Category Archives: Art

Project Idea: A story illustrated with Cinemagraphs

Animation, Art, , , , , ,

Cinemagraphs are beautiful little pictures where most of it is still and some of it is moving.

Let me show, not tell:

Cinemagraph from If We Don't, Remember Me

Yes, this one is moving. Patience.

Our vision works by making comparisons to what it last saw. This is why we are best at seeing things that are in motion. This is why advertisements always have things zooming at us and flashing. Your whole visual system is designed to detect big differences and motion. They are what prey and predator look like.

This is why the best cinemagraphs are subtle, so very subtle.

A Cinemagraph from Ghost World, where only the record and her chest move.

My first thought was: Oh, like Harry Potter.
And then I thought – wouldn’t that be so boss to write a story and have these little gems in it?

So far, I’ve written a story that illustrates itself anew every viewing by grabbing pics from flickr and a poem with moving tentacles. If I have another story, and it fits, I’d like to illustrate it with something still and small and wonderful like these.

Some places I’ve seen great cinemagraphs:From Me To You and If We Don’t, Remember Me.

A Poem about Proper Paperwork

Animation, Art, Hacks, Lit, , , ,

Today is my birthday, and I’ve been overwhelmed with happy birthday wishes. I’m very fortunate and grateful.
I’d like to give you a gift back.
Here is a poem about the importance of filling out forms.
Please enjoy “We Know” in a browser like Chrome or Firefox.

Tonight we will be having dinner at Superfine in DUMBO and then off to see “Black Watch” at the St Ann’s theater. Perhaps we will see you Saturday at Cinco de Matto?

Police bees will hunt rogue geneticists

Art, Hacks, , , , , ,

GO FORTH MY BUZZING SPIES AND FIND THE HIPPIES

Regine has a lovely interview with Thomas Thwaites 1 about a future where the police hunt growers of hallucinogenic plants via special bees.

How did the pollen forensics researchers react to your project?

In general the reaction was that it was almost believable… which is the reaction you want for a futures project I think. A plant geneticist, (who’s ‘Crash Course in Synthetic Biology’ I later crashed) saw the project and said he’d thought about taking genes from the Marijuana plant and putting them into a tomato plant (being a respected scientist I’m sure he wasn’t saying he’d thought about ‘doing it’, just ‘about it’).

And this gem of what’s actually happening now to translate pollen to crime:

Are the police in the UK already using pollen forensics?

Yes, and its been pretty instrumental in several very high profile cases. There’s this lady called Pat Wiltshire who is the police’s go-to person for pollen forensics. She can look at a sample of pollen from clothes or whatever, and visualise the landscape it’s from – a filed of maze, with a river next to it, and an oak tree in the middle – or something like that. The impression I got about police work when I was interviewing James, and a detective, was that it’s really arduous. Pollen forensics would be one detail in many that would lead to cracking a case, and as importantly, proving it in court.

This high weirdness is definitely part of the adjacent possible, one of those strange futures that hasn’t happened, but should.

  1. He’s the guy who tried to make a toaster out of raw materials, start to finish   (back)

Project Idea: Context Free or Processing Header Plugin for WordPress

Art, Dev, Hacks, morelight, Software, wordpress, , , , ,

An iteration or so of the website ago I hacked in a random art generator into the background of the title of my website using ContextFree.js by Aza Raskin.  It was a cool little hack, but what would be really nice is to make it shareable.

I’d like a WordPress Plugin that finds the heading of your website and inserts a little Canvas element, includes either processing.js or contextfree.js and picks a sketch, then plops it in the background of your website’s title.  How cool would that be?

How could you hack open subtitles?

Art, Pals, Politics, Video, , , , , , ,

The Miro open subtitles project just got funded at kickstarter.

The promise is an open source of subtitles for video. Now the subtitles won’t be restricted to the people who made the video. They are anticipating use for the hearing impaired and for translations.  Why am I excited?

The project is also designed to make this decentralized, so that it can be implemented by other video players, and so that users can subscribe to multiple sites of subtitles.  That’s the interesting bit!

I’m seeing subtitles as commentary, subtitles with contrasting dialogue, snarky notes about continuity issues and product placement, or political connections…  Imagine the amazing ShiftSpace web experience 1, or Google’s Sidewiki, but for video.

It’s just cream that the project was funded by tiny donations from lots of strangers 2.

  1. I know Mushon through Eyebeam and Add-Art   (back)
  2. I’m one of them   (back)