toMaterial();

Processing Paris

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:31:00 +0000

Woo hoo! Went to another Processing workshop, this time in bohemian Paris.
Unfortunately haven't had a chance to stay too long, but I love the city:
warm, colourful, busy, dirty. For some reason Parisians seemed a lot more chilled out
than Londoners and I definitely enjoyed the vibe.

I attended the Masterclass at Processing Paris taught by Hartmut Bohnacker. The workshop
focused mostly on Physics simulations. The first day Verlet and Rigid Rody Physics systems were explained, with pros and cons for each. We used multiple implementations:
coding from scratch or using libraries (like traer, toxiclibs, JBox2D and the Fisica wrapper.

It was a pretty cool workshop and I promise update this post later with resource.
The people there were great! Had the chance to meet Andreas Gysin, Miguel Vaz, Will Ismael, Bert Balcaen and many other. The awesome part was I had a chance to chat with the talented Nicolas Barradeau whom I had the pleasure to see on stage at Flash On The Beach. Check out Nicolas' post with some handy resources and thoughts as an actionscript developer jumping into Processing. Met Mathilde who was kind enough to share knowledge on technology/choreography and how they blend and met Coline from whom I got to know a bit more about Digital Agencies in Paris.

Unfortunately there's a lot of things that keep me busy so I won't be able to go into great detail for now.

UPDATE:

Ok, it's been a couple of weeks since Processing Pars, and I didn't expect to be this busy or that documenting a few sketches will take so long.

I started out with the Fisica Wrapper, which was easy to setup and made a polar grid/spider web
You can use the q/a/w/s keys to change the paramaters a bit, also you can drag nodes around.
Note: You will need the Java Runtime to see the sketches in realtime. Also, some might require you to trust/allow access to your microphone to pickup the sound.

I tried some basic FFT analysis using the Minim Library:

FFT Polar Plot from George Profenza on Vimeo.

Run this sketch here

Then used that affect the nodes in the grid:

Audio reactive spider web from George Profenza on Vimeo.

Run this one here

And since I started using Lee Byron's Mesh Library and I didn't have to worry about connecting the nodes manually and keeping track of indices, I randomized the grid a bit:

Audio reactive drunken spider web from George Profenza on Vimeo.

This sketch is available here.

DigitalShoreditch is progress and I have to dash to see the lovely people from SketchPatch to get involved with a Processing session.

Peace!

Makerbot

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:45:00 +0000

At the start of the year, I got involved in a pretty interesting group purchase: a MakerBot. Makerbot essentially is an affordable 3D printer. It's clearly not a fancy and expensive ZCorp, but it is a solution for 3D prototyping.

The group is formed of very talented people from design, development, animation and architecture backgrounds and this was the initiative of Fiddian Warman. I wasn't sure why Soda sounded so familiar, then I remembered we learned about SodaPlay in the Digital Media course I was doing back in Canterbury a few years go, so it's pretty damn cool to work with great people you study about :)

I feel a lot of interesting projects will emerge from this group known as 3DQuorum.

Here are a few materials documenting our progress with building the Makerbot:

Image 'kindly borrowed' from Kirsten Campbell

Here's a short video of the Makerbot running:

Makerbot thing-0-matic first moves from fiddian on Vimeo.

To be honest, I didn't expect it to run from the first go, but tests went surprisingly well so far.

Looking forward to get some of my weird geometries print ready and out in the real world.
Luckily there are a couple of useful Processing libraries out there, like codethread by diatom studio and Marius Watz's(Makerbot artist in residence) ModelBuilder.

Speaking of diatom studio, they have a very cool project called SketchChair which allows everybody to easily sketch, test/simulate and physically create a chair. Pretty impressive!

If you find this project interesting, you can get involved and help out on kickstarter.

Computatonal Design using toxiclibs

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:19:00 +0000

I had the chance to attend a brilliant workshop at the V&A taught by the amazing Karsten Schmidt.

The workshop every Tuesday from the start of February to the start of March it covered a lot interesting topics. That was partly because, we, as attendees were coming from different backgrounds: Mathematics, Graphic Design, Web Development, GIS, Digital Arts, Architecture, etc.

Since the majority did not have background in programming, we started with the basics, and managed to get some bouncing shapes on the screen, which is not a bad start.

Then we moved on to recursion and symmetry, which was a bit of a mental exercise for some to fully absorb through code, but as the saying goes: "To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion".

The course moved to more advanced topics like Spring (Verlet) Physics, which we later applied to simple data visualisation using clusters. Here is a sample which loads a csv file containing attendee names and a table id:

As the projects got more complex we moved from the minimal Processing IDE to Eclipse.
After learning how to use external Java libraries, like JFlickr (a java wrapper for the Flickr API) we used geolocation data to plot images on a sphere:

The part I enjoyed the most was moving to 3D and procedural modeling. Karsten was kind enough to bring his CraftRobo and an unwrapping library he is working on. What this means is, we could generate 3D structures on a computer, which could be unwrapped into 2D to be cut and folded in paper and assembled in 3D in the real world. Pretty impressive stuff!

High Tech at Bistrotheque

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:22:00 +0000

Daniel held another full day of learning and making. From wiring, to soldering, to Physical Computing with Arduino (yes, hardware and software), it was a trial for the lovely participants, but they've made it. I was amazed to see people put so much effort, but it paid off. People with no prior knowledge of electronics or programming managed to get their Digital Creatures up and running.

I must admit assisting this event was easier than for the Kinetica Artfair, but the audience was different as well. At Kinetica we had a few kids too, and it's hard not to worry when there's a hot metal soldering iron involved.

Keep your eyes on the Technology Will Save Us news for more. By the way, there's another
in March on DIY Speakers. See you there!

Oh, and if you want to get started with Processing and Arduino, and you want it now, check out the OpenLab Workshops.

Generative Desgin for the physical world

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:43:00 +0000

Recently I started looking at 3D from different points of view and got a taste for the Physical World. While it's relatively easy to make abstract models that will live in a virtual world, the same does not apply for the this world.

I went to a pretty interesting workshop recently: Generative Design for Robotic Manufacture.The goal was to learn how to take paper folded prototypes into Rhino, parameterize them using Grasshopper, do verlet physics simulations using Kangaroo and hopefully use Lobster IK to simulate the robot movements too. This workflow would help tweak prototypes before they could finally be produced by RoboFold robots.

Grasshopper surprised me in a nice way, with an intuitive visual programming interface similar to Xpresso or better yet, MaxMSP.

I heard "parametrize" this and "parametric" that without knowing for sure. Well, it turns out that "parameter" is architect lingo for "variable" with was comforting.

The workshop kicked off with making paper prototypes. The goal was to play with different techniques(like repetitions, intersections,etc.) to get a feel for what can what can't be done and what kind of folds restrict movement and how. It was a very interesting process. The computer might make some aspects easier, but nothing beats the world world (so far). I am easily fooled that the computer is much more than a tool, using it on a daily basis, but I was pleasantly surprised by the process of using indispensable simple design tools. I didn't need any manual to use them(pen,paper,ruler and scalpel.), I could dive right an quickly prototype.

