"Painting" with a Camera

The term "light painting" refers to effects like the trail of lights left by cars in a photo.  Light painting involves leaving a camera’s shutter wide open and overexposing it to moving objects that emit light, creating a continuous capture until the shutter closes.

Interested in the howto?  Check out the following link.
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Use_Camera_Tricks_to_Paint_Light_in_the_Sky

Website

Here's my website.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/157533150/index.html



I just posted it to have the link handy.

I'm sure you're all still frantically working on your websites, so I thought I'd share some useful tools I've come across while working on my own.

First, W3 Schools.  They offer tutorials for all levels of expertise in writing HTML, CSS, PHP... etc.
http://www.w3schools.com/

I actually came across GoMediaZine while working on a related project, but they offer a lot of tutorials involving font creation and other Illustrator functions.  It helped me with my site banner.
http://www.gomediazine.com/

Finally, a color scheme designer.  You decide what the primary color of you site will be and it'll give you various options for complimenting it.  Shame mine is primarily black and white due to my product.
http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple is a artist and writer based out of New York.  She is something of a political activist as well, she had been arrested during the Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011.  These pictures are a part of her "Shell Game" series, a series of nine 4-foot by 6-foot allegorical paintings to commemorate the chaos of a year of revolution.

 Beyond the Occupy Wall Street movement, the pieces cover Goldman Sachs, Anonymous, the health insurance crisis, the British anti-cuts protests, the American debt crisis, the Tunisian revolution, the anti-austerity protests in Greece and the M15 movement in Spain.

 This series and other works can be found on her website, found at:
http://mollycrabapple.com/shell-game/

Air

I'm exhausted, finishing up projects and papers while struggling to keep up on all the normal papers, then starting all the final projects all in the span of a couple weeks.  As fellow students I'm sure you feel the same way.

Anyways, I sat back after a long day at work, put on my headphones and put on some music to relax. 

I closed my eyes and sunk into the chair, enjoying the music.  Then I had the thought that this artist might make a decent blog post.  So here I am, begrudgingly, typing this for the benefit of my avid readers.  

Air is an  electronic music duo from France.  I love 'em.  A general genre label for them would probably be "electronica."  Like Boards of Canada (the group I presented) they have roots in experimentation with the technology of their time, and adapting new methods over time.  Along with a wide variety of synthesizers and other electronic instruments, they are known to blend in classical instrumentation.  It's recorded with the rest of the album as opposed to being sampled like many artists opt for.

The duo released their first album in 1998.  Though it's completely speculation on my part, I would be willing to bet Air was a major inspiration for Black Moth Super Rainbow.  I'll look that up later.  Maybe.

Enjoy.

Christophe Gowans

London graphic artist Christopher Gowans did a series called "The Record Books" in which he took popular or iconic songs and re imagined them as novels, in most cases.  Sometimes they would be other varieties of books though.  Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys became a "Japanese pre-school board book" that would play back animal noises when buttons were pressed.  Prince's Purple Rain becomes a Sci-Fi novel.  Anyways, here are some examples I liked.

The whole series can be found on his site!
Source: http://ceegworld.com/

Earth Pictures

I was almost done posting for the day, but then I found more unbelievable space pictures.  The twist?  These ones are pointed at the earth.

It always blows my mind that these kinds of images are real as opposed to created by by Photoshop or something.  And as always, there's something to be learned from the color composition and arrangement and such.  There's a reason they're so visually appealing, after all.

Source:  Ah dang it, closed the tab. 

Mars Rover Pictures

Mars Rover photos have been put together in such a way that you can view the landscape in interative Google maps-esque thing.  Looks pretty dry and dead... honestly, I wonder if this is taken in Arizona.  I could point you to some areas in AZ that would not be at all distinguishable from this!

Anyways.  Technology!

Source+thing: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/4-billion-pixel-mars-panorama/

Return of the Pretty Space Pictures

This is the magical color combonation to keep in mind if you are creating a modern movie poster.  The contrast of orange and blue suggest conflict without explicitly stating it.

This is called an "egg nebula."

We 80's now.

Man, space is so cool.  Is it too late to become an astrologist or something?

