Characteristics of Sea Reverberation
Found deep in my photo library today.
South Wind from the Himalayas
“South Wind From The Himalayas” by Himachal Pradesh Guler, circa 1775. From the Met’s excellent exhibition “Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900“.
New York Times Timelapse Video
A really fantastic project (even if it was initially accidental) by Phillip Mendonça-Vieira: “Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour from September 2010 to July 2011, I accidentally collected about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com”. I find I’m most interested in the small quirks in the resulting time-lapse video, such as the wiggling text below the masthead with the date/last update and that some ads stay longer than others.
Also really nice is Phillip’s post about how the piece was compiled into a video. As someone who ends up taking a lot of stills and turning them into video (usually accomplished very slowly using Final Cut), his suggestion of ffmpeg seems an interesting one.
Google’s Ngram Viewer
Today I found Google’s Ngram viewer and raw data sets. Above is the frequency of the words “Jeffrey” and “Jeff” in all of Google’s scanned books from 1800-2000.
The query is insanely fast, considering the data that the viewer must have to read through. Also of note, the frequency is normalized to the number of books published that year.
Random Hexadecimal Colors, Sorted
Finished video based on experiments sorting hexadecimal colors. Watch on Vimeo here.
Sorting Hexadecimal Colors
I’m currently working on a poster/catalog for an upcoming curatorial project at the Bemis Underground and was thinking of using an image of sorted white noise on a television set. Grayscale white noise is actually pretty boring (so long as it’s actually close to random, the values will fall along a Gaussian curve), so I tried some other experiments.
Using hexadecimal color yielded some pretty interesting results. The above image is 1,296,000 random values that range from #000000-FFFFFF (0 - 16,777,215). A Processing sketch sorts those values numerically and fills the pixels of the image in order.
Click here, or on the image, for full-resolution.
Also of interest were Photoshop’s histograms of the color – I’ve not really looked at histograms much in the past, but these were really strange. Luminosity was, as I suspected, a Gaussian curve and RGB values were each close to a flat line. But overall “color” resulted in the above images. The top is the raw image, the one below after “Auto Color” correction: 8-bit fortress meets birthday cake.
Taking the Plunge…
You win, world. I can no longer resist…
Snow and Dirt
Tony Bechara
Tony Bechara’s noisy, minimalist paintings. This one above, titled August 7 (acrylic on linen/60×60″), is best viewed at a distance or with squinted eyes.