The next step was to scan a design and get it into Rhino, from there we exported models to .dxf so we can also try them in Rigid Origami. The process sounded easy, just marking mountain and valley folds in red and blue lines for Rigid Origami, but in practice I found that simpler designs worked better than complex ones which did not work at all. You can see a screen grab from Rhino showing the same fold pattern in 3 version, one simpler than the other. Also, I've added a couple of images from Rigid Origami. The next step was to create a parametric version in Grashpopper, which is why the surface was ruled mostly using even steps. After that we played with Kangaroo to get a feel for doing physical simulations on the model.

scanned surface drawn in Rhino

scanned surface imported in Rigid Origami

The second day we got paired to design surfaces that would fit a pretty nifty window pattern. I got paired with Dr Kontovourkis Odysseas who teaches Architecture at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. I must admit I was a bit overwhelmed at the workshop, not only by the amount of new information (which made me wish I picked up Rhino/Grasshopper earlier), but also by the rest of the attendees. I was the youngest, and came from a pretty different background, where the closest thing would be making 3D models in an abstract world. Most of the attendees were architects from different parts of Europe. Most of them were German speakers, although they weren't from Germany. My colleague was kind enough to get me up to speed with Grasshopper and we started using designs from the previous day to fit on the window pattern.

Again simplicity won. Initially we had a folding with quite a few folds in, but it turned out not only it was hard to parameterize, but it also wasn't very scalable. We started from scratch and got a parametric design.

parameterized design in Grasshopper

It was a challenging experience, but a fulfilling one. The talented people at Metropoltan Works were a pleasure to learn from and I was impressed with their facilities for 3D scanning and printing.

I seem to find cutting and creasing paper very relaxing and I enjoy the different type of thought process. Looks like I found a way to do 3D, but spend a bit more time away from the computer.

Kinetica Art Fair 2011

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:18:00 +0000

Kinetica Art Fair
is one of the biggest artist/maker fairs in the UK. There were a lot of great project, a lot of people and a wonderful vibe in general.

This year was a different for me, because I had the opportunity to participate, not just view the Art Fair this year. Daniel Hirscmann invited me to join Technology Will Save Us for the weekend to assist the workshop. There were multiple workshops including an awesome one on DMX Lighting with Arduino. DMX is a protocol somewhat similar to MIDI used in theatre/performances to control lights/smoke machines/etc. but can be used for light based responsive art installations or similar projects. The I helped with was a bit more basics: a soldering workshop, which allowed to people to learn how to solder, buy building one of these fun little toys Daniel and Mike designed, called the Lumiphone. The workshops were packed with people, young and old.

Here are Daniel's photos from the event:

and here are some random pieces from the show:

For more workshops be sure to check Technology Will Save Us

Sweet Delight and Endless Night 111110

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:25:00 +0000

I haven't been playing with MaxMSP a lot lately, but Palle Lindqvist gave me a good excuse, enter S.T.M.D

Initially I played a bit with the audio input from an electronic stethoscope, trying to trigger actions on heart beats. I had no clue what Palle, had in mind until recently.
So what is S.T.M.D. ? He describes it as: "Experiential live audio-visual room installation. ". Conceptually I see it as a link between your inner and outer self, both literally and metaphorically, but it all makes sense instantly when you experience it...

Speaking of which, you are invited to the Sweet Delight and Endless Night group exhibition.

Plainly put exhibition = prohibition of inhibition, so do expect a surreal experience.
We'll be at 82 Great Eastern Street, from 7PM to 10PM.

Oh, I haven't talked about the technology yet...Would a magician give away his tricks ? Maybe after the show, so check back later for the nerdy bits.
All I can say for now is: lights, cameras, electronic stethoscope.

UPDATE:

Well, not to bad for something pulled of quickly, but certainly not ideal. The complete system was quite complex: Heart beats detected through an electronic stethoscope and a webcam are the inputs. The outputs are lights controlled using
the DMX protocol and the heart beats and a projector displays the webcam feed on a plane drawn with OpenGL that gets 'exploded', again, on heart beats.
There was little time and many things to do, so in short: lots of dirty little hacks.

Here is a stethoscope signal processing test patcher:

Heart Beat Patcher Test from George Profenza on Vimeo.

One of the trickiest part was getting accurate readings, which were almost impossible in the installation's environment: a small room next to a massive room which resonated with the audience of multiple other pieces, but that's what a group exhibition is about. On the other hand, given it was an independent effort by a few students, it turned out ok.

Here is a fragment of the recordings Palle did. You will notice toward the end of the video that the beats (distorted webcam feed) isn't all that accurate:

11.11.10

FOTB 2010

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 19:40:00 +0000

Another Flash On The Beach just finished, and it was a great one.
This year had just as much magic as my first one, back in 2007.

It even had a funny side, because as disturb media we did the opening act.

Found it hard to choose sessions yet again. This year though, attendees should be able
to access video recordings at some point. I hope this won't take too long. I remember the some of the videos made the site in spring.
Again, couldn't find a balance between design and development. Maybe it's just me, but sessions seemed more developer focused. Little mention about flash animation, but in defense, there were brilliant talks on motion graphics/video by Nando Costa(who made the amazing titles this year,featured bellow), Julien Vallée(whom disturb were delighted to meet) and Mr.Imagination-Running-Loose himself Cyriak Harris

FOTB 2010 Titles from Süperfad on Vimeo.

The theme this year seemed to be playfulness, a celebration of homo ludens in any environment, be it commercial or not.
Even from the first session, Grant Skinner showcased fun projects that tied creativity, games and practicality somehow together, from sound visualizers to Android/Phidgets/voice controlled cars. Speaking of sound visualizers, at the LFPUG Aftermath, Grant explained the fast and easy way to do visualizers in as3: leftPeak and rightPeak instead of computeSpectrum.

Andre Michelle did a great session on dynamic sound generation in flash player 10 and showed some awesome tunes people created using Audiotool. Also, he generously released the code used in his workshop.

Mario Klingermann announced his last talk for at least a year, but showed some amazing uses of image processing, including solving jigsaw puzzles. Luckily I had the chance to exchange a few thoughts on solving puzzles (as I'm solving simpler ones) and got some pretty good advice. It looks like I will be learning a lot of new things in the near future. Thank you for your help Mario!

Unfortunately I missed Stacey Mulcahy's session in favor of toxi's one. His session explained why opensource is so important in a very articulated and logical manner. It sounded so simple, to grow or not to grow...isolated systems do not develop as well as the ones in an open environment. It was a passing of experience from years of coding, and an great proof of that are the toxiclibs:

toxiclibs showreel 2010 from postspectacular on Vimeo.

I was lucky enough to win one of his 3d prints generated with toxic libs...YAY!