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/space-photo-of-the-day-2/?pid=6591

Keygens and Chiptunes

http://keygenjukebox.com/

Alright, found this a long time ago and wasn't sure what to write about it.  Essentially, there's a "chiptunes" music scene that doesn't get much attention.  Chiptunes, as far as I know, is when the musician creates music under the restrains or system limitations of old hardware, like a Nintendo Entertainment System or something like that.  For whatever reason,  these songs became commonly featured on key generators, so that's mostly what's featured on this site.  This site compiled a list of them for your listening pleasure.  Want to relive that song from when you pirated legally obtained Alcohol 120 do mount your disc images of other legally obtained software?  Here you go.   Great site for all sorts of non-specific nostalgia.

Urine Controller Video Games

 Heard about this on the radio and thought to myself, "Man, technology and art meet again!  The people in 355 would love to hear about this!"

Technology!


Source:  http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/26/minor-league-baseball-team-to-debut-urinal-video-games

Propaganda Poster Tutorial

Ok, so I know this will come too late for most of you but it's still pretty useful looking.  It offers some step by step instructions utilizing both Photoshop and Illustrator. 


http://www.crestock.com/blog/photoshop/design-tutorial-creating-a-propaganda-poster-153.aspx

Oh, and fair warning:  Having Photoshop and Illustrator open at the same time makes these Macs crawl.  I'd advise doing this in the other lab or at home.  

Neo-triptych

 

Thematically,  this piece is intended to fit with my self portrait.  I tried to use bright colors on angular shapes to convey a sense of energy and movement, and accentuated that with splashes of paint.  I gave the image a black background as opposed to a white one because I felt that white space overpowered the colors and diminished the effect I intended.  Initially, I had the objects separated by three sections, but clear separation between the objects didn't have the same effect as their overlap.  I'd rather not say what the initial letters were as I feel the piece took on a different directon from the initial intention during it's creation.  You can all feel free to guess at what I started with for my own amusement, however.

Electronic Music: GRUM

As much as I'd love you, I won't bombard you with synthpop artists.  Today I'll show you some stuff from the Electroclash/Disco House/Post Disco/Nu-Disco/synthpop (whoops) artist "GRUM."  GRUM is a one man operation, Graeme Shepherd of Scotland.  He released his debut album "Heartbeats" in May 2010 to positive reception, and it has been compared to Daft Punk's "Discovery" and Mylo's "Destroy Rock and Roll."

His music videos are simultaneously amazing and hysterical.  Yes, they are official videos.

Can be purchased at:  http://grum.bigcartel.com/
and probably itunes or something idk

San Fran Music Hack Day

On February 16th and 17th the "Music Hack Day" in San Fransisco took place.  That's two days, but who's counting?  Every Music Hack Day offers participants 24 hours to conjure up inventive new ways of interacting with music with the aid of technology.  Here were some cool results from this years event.

LSD
Taking the idea of the collaborative playlist and applying it to visualizations, LSD “allows people in the audience to control the visuals projected on stage at concerts and festivals, all using their smartphones,” explains creator Tyler F. Each visualization acts as a kind of room — people can log onto the site, join in, and take control of visual effects. Even better, they can add in visuals that they’ve recorded on their phones and add them to the mix.

Tweet Concrète
This jokingly pretentious offering from Ryan Fitzgerald generates short sonic collages based on randomly selected tweets from your account. Think of them as tweet soundtracks that last as long as each tweet takes to read. Or, if that doesn’t take your fancy, then why not try…

Nightingale
Apparently, Nightingale ”crawls through your Twitter stream and matches keywords and phrases to song lyrics by utilizing text processing and sentiment analysis” to deliver an “amazing playlist” that matches the mood of your tweets. While the bar for “amazing” is set at an unclear height (and every playlist seemed to have a Black Eyed Peas song in it on our tests), it’s pretty good at picking stuff on Spotify that goes with the taste of each tweeter.

The Bonhamizer
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what a song might sound like if it had been recorded with John Bonham on drums, look no further — Paul Lemere’s Bonhamizer is just the ticket. Lets you upload a song and choose from four types of Bonham — “Basic Bonham,” “Hammer of the Gods,” “Double Time Shuffle,” and “Bonham Shuffle.”

Code Music
This site, from Daniel Imrie-Situnayake and Ryan Brown, turns valid JavaScript into music by mapping the “structure, nesting and errors contained within” onto a compositional waveform.

