfield minus garfield, which erases Jon Arbuckle’s hallucinatory cat to show “the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.”

The comic is so much better and makes so much more sense when you know that the cat doesn’t exist.

A big congrats to my ol’ buddy Sraedi for winning the Skull A Day dance video contest!

Ignore this, it is just a braindump from the train.  Unless you want to help out.

I’ve started working on a project called add-art.   The idea is to turn advertisements into beauty.  It is based on the popular ad-block-plus firefox extension, but instead of leaving holes where advertisements are removed, it would insert art.  Curators could book shows on add-art.org for artists.  When you go to a website with tons of ads, they would be replaced by art images.

Great stuff!   Once we get the plugin working with add-art.org, we should look at decentralizing it.  Let the extension communicate with multiple ad block lists and multiple replacement image servers.  Then package the add-art.org server as an installable package so anyone can run it.  Let users pick up the url of other servers as a way to get art from the artists they like on their browser…

Deviantart might run something like this.
Maybe flickr/explore/interesting could be a provider.
Hell, why not use atom/rss as the provider and let any rss list of images be the provider?
Image sizing becomes an issue.  You need to stick in appropriate sized images.  If they aren’t the right size you’ll need to slice them up on the client side.  Is that cheap?  Does the browser give you a way to not only decently resize, but also slice from an image?

Urban artist Ellis G has been arrested for drawing art on the sidewalks.

How shameful.  His art is drawing the shadows cast by objects in chalk.  It’s beautiful and interesting.  And it washes away.  I’ve happened on his little drawings a few times, always happy to see them.

Nobody pays him, he just does it.  And now he’s been arrested.  What a waste.

It is a menacing shadow, and if it were available in a larger size it would be my desktop wallpaper right now.

From Christopher Baker, who has more details and a video of the image building up.

Hey, NYC friends,

Lets pick a night and go see a drive in movie at grand opening. This car seats six -maybe a triple date?

From their website:

Cruise downtown and park yourself at DRV-IN—Manhattan’s only drive-in cinema. Seven days a week, twice a night, passengers are transported
to another time and place. Under starry skies and the foliage of a potted oak tree, guests watch classic films in a one-of-a-kind 1965 Ford Falcon convertible. With seating for six and a full concession stand, this unique theater setting is one of the Lower East Side’s most intimate experiences. Starting with films from 1960 and progressing chronologically each night, DRV-IN speeds through four decades of cinematic achievement.

Any takers?

Yes, I should be coding, but I love you too much not to share this.