Robert Hodgin held another inspiring talk. His journey through computation and art helped gain hands on experience in re-creating things found in nature that we often take from granted. Personally I was very pleased to see how a mind that seemed split between art and logic somehow found peace. I say somehow, but what I mean is doing what you love and restlessly devote yourself to this. From magnetism to Radiolaria, Robert makes me think of a contemporary Ernst Haeckel.

Image originally from Robert Hodgin's Portfolio

Stefan Sagmeister closed the 1st day with a showcase of great design projects and a lot of lessons for life. If there's one word I could summarize Stefan by, without using foul language, I would say confidence.

The second day kicked off with the Elevator Pitch. A lot of good speakers, too little time(3mins each). Flashmagazine has a good feature on that. Some of the speakers, like Nicolas Barradeau, should have their very own session. There were other interesting talks on that pitch, including the Doomsday Console, as3sfxr(Thomas had an awesome 8-bit style presentation as well), xJSFL and many others. I thought I would see a talk by Matt Pearson this year, but he seems to be a bit busy with a great book on Processing and Generative Art.

Branden Hall also touched a bit on opensource, but also focused on HYPE!. Last year I posted a few details on HYPE!. It is a great framework, and hopefully more artists/designers will tinker with it. I remember the "good ol' days" when people just hacked away in flash mixing illustrations and scripts to produce amazing pieces. People like Erik Natzke, Joshua Davis, James Patterson, etc. matured creatively from such experiences, and still use Flash/actionscript to this day. Hopefully more people will pick this up and just have fun!
Branden also briefly mentioned scheme, and my mind went straight to live coding and fluxus. I recommended this to Branden and he was excited about it. Who knows, maybe we'll see something materialize from this.

Joa Ebert was the highlight on technical achievements in the world of Flash Player this year. From Apparat, Joa started of a new project called JITB which is a Flash Player that runs in the Java Virtual Machine. There were plently of amazing tech demos, including compiling Pixel Bender shaders to GLSL Shaders. I understood the bit about GLSL shaders as I played a used them a bit for my OpenGL coursework, but the rest of the talk was way over my head to be honest. At one point I was wondering why not learn Java instead, or use something else. One thing I can think of is, with this project, people that already know actionscript and use it for art installations/design projects could use they're existing knowledge, but get much faster results than what the Flash Player can deliver at the moment. That is one application that comes to mind, but surely there must be more.

After such a technical session I went to see Florian Schmitt's session. At some point in the talk, the line between art and design got blurred, which was nice too see.
Julien Vallée
showcased fun and playful motion graphics, again the theme of home ludens re-occured indirectly, not only in the colours and motion, but also in the material themselves. Instantly I was reminded of how fun it was to play with paper,scissors and colours.

Unfortunately I missed Mind Candy's talk, but my only excuse is, I did see them at LFPUG. Sorry Cat! I briefly spotted Mike Jewell, whom I had the pleasure to meet at Goldsmiths, and get his help as a PhD student. He did quite some impressive work for Moshi Monsters while he was there.

Nando Costa did a great talk about motion graphics, commercial work and the fun of just making things you like, even if they prove to be successful commercially or not. I didn't expect to see a session about failed projects, but that is a key to moving forward. You learn more from making mistakes than from fearing them. Fear never lead to anything, at least when creating. I linked this to being open vs. closed.

Brendan Dawes closed the second day with a brilliant talk. Less noisy than 2007(no more MaxMSP/turntable/webcam action), but insightful nevertheless.
It tied in with the cool things we learned in the Creative Computing course. If you've liked the videos from his session, do check out the ones from our Audio Visual Processing course

After 2 nights of drinking, I made it in halfway though the Jam Session.

Linked to the Elevator Pitch and people that didn't belong there, just because they're that good, I was glad to see Iain Lobb in a full session. I've seen a few of his previous talks. Obviously, he knows what his talking about and has plenty of hands-on experience, but his passion for what he does makes him a brilliant presenter. Proof of that, he filled the whole theater in just a few minutes and there were plenty more people that couldn't even make it it. John Davey should reconsider location for a future talk. If you're interested in Game Design and Flash, do have a look at his blog as he also shares the awesome interface he used in talk.

I missed Doug McCune's session, which sounded very interesting, but saw some awesome demos and learned about Spherical Harmonics in Ralph Hauwert's session.

Cyriak Harris was a proper break from the "ugly face of reality", if you haven't already, do check out his awesome videos.

Joshua Hirsch from bigspaceship had a talk about personal project in a commercial environment. I didn't see his talk last year, but I understood the one this year was pretty similar. Don't know if anybody else noticed, but the guy complained about not many employees committed to personal projects. After he mentioned that bigspaceship takes ownership of the ideas and some of the incentives were things like "meal in a restaurant" it was obvious to me. disturb isn't as large as bigspaceship, but it certainly treats personal projects and encourages ideas better.

The closing talk was given by Jared Tarbell. Another great talk about the link between nature, simple agents and emergent systems...creating complexity from simple behavior. Some new work was showcased, and there were a lot of insights into the manufacturing process of his artwork, from the algorithm running on a computer to the physical world(be it print, laser engraving, etc.)
In 2007 I saw Jared's talk for the first time and was amazed. Generous as he is, he gave some of his art pieces to the public, but I was way in the back. I was a bit sad I couldn't get one of his wood prints, but somehow, he threw one that landed straight onto my lap. That was magic! This year I thought I should go to the front. I didn't manage to catch a wooden cube, but chance made it so, that one felt into my open bag...again I might be tempted to carry on about how random things aren't actually random, and there's a reason for most events, but I will stop here. Luckily I had a little something for Jared too. With such awesome people to fuel my confidence, you will see some generative art pretty soon...

Arduino & Actionscript - The resources

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:40:00 +0000

Things are getting busy again, but finally managed to get a bit of time to put the materials together from my talk at LFPUG

You can download the resources here.
The zip contains the slides(pdf), a readme file with instructions on how to setup your files for Arduino and how to configure serproxy.

The video recording of the talk is available (thanks Influxis)

If you have any problems comment on this page or send me an email.

Thanks again to Tink for the opportunity to talk at LFPUG and big thanks to disturb media for supporting me
with the presentation. The slide design is crafted by Jason Turner.

Big thanks to Daniel Hirschmann
for the awesome course taught at Goldsmiths. Remember, there are lot of good resources on the Physical Computing Wiki . Feel free to make use of Daniel's mailing list([physcomp][at][lists.plankman.com]).

This post should be on the disturb blog, but at the moment, Jace is a bit busy making sandwiches.

Conrad's talk will be at Flash On the Beach.
Disturb have a few surprises for you there.

See y'all offline !

Arduino & Actionscript - The talk

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:54:00 +0000

Tink was kind enough to allow me to give a talk at the London Flash Platform User Group later this month.