Soundvine
Matt Montag’s Soundvine lets you pair up your Vines with a track of your choosing, control the playback speed, and generally “remix” the looping video/audio format. Lots of the Music Hack Day projects focus on Spotify and Twitter, but it’s likely that Vine will become equally important over time as the format grows in popularity.

LazyListen
If you’ve ever wanted to be able to listen to Pandora without having the stress of having to use your hands to say you love certain tracks, Peter Watts’ LazyListen will help with just that. Using your computer’s webcam, the radio will stop playing if you get up and leave — and if you “rock out” to a track, it’ll automatically give it a thumbs-up.

Tweedio
Possibly perfect for parties, Tweedio (from Justin Mahon and Sean Po) lets people text or tweet to add songs to a collaborative playlist. Not only can new songs be added, but songs already on the playlist can be pushed up so they come on sooner.

Electronic Music: Perturbator

Little is known about the French electronic music artist "Perturbator."  Well, at least my google searched didn't turn up anything for information on the person behind the music.  Much like "Miami Nights 1984" he does 80's inspired synthpop.  However, his takes on the self proclaimed theme of "Dark and Retrofuturistic music inspired by the 80's."

His album covers honestly look like they'd be 80's metal albums. which is sweet.  Scholarly fact.

Sample:

 When searching for information on this guy, I learned that he recently had done tracks for a recently released video game.  Here is one of them.

The soundtrack is pretty good, I'll probably be checking that out.

His music is available for FREE (or name your price if you feel so inclined) at:  http://perturbator.bandcamp.com/

Fowl Imagery

No statement.  Only hardship and tears on your journey to discovery. 

Electronic Music: Miami Nights 1984

Miami Nights 1984 is Michael Glover from Victoria, BC, Canada. Miami Nights tries to embody the soft warm feeling of an 80s John Hughes film, characterized by smooth synthesizers and nostalgic solos. Born in 1982 on Vancouver island in British Columbia Canada he has been able to draw inspiration from his surrounding environment and romantic dreams.

His obsession with the 1980s has led to the founding of Rosso Corsa Records and a revival of synthesizer music. With Rosso Corsa he is championing many artists such as Mitch Murder, Lazerhawk and Jordan F to make 1980s-inspired music with modern fidelity. 

The genre of the music could be called a number of things; electronic, nu disco amongst others, but the most accurate would probably be "modern 80's synthpop."
And here are a couple of my favorites from the artist:

 

 

 His albums can be purchased at: http://miaminights1984.bandcamp.com/

Didn't notice before, but nostalgic imagery seems to be a theme in the music I like. 

More Framerate Stuff

So remember all that science I dropped in that last blog post?  Me neither.  Like me you'll probably be able to make more sense of it if you actually have something to look at.

Luckily, I found this: http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/

You can compare what various framerates will look like at different settings for motion blur and velocity.  Keep in mind, movies traditionally are set for 24fps, YouTube maxes at 30fps regardless of the source file, "The Hobbit" was shot at 48fps, and your monitor probably doesn't go above 60fps.  I personally think this affirms my belief that we're moving in the right direction by upping the video quality of movies, I'm sick of not being able to see anything but blur during action scenes. 

Stuff About Framerates.

Remember Jared's presentation on the Hobbit and how they chose to film it in 48fps vs 24fps?  This is related to that.  Actually, it references that exactly.

Article: http://www.cameratechnica.com/2011/11/21/what-is-the-highest-frame-rate-the-human-eye-can-perceive/

"24fps looks just artsy and unrealistic enough to remind ourselves that we are watching a movie." 
The framerate a person's eye can actually perceive, however, varies based on a number of factors including distance from stimuli, size of stimuli and its luminescence (brightness).  It seems generally the ideal framerate is around 60fps, where the eye's ability to perceive generally drops off.  Luckily that happens to be the display rate standard for most LCD televisions and monitors. 

More Neat Photograpy from Space

From Landsat’s Amazing 40-Year Record of Earth From Space

Volcanic dome known as the Richat structure in Mauritania, taken by Landsat 7 on Jan. 11, 2001. 

California's Death Valley, the lowest and hottest place in the United States, taken by Landsat 7 on June 11, 2000.

