Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
Sorting pixels along a middle “energy seam”, similar to how Photoshop’s “content-aware scaling” works, with additional glitchy goodness. Source images (top to bottom) are: an idyllic mountainscape, a crowd of people, the face of a weird looking man, a missile launch, and sheep on a mountain hill.
An image of four tacos, sorted in pixel blocks.
Image of tacos, sorted in chunks of N pixels (with wrapping).
Sorting X, Y, and both.
Audio samples, sorted by numerical value with lines drawn between their initial and resulting positions in the recording. Click on images for full-size (quite large).
Finished video based on experiments sorting hexadecimal colors. Watch on Vimeo here.
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.
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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.
Attempting to sort by height… ended up with this instead.
Metallica’s Ride the Lightning with all sample values sorted, then arcs are traced back to the sample’s original position. Several iterations here with varying levels of arc transparency.
Click on images for full-resolution versions.