I will be presenting an introduction to Arduino, sensors, actuators and all that geeky goodness.
There will be a few demos on how to communicate between Arduino and Actionscript, so hopefully,
is hardware doesn't fail, this will be pretty fun.

With years of experience in OOD, frameworks and TDD, Conrad Winchester will giving a talk before me on the Robotlegs micro-architecture.

If you're in London, do sign up and drop by RG/A's office in Clerkenwell as they will be hosting the talks this month.

Otherwise, stay tuned, video and slides will be posted here after the talk.

The Mother Mind is free

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:23:00 +0000

The Mother Mind was released to the curious hearts and minds visiting Goldsmiths.
As mentioned in the previous post, balance shifted from a lot of live video processing,
to less. Instead the voice of Helene took over the performance, and technology just
aided here and there, trying to disguise itself as magic.

Here is a fragment from the performance:

For documentation purposes, here are is a video of a previous Max patcher:

Colour Sound from George Profenza on Vimeo.

Using jitter, I analyze the average colour in the video. The amount of red is mapped to the volume of the wind track and the amount of blue is mapped to the volume of the chimes track (both sounds from freesound.org).

The tracks were randomly chosen, but the Wind track seems to go with the waves somehow.

Here are some screenshot :

Mother Mind

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:30:00 +0000

About a month ago I had the pleasure to meet Helene Nymann on the steps of Goldsmiths University Library. Long story short, I did a bit of research into sound, film, film sound and soundtracks, but didn't have the chance to work with great material, and Helene had great video material and no sound.

We tried a few simple techniques using Max/MSP/Jitter to analyze the video and alter pre-recorded sound. Helene also wanted to bring something new into this and tries to blend film, performance and gallery space into one. If you're interested in experimental video, live performance, and a bit of live signal processing, you're more than welcome to view Helene's project: Mothermind.

The performance will take place on the 17th of June, from 6PM to 9PM in Goldsmiths Richard Hoggart building(entrance 26 on the map bellow), in room 328.

Details to follow...

Slides from the London Flash Developers and Designers Meetup Talk

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:40:00 +0000

Hello there,

The slides are available online now.
A bit compressed on slideshare:

Introduction To JSFL

View more presentations from George Profenza.

Or the orginal in PDF format.

Quick warning: "Forgive me for my English is not so premium!"
There might be spelling errors here and there. If you find that
annoying, let me know and I'll fix the errors. I didn't plan time
for any proof reading, my bad.

Here are the links for some of the animation helpers presented
at the start of the session:

Stage Recorder by Slavomir Durej

Motion Sketch by Justin Putney/ajarproductions

LazyBoy Panel - manually declares stage instances based on a naming convention.

More handy tools in the presentation.

David will gather the files written at the presentation. Updates related to this talk will be posted here.

Oh, if want to get started with MooTools or see what the Adobe Open Source Media Framework is about, there is a talk next week at the London Flash Platform User Group.

Thanks,
George

Speaking at London Flash Developers and Designers Meetup Group

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:40:00 +0000

I will be giving a talk on the 22nd of April at The London Flash Developers and Designers Meetup Group.

The talk will be about JSFL(Javascript Flash) and hopefully will help attendees getting started with automating aspects of the Flash IDE. Although there is some scripting involved, there are quite a few things in for designers/animators that use Flash as well. We will be looking at how to create some basic commands then move on to traversing the timeline and accessing the data of various elements.

Tired of doing the same tasks again and again in Flash ? Come a long and see how you can make it all easier.

The Flash Meetup takes place at London South Bank University in the Keyworth Building,
this Thursday at 7 PM. More details on the Meetup page.

South Park style lip synch with actionscript 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:17:00 +0000

At disturb media we wrote a detailed tutorial on how to use the Sound and SoundMixer class in actionscript for something else, not just fancy sound visualizers.

The tutorial made it in issue 169 of WebDesigner Magazine
It's a 4 page feauture, lot's of details covered, do check it out!

Click on the image to see a demo.

The "heaps aweseome patrol captain" Chris designed the character and setup the assets,
and Alex performed and produced the sound. Big thanks !

Decode

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:21:00 +0000

A great exhibition ended this Sunday, the Decode Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
I've seen a lot of great projects out from the likes of John Maeda, Casey Reas, Marius Watz, Golan Levin, Jonathan Harris, Joshua Davis, Robert Hodgin, Chris O'Shea, et al. It was the first time I've seen so much technology in a museum, at this scale.
More interesting than the technology itself was the chance to see the reactions of the other visitors.

An interesting catch is that the source code for the Decode Identity by Karsten Schmidt is released on GoogleCode, so people could submit recoded versions. I am way behind with my main project, but I spent a bit of Sunday tinkering with the code. I did run intro trouble when I had to put the images together as a video. I've used After Effects for the first time just to import a sequence of images and lay a sound track, but it took quite some time to get used to the basics for some reason. The sound is a fragment from a song by Valentin Leonat performed back in 2007. I've used the Minim library, FFT mostly to use the sound as a trigger for changes in the video. The drums control the mesh colour a bit (the intensity of the blue-ish tint), but the guitar controls
the background colour and the camera position on higher peaks and the distortion of the mesh throughout the length of the video.

The video doesn't feel the same way, as recording a sequence of images from Processing seems to take a lot of resources,
but I encourage you to download my version of the source code and have a look for yourselves.

Anyway, here is my late and tiny contribution:

Decode Tremolo from George Profenza on Vimeo.

Ok, back to some work now.

Oh, one last thing, the Decode Gallery ended, but there are still a few days to check out some digital goodness
on Digital Pioneers.

Take care,
George

Time for another update

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:07:00 +0000

Finally a bit of time to breathe. A lot happening lately, again. Just finished 2 assignments, 1 more to go for now.
This time I'd like to share some of the things I study in Creative Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

I am handing in the project for Audio Visual Processing. The task given was to "implement interactive real-time audio
and video systems using the programming tool of your choice (either maxMSPJitter, C++ using provided libraries, or Java/Processing)."

There was plenty of information to sponge in a short amount of time, but very fun. What I've noticed so far is: the simpler, the better. What I mean is, if I use the right numbers by processing video or audio, the results might be a bit 'jittery' and might not convey a theme, that could be easier conveyed with a bit of cheating. The brain does a lot of things for us, and when it comes to video we only need 24 frames per second be fooled into seeing continuos animation, when linked to sound, the images gain value, and feed information (confirmation) back to the sound (source) in a strange but effective loop. I haven't managed to get the right balance between the data processed and the way to map that wisely so it's instantly and easily perceivable.

Well, enough talk for now. Here is a an attempt to modify 3d geometry (a plane) using video(color) and audio(peak amplitudes sampled every 40 milliseconds) as source. For some reason it makes me think it could be a 'quick'n'dirty' technique to achieve an effect similar to Michel Gondry's "Fell in Fell In Love With A Girl Lyrics" video for The White Stripes. The source video is a performance by Les Elephants Bizarres, talented friends from back home.