The Mergui Archipelago in the Andaman Sea captured by Landsat 5 on Dec. 14, 2004.

 These photos have fantastic color composition and balance, I just find it amazing that these images exist (somewhat) naturally.

Game of Thrones Fan Recreates City as 3D Model

“The biggest challenge was finding a ‘true’ town map,” he says. “The title sequence is only a few seconds, and shows the town whilst it builds up. There is a ground map at A Wiki of Fire & Ice and you can also find various artwork that was done by fans. Interpolating between these different sources and filling in the blank was surely the challenging and fun part.”

The model was crated using a 3D printer and modeled in CAD.

Source:  http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/3d-printed-mini-winterfell/

Digital Technology Allows for a Gorgeous Special Effects on a Budget

C 299,792 km/s is a Kickstarter success story. The team was successfully funded in December 2011. They raised $37,317, double their target, at which point they decided to further their ambitions, ultimately turning to their fans for a second round of funding. All told, the movie was made for only $40,000 — but you wouldn’t know it to look at it.

“Digital technology has made basic filmmaking tools available to everyone, but undertaking a project like this is still considered way outside of the indie filmmaking spectrum,” says Stockmeier. “What we hoped to achieve with combining practical effects and digital equipment is to show that with a little ingenuity people can make really cool movies with very little resources.”


For the interview, visit the source:  http://www.wired.com/design/2013/01/kickstarted-scifi-movie/?pid=2005&viewall=true

More cool space photos!  Photoshopped looking images that actually exist!
The following are photographs of supernovas; essentially stars that exploded.

Oldest Supernova

The oldest recorded supernova is this one, RCW 86, located 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Circinus. It was noted nearly 2,000 years ago (in 185 A.D.) as a “guest star” in Chinese astronomical documents. Light from the supernova was visible for nearly eight months in the sky before it faded, leaving this amazing remnant behind.

Crab Nebula

Arguably the most famous supernova remnant is the Crab nebula, found 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. The remnant represents the remains of a supernova that exploded in 1054 A.D., which was recorded by Chinese and Japanese astronomers at the time. At the Crab nebula’s center is a spinning pulsar, a neutron star that spews a beam of radiation at Earth every 30.2 seconds.


Source:  http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/supernova-remnants-gallery/?pid=6103

Decades of space photography has revealed a considerable amount of information and has produced incredible imagery that happens to have an artistic aesthetic.

"In 1992, the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft made a pass by our planet’s closest companion, the moon. This mosaic of 53 images shows the different composition of rocks on the moon's surface. Blue and orange colors represent lava flows, bright pink areas are highlands, and light blue colors indicate recent impact material with the youngest craters showing blue rays extending away from them."

"When NASA’s Voyager 1 mission zipped by the Jupiter system in 1979, it discovered that far from the sun were worlds of incredibly active worlds. In particular, it shot spectacular pictures of the moon Io, which is covered in volcanoes and is now known to be one of the most geologically active places in the solar system. This image shows a plume from a volcano on Io’s surface."


Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/wp-content/gallery/solar-system-geology/iovolcano.jpg

This is a self-portrait.  Thought it may only appear to be a crude outline of a person, it was formed from an actual photograph of myself.    The violent rapid splash of colors conforms with the Neo-expressionism art style popularized in the 80s, the decade in which I was born.  Recently I’ve become very interested in the revisiting of the culture from that era, and represented myself in that style as a result.  Furthermore, I find this colorful vibrant representation of myself considerably more than the uninteresting reality of my appearance.

The upcoming art show "LOLcat: The Exhibishun" features just what it suggests, media based on the internet's fascination with cats.  The pieces range from pictures, to animated .gif images, and video. 

"“For many people, especially those who don’t spend a ton of time on the internet, ‘funny cat pictures’ are shorthand for internet culture as a whole,” Miltner said. “From my perspective, it makes total sense that a phenomenon with this level of cultural significance would be explored through other art forms.”

Essentially, he feels that this is representative to the internet as a whole for a lot of people, and beyond that it is representative on people's fascination with cats.  I love it, so there's at least some truth to his thoughts.

The full story and gallery at the source.

Source: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/01/lolcat-teh-exhibishun/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29&pid=8639