prosthetic knowledge

The Birth of the Pixel Look

The New Yorker article on early special effects in films which adopt the ‘computer’ look:

The rise of the pixel in cinema may feel like a recent development, but this year actually marks its fortieth anniversary. It began in 1973, with the release of a low-budget science-fiction film, Michael Crichton’s “Westworld.” The movie’s use of a digital effect for a total of two minutes—a now-routine process called pixelization, commonly deployed on Gordon Ramsay cooking shows to obscure a contestant’s cursing mouth—was the unlikely launching point of this revolution.

More films are discussed, and connects people who eventually worked for Pixar.

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1bir (1 Block Interactive Raycaster)

A 3D engine developed by demogroup Crescent for the Commodore 64, which has a kind of minimalist beauty in itself - video embedded below:

This is a simple raycaster for our beloved C64 featuring the following:

- Size of one C64 disk block (254 bytes)
- Joystick controlled (port 2)
- Simple collision detection
- 256 step rotation in 2 PI
- Open (wrapped) and closed map areas

Download links can be found at Pouet here

manwitha.mov

My submission for the ‘Run Computer Run’ AR show exhibition ‘Economics + The Immaterial’: avant-guard film classic ‘Man With A Movie Camera’ meets 8-Bit aesthetics of computers which had an impact in Russia.

Apologies for gratuitous self-promotion - video and synopsis below:

manwitha.mov from Rich Oglesby on Vimeo.

Created for the ‘Economics + The Immaterial’ exhibition, part of the ‘Run Computer Run’ show at the Rua Red Gallery from May 25 to 13 July.
runcomputerrun.com/?page_id=8313

A visual experiment of curiosity and theoretical connections, of culture and technology (in particular, Russia), information transference and reproduction through media, analogue and digital.

The project aims to be a combination of two Russian cultural artifacts, a visualization of the results. First, “Man With A Movie Camera”, an avant-guard film directed by Dziga Vertov, demonstrated the creative use of filming, employing techniques developed and practiced for years by the director. In the context of this piece, the original film could be considered a “demoscene production”, exploring and pushing the creative possibilities of a technology. Second, the growth of ZX Spectrum clones in Russia during the 1980′s, in which colour and cheap digital computing grew from reverse-engineering and redevelopment. The availability of these various computer clones evolved a homebrew creative scene around the former Soviet bloc. There is still a strong creative demoscene around these machines in Russia today.

The whole of the ‘Man With A Movie Camera’ film has been converted into a representational format within the ZX Spectrum graphics protocol, reduced to 256 by 192 pixels, with each 8 by 8 pixel area represented by just two colours available from the system. The original file was downloaded from the internet (in .mov format) – it is worth bearing in mind that this file of information itself has travelled to and from various technological formats itself: without even taking into consideration the editing and filming or the original film, the information has been transferred to video tape, then a digital video file, and then on a video hosting site, each stage which has it’s own technical protocols which would effect the fidelity of visual representation.
The film has been converted to ZX Spectrum visual protocol manually on a shot by shot basis to produce the best representation of the film as much as possible.

HA_DHIWE by rObat

Winner of the ZX Spectrum Graphics category at the AAA DEMO PARTY 2013.

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Kate Bush Album Cover ZX Spectrum Tribute

See the whole collection here

Rhizome - Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Commodore Christmas Demos 

In my last submission this year, we take a look at some seasonal animations made on the Commodore 64, ranging from the promotional (to demonstrate the capabilities of the machine) to the communal and entertaining.

More at Rhizome here

British researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years 

The familiar pixel could be on it’s way out, as developers are putting together a video codec which works with vectors, via Extreme Tech:

The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British researchers have their way, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with… vectors.

If you know about computer graphics, or if you’ve ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on.

These two methods are very different, and they fulfill very different needs. Vector graphics, because they’re made out of geometric primitives, are infinitely scalable, making them the ideal image format for illustrations, clipart, maps, typography, Flash animations, and so on. For everything else, we use pixel bitmaps. Streaming videos, digital cameras, movie editing, video game textures — all bitmaps. There might be different file formats involved (PNG, MOV, JPG), but they’re all ultimately converted into pixel bitmaps when it comes to displaying them on your monitor, TV, or cinema screen …

… Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors. In a conventional digital camera, images (or videos) are captured as pixel bitmaps and compressed using a codec such as JPEG or H.264. Willis and Patterson have devised a codec called Vectorized Streaming Video (VSV) that converts the bitmap image into vectors. This builds on their previous work with VPI — vectorized photographic images [PDF] — which deals with converting bitmap images into perfect, vectorized copies.