GridTest - Les Elephants Bizarres - Hello Says The Devil from George Profenza on Vimeo.

The colour channels from the video control the height of each grid square, coresponding to a group of polygons in the 3d plane. The resolution of the 3d plane and source video can be altered in realtime. The inputs can trigger a change all the time, or only when a change in peaks occurs, as with this video. Also the height can be controlled by the audio, not fully demonstrated in the video.
Click here for the MaxMSP/Jitter patches used to generate the videos(really compressed videos).

Here is a simpler attempt to modify a procedural 2d texture that in turn modifies the geometry of a 3d plane using sound as input. This time I used the pfft object narrow 3 ranges of frequencies (low, medium, high), but they're not very cleverly mapped to the texture inputs. The low frequencies control the scale of the procedural map, the peaks in medium frequencies change the procedural map, while the high frequencies alter the weight applied to the maps.

AudioVisual test - Valentin Leonat - Esti Departe from George Profenza on Vimeo.

Music by Valentin Leonat. Be sure to check out more tunes on Valentin's MySpace page.

The method to analyze audio is good enough, but not the method to control the visual. The inputs might work better with a glitchy tune. Here is the Ghost of 3.13 with Orchids and Lilacs

AudioVisual test - The Ghost Of 3.13 - Orchids And Lilacs from George Profenza on Vimeo.

Missing myself

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:29:00 +0000

Detail from Nature by John Maeda

Sounds egoistic, and maybe it is. I didn't bother me much, until I've looked back and realized how I've changed. Well, we all change, we interact, we change others in return and so on. I used to draw more, create more, not better, just more. I was annoyed I didn't know enough code to make some of my ideas work. A few random events, like Jared Tarbell throwing one of his laser cuts wood models at me at FOTB'07...

... winning an Arduino at LFPUG, a few dozen coin flips always ending on the same side and I ended up studying Creative Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. There was a lot of new material to cover (like Java, Processing, OpenGL, MaxMSPJitter, openframeworks, etc), but I've managed to do a decent job and I don't think I did it by my own.

Back in 2007 I just started to tinker with code(as2.0) and I was pretty bad at it, plus the amount of knowledge I had to cover scared me. AS3.0 was out and that was even scarier. When I was at FOTB I had a copy of Essential AS 3.0 which I used to get autographs from most of the great developers there like Keith Peters, Andre Michelle, Brendan Dawes, Erik Natze, Carlos Ulloa, etc.

In my head it was like I had their 'go-ahead'/approval and I'd owe it to them to learn all that. I managed to get a job in London in late April, early May 2008 which meant for a while I commuted from Canterbury, each morning waking at 5, sleeping a few hours a night and had to hand in my projects for Fine Arts and Digital Media at that time. Daily bus journeys meant 4 to 5 hours a day which meant when I wasn't instantly falling asleep after running to catch the bus I would read. The 'good luck charm' worked.

I got scared again when I had to start Creative Computing. Not a problem, I got Robert Hodgin's signature on my copy of Processing: A Programming Handbook
for Visual Designers and Artists. I started to learn Processing and started to play with OpenGL a bit. I still regret I haven't caught James Patterson, although I did put about 10 or 11 forms in 2007 and in 2008 John Davey managed to get him on stage.

This year I am finishing my undergraduate studies. This is a bit unbelievable as this would be the 5th University I'm studying in, but the 1st degree I seem to finish. Now I don't know for sure where I will head, but as usual I 'smell' a direction and keep hitting walls from side to side in order to move forward. Sometimes I find shortcuts, sometimes I get lost for a while, it's all part of learning.

Now fear was creeping in regarding my direction, but I found a bit of light tonight.
I just got back from an amazing talk at the V&A given by John Maeda. I didn't realize how much I went into this whole computing thing and technology, I was thinking more about the geeky details than the ideas. Getting lost into creating tools and the most efficient way to build tools that I ran out of time to actually use them. As Jonathan Harris mentioned, tools are using me, not the other way around.

Thank you John Maeda for reminding me to finish what I've started. Oh, and thank you for the 'go-ahead' as well.

It is always great to meet your heroes in person, as a great man once said.

quick update

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:35:00 +0000

I'm trying to write at least a post per month, so here's October, roughly.

First off...I'm year 3 now, the final year in my degree and a lot of work will go into that. I had a few good ideas for my projects, but it so happened that this year it won't be a solo project. I will work with a friend from Canterbury who studies FRTV (Film-Radio-Television) on a movie project. She will take have to deal with the script, props, actors, and what not, I will be doing the soundtrack. Soundtrack ? Yes!

Sound if one the those things that scared me. I work with visual stuff most of the time and its my comfort zone. I've always been scared of playing with sound/music, I never played any instrument, never was good at anything related to it. Now that I understand roughly how sound works in geeky terms (longitudinal pressure waves), all this is like a black hole...a whole new world awaiting for me to get sucked into. That is good, but that goes to prove that there is no support for visual things ( drawing, animation ) in our Creative Computing course, but there is plenty for sound though.

Ever since this project started, things started to fall into place like jigsaw pieces, one at a time, nice and steady. The more I researched sound the more I found confirmations to get rid of my fears. The first books on sound I got my hands/eyes/head on are: "This is your brain on music" and "Musical beginnings".
Aside a lot of interesting research on sound and how it works on your body( It seems the fetus starts to develop his/her auditory system between weeks 8 and 11, later it distinguishes voices, it recognizes the mother voice, it gets accustomed and calmed by rhythms (hear beats), etc. ), things you can read more by yourselves, and hopefully I can blog about them more in time. There was a part that gave me courage:
"There are two widespread myths about musical excellence. The first of these is that high levels of musical accomplishment are necessarily rare. The second is that these high levels of skills are predicated on particular unusual early musical attributes or capacities." - John Sloboda in Musical Beginnings.

I will test this things as I go along, but so far it's been nothing but confidence.
If I think of cymatics and the Jared Ficklin and Craig Swan's sessions at Flash On The Beach...since were all just grouped particles, suddenly stories about magical spells (words that resonate to the right frequencies to change matter) don't seem that far from the truth.

Weird ... :)

Anyway...back to this 'real' world

What I will do is generate a soundtrack on the fly as the movie is being shot. Using computer vision and a few fancy microphone setups as inputs I will generate music that will be in tune with what happens visually on the screen. Since this will be a translation of movement into sound partially...there is a lot of history on that side in Digital Performance. On the other side, post production, there are people developing clever systems to analyze video and annotations to produce soundtracks. We are bit stuck in the middle, and I am not sure where we might go with this. It seems like a fun and interesting thing to explore and we'll see what will happen.

As i said, things fall into place with this project. I need to get the grips with computer vision. I've played with actionscript and webcams a bit, but nothing fancy. openCV has tons of cool things already implemented so I'm pretty sure we'll use that. It so happens that Arturo Castro and Joel Gethin Lewis ( who blew people away with his projects at Flash On The Beach this year ) will teach Computer Vision at Goldsmiths for 4 days.

