[MEDIA=20]

A time-lapse movie: 400minutes in 3000 screenshots, captured during the Kunsthausnacht event.
[MEDIA=19]

Pollock In Action
„When painting, I’m in the image“, so Jackson Pollock. „The image has a life of its own“. He dripped, splattered color onto the canvas in fluid, dance-like motions. Not having a final image in mind. On the images actions took place, nothing was illustrated.
„Pollock in action“ tries to re-interpret Pollocks style of painting with new technologies. Projected light replaces the fluid colors. The movements of the brush are captured with a camera and a computer. Combining this data with accelerometers in the brush gives an motion sequence, which gets translated into drippings.
Like he said, Jackson Pollocks images didn’t have a beginning nor an end. He was never afraid to change, transform or destroy his image.

Technology

Video Tracking:
An old Sony Handycam in Nightshot-mode, an infrared filter and a infrared LED in the brush made it easy to track the brightest pixel in the image.

Paint buckets:
To sense when the brush is in the paint bucket I used very sensitive pressue/touch sensors.
An Arduino microcontroller board () is connected to the USB-port of the computer (serial) and sends the bucket information.

The brush:
Made from wood, filled with: an Arduino Mini, an EasyRadio RF transceiver to communicate with the computer, an accelerometer to sense to movements of the brush, 2 RGB-LEDs to glow in many colors, an infrared LED to be seen by the camera, and a battery-pack (4x 1,5V AAA, lasted >6h).

Communication:
The computer is attached to another EasyRadio Transceiver keep in touch with the brush. The RF module was connected to USB via a serial/usb converter. The computer sends the chosen color to the brush, and the brush answers with the accelerometer data.

Softwre:
Made with Processing. Video Tracking, communications and visualization run all in the same Processing sketch. Actionpainting algorithm partly taken from Stamen, Splatter http://stamen.com/projects/splatter,
©2003 Michal Migurski, Stamen Design and translated from Actionscript to Java/Processing by me. I modified the splatter code so it could react on accelerometer data.

Download “Pollock In Action” Processing Sketch

Screenshot of the sketch in debug mode:

Links:
Interaction Design @hgkz
Art Transforming Project Website
Kunsthaus Zürich
Stamen Design

Copyrights:
This work is offered under a Creative Commmons license.

Anyone may redistribute this work under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Details on this
license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/.
See also: http://stamen.com/files/LICENSE.txt

[MEDIA=1]

My idea was a touchscreen based blogosphere browser. It should show the complexity, the “networkedness” of the blogosphere. On the other hand it should be a tool to explore the blogosphere completely off the browser.

BlogosphereBrowser in action:
[MEDIA=5]

BlogosphereBrowser Presentation:
[MEDIA=4]

Please visit the project website for a complete description of the project (German only).

Downloads:

dummy_web.zip The zip-file contains application & sourcecode.

How to use blogosphereBrowser:
Think of your cursor to be a finger. Click and drag your mouse simulate touching the screen. As we have one mouse only, the zooming and paning works with z & drag; space & drag.

Chosen photograph:

Early prototype:
[MEDIA=3]

Prototypes:

Final color model:

Visit the Project website for an online version of my Processing Sketch (Java Applets)

Downloads:
Project documentation (pdf)
Project presentation (swf)