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GlitchSort2 

An image pixel-sorting glitching app written in Processing by Paul Hertz:

GlitchSort2 is a Processing application that uses broken pixel-sorting to create glitchy images. Since it has found an audience among glitch artists, I’m setting up this page as a point from which to download a current version and reference materials, as these become available. I’ll also post news or links to news about GlitchSort2 here.

In version 1.0b4, released on August 1, 2012, there are four different sorting algorithms, each of which has a different behavior that can be used to affect images in different ways. Images larger than your screen can be panned by dragging with the mouse or fit to the screen dimensions for display. I’ve added a “munge” feature that does glitchy compositing, and a “degrade” command that uses JPEG compression to degrade an image.

There are links to the source code as well as executable versions for various operating systems which can be found here.

It should be noted that when I installed and run the application, it required a Processing library. Should you wish to try this app out, it is probably worth downloading and installing Processing, and installing this library in it’s folder (which it will ask for). When it is running, you will be given a prompt to open an image, and the options are in the drop-down menus (in ‘Glitch’). Have fun experimenting!

Abstract Christmas tree sparks protests in Brussels 

An updated version of a post made earlier today, now with a video from BBC News

A minimal voxelesque Christmas tree with projection mapping and a staircase to view from it’s top hasn’t gone down well with some …

Thousands of people have signed a petition against an abstract light installation replacing the traditional Christmas tree in Brussels city centre.

More than 11,000 signatures have been gathered in the online petition and a Facebook page attacking the new feature has been launched.

Critics accuse officials of opting for the installation for fear of offending non-Christians, especially Muslims.

Maddy Savage reports.

Abstract Christmas tree sparks protests in Brussels 

A minimal voxelesque Christmas tree hasn’t gone down well with some … via BBC News:

Thousands of people have signed a petition against an abstract light installation replacing the traditional Christmas tree in Brussels city centre.

More than 11,000 signatures have been gathered in the online petition and a Facebook page attacking the new feature has been launched.

Critics accuse officials of opting for the installation for fear of offending non-Christians, especially Muslims.

But the mayor’s office said it was part of a theme this year of “light”.

Traditionally, a 20m (65ft) pine tree taken from the forests of the Ardennes has adorned the city’s central square, the Grand Place.

This year, it has been replaced with a 25m (82ft) construction, though smaller real Christmas trees still decorate the square, a spokesman at the mayor’s office said.

The city’s website said the new “tree” was one of five “light” installations around the Grand Place this year, offering visitors the chance to climb to the top and enjoy “beautiful views” of the city.

Tourism councillor Philippe Close at the mayor’s office said the aim was to show off the “avant-garde character” of Brussels by blending the modern and the traditional, to produce something new and different.

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Inti Romero 

A public Facebook profile whose photos have been censored with pixelation.

Link

Animated Pixel Sort 

Kim Asendorf’s open-source Pixel Sorting code has been modified by Sam Walker for animated Gifs.

You will need to have Processing installed should you want to try it out, and you can get it here

[Also, Sam has a Tumblr blog which you can visit here]

8-bit Evaporation by the flying O.H.N.O. twins 

Stop-motion animation of a Super Mario cloud made from over 5,000 tinted ice-cubes placed as pixels, melting:

8-bit evaporation from the flying O.H.N.O. twins on Vimeo.

In “8-bit evaporation”, 5,500 tinted ice cubes were used as “pixels” to create the iconic Super Mario Bros cloud. It was then encouraged to melt and was recorded in HD. The resulting video was sped up, compressed, reversed and looped. The soundtrack are two audio files sampled from the original Nintendo video game that were sped up, slowed down and overlaid.

Kim Asendorf’s “Pixel Sorting” Code is now Open-Source 

Highly creative computer artist Kim Asendorf put together a collection of images called “Mountain Tour”, one of the first noticeable examples employing a pixel sorting technique. Today, he has released the Processing code for anyone to use or build something new with. Already, there is a javascript version posted on Github.

Above are a few output examples I got with it as it is - you will need to download Processing and have some familiarity with code in the sense of knowing what goes where, but if you are inclined, it’s worth the time for creative experimentation.

Links can be found at Kim’s Tumblr post here