"Goldsmiths Digital Studios is pleased to announce a Computer
Visionworkshop using
openFrameworks on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th of November 2009 lead by Arturo
Castro(co-founder of
openFrameworks) and Joel Gethin Lewis and
hosted by Goldsmiths College’s MFA Computational Studio
Arts programme.
You will gain a very good insight into what you can control
through video and be able to work on interactive projects involving
motion-tracking, face and body recognition and identification and more.
There will a group for beginners, starting off with some basics in
object-oriented coding and an advanced group who will dive straight into
computer vision. If you’d like to get a sample of openFrameworks in action,
check out Made With openFrameworks"

I've never programmed in C++ before and I haven't used openFrameworks. I've setup OF using the easy to follow instructions on their website. Browsed through a few samples and so far it doesn't look that hard. I'll get used to namespaces probably. I've spotted methods familiar to Processing ( setup, update, draw, etc. ) and it feels confy :)

Hopefully I will document my project using this blog so you will hear more about this.

I haven't ditched Flash, I don't think I will. Lately I've met some brilliant people that use a lot of cool stuff, mostly more powerful than Flash, but they still use Flash and enjoy it. I found that reassuring.

Speaking of people I've met, I will try to tell you a little bit about them.
One of them is Michael Jewell who is a researcher at Goldsmiths. Remember I've mentioned people that develop clever systems that make soundtracks in postproduction ? You can read more about that in his thesis. Aside that he made a few good games for State Of Play. One of them is Moshi Monsters and I couldn't believe the technical details of the project. Some mad actionscript bytecode action going behind the scenes. Michael hasn't updated his blog in a while, but he's got some cool stuff there.

I went to a few geeky workshops lately at Space. There is a guy that I will not mention his name yet. We meet in situations like this (Arduino workshop in this case, Away3D workshop last year, etc. ) and its funny how these things just happen.

Aside OpenProcessing and HasCanvas, there is an actionscript version of a Processing online prototyping tool called SketchPatch. I've met Davide, one of the co-founders of the project at a Chip Tune workshop, nerding away on 8bit noise. The project looks pretty good but there are always things to be added, and I hope I can lend a hand.

Still on the Flash side of things, LazyBoy, a handy extension I wrote for Flash, that got featured in WebDesigner Magazine, is now also on the Adobe Exchange website. If you use the Flash IDE and work with classes and custom layout designs, this might save time setting up.

Since Uni started, there is plenty to do there ( year 3 project, openGL course, Physical Computing course ) so I'm working part time, which means I don't have the time to get involved in the big projects at disturb. I'm missing out on fun, and getting more things that can be handled in the 2.5 days per week I'm there. Somehow lately I've managed to get some fun out of it. I've built a few tools that would do the work for me. Even things that were supposed to be dull ended up being fun which is great. I hope I can get that happening for a long time now. The latest project was a quick karaoke thing, I might not be able to talk more about it as most of the things we do at disturb are secret. I wish I can post some of the tools. I worked with our new designer, Jason Turner. I thought I recognized him from somewhere, he is one of the finalists in the Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament...that is like Live Coding for Designers :)
New designer, as in extra one, yup we're 8 of us now at disturb and Chris is coming back from Australia...woo hoo! ASS! ASS! I bet he's all saturated with Mumatron love by now...WHUT ?

I keep meaning to post some tutorials never have the time. There's plenty of things in the bag, let's just hope we won't have to wait until Christmas.

Yup, things have gone mad busy again, but it's all good so far.

Until next time,
SMILE! ^_^

FOTB 09

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:17:00 +0000

It's been a week since FOTB 09 finished. A great event, better than last year, but for some reason, not as magical as FOTB07, this IMHO.

This year was balanced between design and development from one point of view, and maybe to techie from another. Advantage for techies, which most of them this year presented creative projects, creative coders like: Dr.WooHoo, Joel Gethin Lewis, Jeremy Thorp, Joel Baumann, Karsten Schmidt[Toxi], Craig Swann, Mario Klingemann, Jared Ficklin, Joshua Davis, etc.

Maybe it is just me, but this year the sessions seemed to be resonate more in tune with last year's Jonathan Harris' talk. Less spoken ( yes Joel Gethin Lewis, I heard you loud and clear about that 2001,2002 project done in Director and Havok ), but more proven. The great projects this year weren't necessarily build using flash/actionscript. Even the flash related project proved that you can achieve a lot more by going outside the box. Here are some simple examples that come to mind right now: Keith Peters' game framework, inspired by cocos2d, Chuck Freedman's Stereo Microphone, and of course Joa Ebert's Apparat. Joa basically, pardon the expresion, bitch slapped Adobe with those tools. Well done! While in the last years I heard more about Flash and Flex, this year words like Processing and OpenFrameworks resonated in my ears. Maybe that is what I wanted to hear.
There were quite a few designer sessions, but compared to last years, I seem more attracted to creative computing at the moment. Oh, and I almost forgot, I've met Branden Hall there and he and Joshua Davis are working on a project that sounds pretty cool. Maybe it was too soon for Joshua to talk about their project called Hype, but I wish he did.

Right, I'll keep my opinions short. Sorry, no pictures or videos to share...but I do have something. I kept writting tiny notes in an xml file and during a session I've managed to write a minimal viewer for my notes. There might be a lot of spelling mistakes, unless it gets too frustrating, ignore them.

Maybe there are a few references here and there that might be handy.

I have collected a list of resources (videos, slides) related to Flash On The Beach 09. Here goes:

Julian Dolce

iPhone App Development For Flash Developers - http://deleteaso.com/iphone-workshop/

Lee Brimelow

Down And Dirty With The Low Level Bytes - http://theflashblog.com/?p=1391
As Mike Chambers pointed out some time ago, a lot of videos available on the FITC website. There is a video of Lee talking about ByteArrays.

Keith Peters

Casual Game Architecture: How to finish coding a game without despising it - http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2402

Mike Chambers

Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR - http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2009/09/22/fotb-slides-advanced-desktop-development-with-adobe-air/

Carlos Ulloa

HelloEnjoy - http://www.lfpug.com/we-make-you-enjoy/

Rich Shupe

Lead the Hand and the Arm will Follow: Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4 - http://www.learningflashcs4.com/2009/09/20/inverse-kinematics-in-flash-cs4-fotb09/

Elevator Pitch
3 Minute Wonders
http://zenbullets.com/blog/?p=423,
http://blog.iainlobb.com/2009/09/3-minute-lesson-in-game-design-my-talk.html
http://www.slideshare.net/micros123/fotb-presentation-2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJfy0_M1m2Q&fmt=18,
http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/29/fotb09-3d-bowling-demo/,
http://swingpants.com/2009/09/29/flash-on-the-beach-elevator-pitch-how-to-build-3-games-in-3-minutes-part1/

Grant Skinner

Quick as a Flash - gskiner.com/talks/quick Truth is, Grant Skinner talks quick :) He managed to go through 100 slides in 1 hour.

