Generative Art Show @ February First Friday

Thanks to Jennifer and Brian Henry, I’ll be having my first art show EVER at First Friday, February 1st. I’ll be displaying and selling prints of various generative pieces like Jellyfish, and I’ll also be projecting video of the pieces being generated, probably with my music as well.

I’ll be at the outdoor festival grounds at the corner of Casino Center and Colorado, right near the Funkhouse. So if you’re going to First Friday, stop by. And buy something. 🙂

Jellyfish Updated

I updated the Jellyfish piece — changed the dimensions to make it wider than taller, and added some cool random blurry background circles in shades of blue and green.

Also, I should probably explain what the hell this actually is: it’s a Flash app that uses Actionscript to algorithmically generate the “jellyfish”. There are separate functions (heavy on the trig) that create the “bell” and the small circles that build it, the triangular “fringe” and the long tentacles, which are Bezier curves with crosses attached to their control points. Then other functions randomly place the “specks” and crosses (which I just added to look cool) and the big background circles, which are randomly colored and blurred. Finally, a “glow” effect is added to the jellyfish, giving it that otherworldly underwater look.

This was incredibly complicated to write — I hadn’t done anything in Flash of this magnitude before, and it took a lot of re-acquainting myself with Actionscript and newly acquainting myself with Flash’s drawing functions, which I’ve barely ever used before.

I’m pretty proud of it. And I’ll be showing it and selling prints of it and other generative pieces at First Friday! More details to come.

You Thing Rike Jellyfish Now

Jellyfish 1. Coded in Actionscript 2.0, mostly using the drawing functions. I am rather proud of this.

First of a series.

(Nerdy detailed explanation: This does a bunch of random point generation, then does Bezier curves to do the tentacles, triangles to do the fringing, a half-circle to do the bell, which is duplicated and set as a mask, and then randomly copies a couple of circle and cross movie clips to do the bell spots, the floating particles and the cross shimmers.)

[Note: as per Frank’s comment…I’m not being racist with this blog post title. It’s a misremembering of a quote from William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine that I picked up from Mondo 2000 a decade ago. “You win something rike jellyfish, Meester, or it win you.” Or something like that.]

MacBook Air: Not Massively Impressed, In General

So the MacBook Air debuted today. Aside from the multitouch trackpad and the 802.11n, I’m not really very excited by this.

Why? Because I don’t care how thin it is. After a certain threshhold, thin doesn’t matter. My MacBook Pro is plenty thin at, what, 1.5″ wide?

The Air has one USB port, no FireWire, a relatively small hard drive, a relatively slow CPU, no Ethernet (not that I use Ethernet). The battery isn’t user-replaceable. And it’s still too goddamn big. This isn’t a sub-notebook, it’s just a skinny under-functional notebook. And unless that screen is tolerant of torsion, I suspect it’s pretty easy to break.

For fuck’s sake, Steve, I want a full-fledged Apple UMPC, not this silly thing. Smaller footprint, not narrow footprint.

The new Apple TV looks kinda cool. And the Time Capsule dedicated back-up server is nice. But the Air is, honestly, something of a disappointment.

I want a multitouch pad, though. Bad. It would be cool if Apple made a USB version.

Another Random Thought Of The Day

In wake of the Gizmodo thing from CES, I keep seeing comments saying “They just should have secured their IR ports. It’s a security lesson.”

Well, know what? When I walk up to you on the street and slap your teeth out of your head, and then kick you in the stomach hard with my steel-toe boots, and then piss on your wounds…well, fuck you, because you should have had bodyguards. It’s a security lesson, asshole.

Civilization exists on the reasonable assumption that most people will not actively act like douchebags. Be knowing and cynical here if you want, but you’re actually neither, because this is generally the case. Nobody else at CES went around turning off presentations with a TV-B-Gone. Just this prick from Gizmodo. And then the stupid bastard went and mouthed off about it on his blog. And they kicked him out, rightly so.

I wish these dudes would take responsibility for being idiots.