My studio is temporarily in boxes so I’ve just been messing around with video stuff. Been stealing images from Nintendo ROMs. Here’s a small part of the video I’m working on. The image is from a hacked ROM of Ninja Gaiden.
For my 11th birthday I got the NES game Athena from my Uncle in the mail. I’d never heard of the game before, none of my friends had it, Nintendo Power never talked about it, so it was pretty mysterious plus the graphics were a little more beautiful and colorful than average. To get very far in the game was practically impossible, making it all the more mystifying. Now about 20 years later I can open it as a very small file on my computer and observe the entire game in one big tile, solving the enigma. It’s just a bunch of pixels…a bizarre 80s Japanese take on Greek mythology. Here it is, laid out with an 8-bit version of Bach’s Invention 9 playing.
Now I have facial recognition and color recognition in one program. The little face in the lower left corner is a notepad with a face drawn on it. The face image blinks and can re-size to adjust to any face on screen. The programming is still pretty sloppy and parts don’t work too well…but I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve been learning. I want to make it feel more like you’re playing an instrument and the images jump around a little too much still.
I feel a lot of future potential with this color sensor program I made. I put on a yellow kitchen glove and depending on which quadrant of the video the glove is in it makes a unique sound. Written in Processing. Here is the code. The logic took me a few days to figure out how to get the sound to only play once in each section…I learned a lot doing this.
I used almost all new programs to make this video. No Flash this time, just After Effects which is way more powerful. The music was the most interesting. I used Monkey Machine to make MIDI beats and then I used this crazy little program called GXSCC to convert the MIDI files to sound like 8-bit music. Then I put everything in AudioMulch and recorded it.
I made a very simple little program about synesthesia. I will probably develop it more and make it a little more “scientific.” When you mouse over colors of a Matisse painting different notes play that kind of “sound like” the color. I can’t post it here because sounds just start playing right away.
Click here to check it out and see the code and stuff.
Been trying to figure out how to get a Processing sketch in a post for awhile. I’ve been messing around with image manipulation and Processing. I’ll post more stuff I figured out soon. For the image on the left, left click to get it going and right click to stop. The image on the right sorts all the pixels by hue.
Magical 1.5meg Floppy Discs by Lavender Corporation, Acrylic on floppy discs, 2010
I’ve had these laying around for awhile. If you hang one of these above your computer it will magically help to prevent data loss, virii, and will stop you from writing drunken emails and facebook posts. The commercial is here.
I’m learning a lot more about programming so I’m able to do some new stuff. I can make Processing interact a lot better with an Arduino. Here I have three FSRs on the long wires and placed in books. The FSRs are hooked up to my Arduino and each FSR makes the lady dance with a different move. The sound is actually coming from the Arduino also with a wave shield from adafruit. I know I could make the sound in Processing but I’m just learning how to use the wave shield. It’s neat.
I made a Prezi for a talk I’m giving for a class at New School two of my friends are teaching. It’s got a lot of old embarrassing paintings in it. Prezi is a lot of fun. Click or use that arrow to move the presentation along. To get the full effect, click on “More” and make it full screen.
This is how I’m helping to deal with being in hospitals a lot lately.
Some people have been asking me how I make these videos. Believe me I have no idea what I’m doing. I use Illustrator to do the drawing (from this tutorial), Photoshop to do some image editing, Flash to do the animation, Fruity Loops and the Magical 8-bit instrument to make the music and then I put it all together with Premiere. I bet I could make this a lot easier if I did some programming…especially to change the flashing colors and stuff. I’ll figure it out. Please let me know if you have any advice how to make these better.