Peter Elst

The Secret Life of a Flash Freelancer - http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2009/09/22/the-secret-life-of-a-flash-freelancer/

Joa Ebert

Leaving The Sandbox - http://de.sevenload.com/videos/PRm9XUh-Joa-Ebert-FOTB
Live Coding - http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2009/09/28/fotb-recordings/,
http://arton.no/blog/2009/09/25/joa-ebert-flash-on-the-beach-session-and-java-live-coding/

Lisa Larson

NEVER MIND the Buffer! FMS Made Easy - http://www.flashconnections.com/?p=112

Richard Lord

Application Frameworks: The good, the bad, and the ugly - http://www.bigroom.co.uk/blog/application-frameworks-at-fotb

Paul Burnett

More than Bending Pixels - http://www.mad.com.au/blog/?p=579

Hugh Elliott

The 10 Best Excuses to NOT do Amazing Work - http://wheniwas19.com/speaking/fotb/09/10Excuses/fotb09_brighton.html

Colin Moock's Union and MegaPhone and Joshua Davis' Space similar presentations can be found on the Flash In The Can website.

Colin's presentation made it clear that there is an easy option to get started and make things multiplayer in flash. The code written in a few minutes at fotb can be found on the Union site. The Reactor SWC lives here.

You can find out more about Hype on http://hype.joshuadavis.com/ tar. I looks like a good start, but I see at a teacher approach. You know how teachers always tempt you by showing something simple, and bit by bit it all gets complicated ? That's how I see this. Designers can use these snippets/behaviours and have fun. After a while they will want more and more, but it will get slower and slower so in order to have they're ideas work, they will end up getting familiar with the geeky parts of as3. There is an informative post on the FDT blog. So designers, don't believe the Hype ...use it! :)
The Keynote this year had a few sneak peaks of Flash CS5, which in my opinion will bring a few enhancements to CS4 but will not be as different from CS4 as CS3 used to be. Some of the features are Flash-Flex(Flash Builder) integration and TextLayoutFramework integration(imagine inDesign layouts with dynamic content in Flash) I won't go on with this, I'm sure you can find out more on Flash Magazine and other sites/blogs as well. Speaking of resources, I wonder what happened to the videos filmed on the FOTB stages.

Hope you will find these useful. If you have more links to slides from FOTB09 let me know and I will update this post.

The new University year started and things look busy. Until the next post, all the best!

disturb media launched twigital

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:31:00 +0000

I am proud to present a new site we launched at disturb media called Twigital.
It is created to help promote the greatest media events on their way as you read this: London Digital Week and Flash On The Beach.
Twigital populates London with characters who've recently Tweeted about London Digital Week and Flash on the Beach '09. If you Tweet mentioning #ldw or #fotb then you'll appear on the landscape.
You can also search for any other word or topic you fancy.

We are trying to improve twigital so your feedback is greatly appreciated. Be sure to check it out.

In case you are wondering, this project uses Papervision 3D and the graphics are made by the amazing Heaps Awesome Patrol Captain/Designer Chris Phillips.

Chris and Alex are featured in issue 161 of Web Designer Magazine with a full flash gaming tutorial.

Well done!

#songsincode

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:21:00 +0000

Ok,

It's been a while since my last post(again), almost a year now.
Sooo, what shall I start with ? Things change on a day to day basis, later in this post
I will list some stuff that happened and I didn't mention on the blog.
But first, I haven't been present online much, well, no blog posts, before last year I had a twitter account with 2 or 3 twitts in a full year, etc.

I somehow managed to get caught in this whole web 2.0 thing a bit.
I started to tweet more. Less than normal people but a lot more according to my 'low' standards. I got caught by a hash tag, #songsincode namely. First I had a few simple simple but somewhat lame attemptsjavascript:void(0):
"roll(4);roll(9);this.find(this) = Location.PARADISE; "(BabyShambles),
"var i=this;i.want(somethingGood(i.die(4))).makeItBeautifulToLive();i.want(new Mistake());lose > hesitate;"(Queens Of The Stone Age),
"var i=this;i.ahead=true;i.man=true;i.mammalToWearPantsID=1;trace('yeah')with(i.lust){i.atPeace=true}if(i.trustGod)i.canKill=true"(Pearl Jam),
"!we.areScaremongering; this.isReallyHappening;"(Radiohead).

Some worked better ( Life.kill(self) TypeONegative ) than others
( new HeadAches();new HeartBreaks();(this.age > this.capacity) && this.affection = Math.sin(angle%360*Math.PI/180);angle++; The Killers ) , but later I decided to go for a full song.

"for(var i=0 ; i < 12*12 ; i++) trace("Around The World"); "
Daft Punk - Around The World :)

Ok that might not count so I actually tweeted the first that came to mind involving creation of new objects, Buttons and what not. I've used Mathue's awesome time traveling technique to do this.
Here goes(drum rolls) The White Stripes - Hardest Button To Button in 21 #songsincode twitts.

Aside this I try answer questions often enough on stackoverflow. In case you don't know what stackoverflow is, just take a quick peek. It's a website where geeks(mainly) exchange questions/answers.

As you might have noticed, I'm posting pretty geeky stuff lately. There is a reason for that. As I said at the top of this post things changed.

I no longer live or study in Canterbury. I had a great time because there are a lot of great students out there I had a great time with. I've done a few interesting projects there, but since I stayed there for about a year and I couldn't find a job, although I am an Adobe Certified Professional with Flash ( Design and Development ) and have been working for a while, I still couldn't find a job, so I left.

I was lucky to meet Euan Millar, a very interesting guy I met at my first Flash On Beach in 2007. It turns out that now he is one of my employers and for the last year I have been working at disturb media. We've done quite a few interesting thing here, although most of them are secret!(Shhhh!!!)
We (at disturb) got featured in Web Designer Magazine issue 157 and again in the current issue(160)

There's a cute extension I wrote on the CD of the magazine, an also available on the blog post online.

We like playing with APIs like Papervision3D, Away3D, Box2D, GoogleMaps(go Alex!), FLARToolkit, etc. So far anything goes. If we come up with an idea, there's not much stopping us, a thing I missed while working back home. I am constantly attracted by new technologies and I'm glad I have the change to play with most of them.

Recently Iulia Nastasoiu, a brilliant Java Developer will join our team starting tomorrow. I had the pleasure of working with her previously and we wrote the Dithering class posted here last year. Alse we used to study at the same university back in Canterbury. Welcome to our team!

About Dithering and all that. Many of my older posts are broken as the server where the files used to live is asleep right now for an unknown period of time. Big thanks to Bogdan Ciocoiu who hosted my all that time free of charge and helped me when I really needed. I still have the files on my hdd and hopefully I will fix those posts as I have a new domain I don't use much nowadays.

I still study, only now I don't study Fine Arts and Digital Media anymore. Which means I have been drawing less, but still haven't given up drawing, mainly thanks to Ayue.

I've played a bit with opensource 3d tools. I got used to 3dsmax and that doesn't work on mac osx. I tried wings 3d which I love for sub division modeling, and blender which crashes pretty often because of the crappy GPU macbooks have these days. Modeling is fine, rendering, not so fine. I've tried a few ray tracers and POVRay keeps crashing, RenderMan works, but it's commercial, yafaray is cool, but it was tough to setup. I haven't tried Pixie yet, but it looks promising.

Here are a few abstract models I did in spring using wings 3d.

I don't study Fine Arts anymore and don't have any class on drawing (sigh!), and I know I'm pretty lazy by default. I've been pretty geeky lately as I now study Creative Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
One of the main reasons I chose this programs was pretty random. I've won an Arduino board at one of the London Flash Platform User Group meetings which I try to attend as often as possible and wanted to learn how to use that toy.
So far this program is the best combination of Geeky/Artsy education you can get around here. Well I wish there was more to study related to color theory/layout/typography/etc...but can't have everything at once can I ? Speaking of Arduino boards we are studying Physical Computing starting September with Dr. Tim Blackwell as far as I know. More Max/MSP/Jitter on its way with Dr. Mick Grierson, OpenGL and Java with Dr. Marco Gilles, and my first lecture with a Romanian Lecturer in London, involving Interactive and Narrative Media with Dr. Marian Ursu.
I like it so far, I've learned a lot of things I wouldn't imagine learning by myself, I feel a lot more confident with code and stopped believing Flash is the greatest thing ever. Yup, that is what I used to believe, not matter what anyone said. I've been using it for a few good years now, got over 5320 hours of commercial work done and surely am heading for the 10000. I will not give it up, but I have to spend time to learn all this new things that these people teach me at Goldsmiths.

Yet again I don't know what to do, but it's fine now...it means I have more choices. Some things will need to change and there is a lot of work to be done.

I will try to post things I've done this year that were pretty interesting and hopefully useful to others. As usual I hope to blog more, and maybe the posts won't be as long as this one. There are a lot of things unsaid, but they'll all come in good time. Ideally I will be able to keep a balance on personal stuff/geeky(flash and others) and artsy stuff.

Big thanks, you know why!

P.S. Now that I've managed to blog about most things that were on my mind, so apologies to the people that ended up on this page because of #songsincode :)

Read my lips: BeeZee!

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:15:00 +0000

Kind of a harsh title, but I found it fun. I often do, and people and don't. I guess it's my type of humor, I call it non-humor. Only few of my friends really get my jokes and I treasure them for that.

Back to blogging, it's been a while. As I feared, I would often lack the time to post because it's not in my list of priorities to be honest. I just do it whenever I feel like it, have something interesting to say, a computer with internet connection at my disposal and of course the time.

All the way from May I've been working on all sorts of interesting geeky projects( flash, as3, papervision, that kind of stuff ), but recently I've started to pay attention to my other need (drawing). I tend to be lazy, but I feel the urge to hold a balance between my geeky and my (wannabe) artistic side lately.

Long story short, I found a dead bee ( or wasp, not sure to be honest ) on the side of my window, so I've decided to spend some time to study it. I'm pretty proud of my eyesight and getting old is one of scariest things I can think of.

Here is the first drawing, a side-view:

I continued with a back-view:

This one has a a detailed wing on the bottom. It kept looking at the pattern for a while. I wonder what subdivision algorithm nature came came up with this time. I'll take the time to study that later on. It reminded me of Robert Hodgin's talk at Flash On The Beach last year and his butterflies. Check out this post here for more details.

Here's a not so impressive top view, I had weird angle for this one:

And as I usually keep what's best for last, here is a 2/3 view :

I wanted to keep these images as they were in my sketchbook, without major alterations or cleaning up so I could reference them later and make comparisons.

That made me feel a bit better, because last week I've been dipping my feet into too much 'geekery': a bit of maxscript, a bit of C ( I've compiled my Hello World gameboy advance rom ), a bit of Java and more processing.
I think I am the weirdest type of 'hybrid' when it comes to computers. I keep hearing that word in the flash community. I haven't seen that many flash designers that became developers and started learning Java, hopefully I'll be an interesting twist. I usually see Java developers learning Flex and actionscript, not even closely the other way around, but that's what makes it fun I guess. I know I will never be a great software engineer, building enterprise apps. with huge OLAP databases, because I know I don't want to become an engineer :) ( Not that's anything wrong with that, on the contrary, it's just something I'm not. I find it easier to figure out what/who am I by figuring out what I am not. )

Well, enough talk for now. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something great next time. Enjoy.

Metamorphosis

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:46:00 +0000

I've been really busy lately and I hadn't had the time to post as much as I wanted to. I was revisiting a uni project in which I've used a figure:

I love working with vectors. I like crisp, clean, clear shapes. I like things that look cartoonish. Maybe I've been spending to much time flashing. Although I've used the figure in a Flash project, I started to play with the shape in Fireworks ( I find it faster than Photoshop for simple tasks, and I just wanted to quickly explore an idea ). I was using the Edit Multiple Frames function and notices that all the frames of the animation ( a figure raising arms ) composed into something that looked liked a winged man.

(Note to self: If you compress time in image recordings the static result is more interesting than a display of images in a liniar timeline. ) Entrapping a simple figure in time allowed me to toy with it and make it go through a process of metamorphosis.

I was intrigued by the forms created from positive and negative space, so I continued. With each iteration I developed the form into something recognizable. The objects chosen came to mind as I worked through the shape.

Since I've restricted to a couple of tones I thought I should restrict myself to a handful of tools in Fireworks, just the basics: select, copy, paste, scale and repeated the process. I've intentionally left the shades of gray to reveal the simple process.

Although I've been coding a lot lately, I can't really figure out why I've chosen this method. I guess it was the digital version of playing with paper cutouts: less time, less waste but less fun also I guess.

Repetitive patterns in nature draw my attention most of the time and I still regret not paying enough attention to my Maths classes in high-school ( I've promised myself to reserve some time for Maths as well ). The next step is most likely a series of experiments in Flash, but that might take a while, because the I've still got a lot of projects to finish.

to be continued...

Polylines

noreply@blogger.com (George Profenza) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:52:00 +0000

One day my mind was wondering and I found myself playing with the default screensavers in windows ( yes, I am a PC user :) ). I found one called Mystify, this one got my attention. I think the name the similar screensaver had in Norton Commander was better ( Moving Polygons that is ). I had to do it in Flash, and it was a simple fun task because I'm migrating to as3 and it's a bit tricky.

There are some basic controls:

> click - resets to a random number of points
> up,down keys - increase / descrease points
> q - toggle quality
> r - toggle random colours, f - toggle filter

Here are some screen grabs from while I was working on it:

I'll upload the source code soon.