Accounts from Real Space: November 2005 Archives

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mNowland Hacks Patch a Day

November 30, 2005

evidence of play sent to me by Dr Nowland

SML hacks /real 001

01:41 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

I Suck at Color

November 29, 2005

I've always been very aware of my inability to create and mix my own quality color palletes for use in my werk. So I had to find ways around this. My process and progression went something like this.

Random color the long way:
I started with creating random color gerenerators in Flash and then selecting groups that the script made to save as colors for use later. This returned alot of junk compared to the amount I was actually saving.

Random ranges as identity:
Eventually I was able to find ranges for the R, G, and B to randomly select from that returned results that I really liked. One of them is the one that I use for the majority of my formalplay studies as a branding excersise of sorts. Using this was fun but it still took alot of werk and monkeying to get new or different quality results/color palettes. I needed something more flexible that could still return quality color palettes...

Color from around me:
Then I found out you could use php to get the color value of a pixel in an image. This idea seemed awesome. I sat down one weekend and learned some php and was eventually able to write my img analyzer that took a jpg and returned an array of pixels for Flash to use. This array of hex values represents the grid of colors from the deciphered img. As it turns out it WAS awesome and a lot of fun to hook up to new explorations. I realized there are amazing color palettes all around me and all I need to do now was capture them. This is a method I have used for quite a few different explorations to date. A couple examples: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Color from around me but staying in Flash [AKA getting lazier]:
the img analyzer is fun and still does what I wanted it to originally but getting back all that data has become cumbersome in some cases since it returns a color for every 10th pixel even if that color or one very close to it (in the case of a jpeg) has already been returned from another pixel. Also, i still needed to run the script, download the ActionScript file it produced and then include that in Flash. Not terrible but once I learned a couple things about JSFL [Java Script for Flash] last week, I figured out a new cleaner way that doesn't even involve leaveing Flash. I wrote a JSFL based Flash panel that will get the index colors of a gif that is selected on the stage and then write an array of the hex colors to the current timeline in a new layer. This is proving to be double awesome. Now, I just make gif's with however many colors I want [8, 16, 32, 256, etc] and then I get that many colors to use as Action Script. Here are a couple things I have used it for so far: [1] [2]

I'm off to capture more color palletes.

If you're interested or you suck at color too [We don't judge here] you can download my 'Get Image Colors'Panel .

To Install:

Download the .zip and unzip.
Double Click the mxp file to install in the Extensions Manager.
Restart Flash.
The panel is then accessible from "Window > Other Panels > Get Image Colors"

01:47 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

Winter : 2005 Type Flakes

November 28, 2005

This video was created with Flash using Bodoni-Bold and colors from a gif yanked out by my JSFL panel Get Image Colors

01:35 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

Autumn

November 22, 2005

Colors captured using my new 'Get Image Colors' Flash Panel.

11:46 PM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

MAX Patch a Day . 07

November 21, 2005

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:

sfrecord~ [records to a sound file as apposed to hijacking]
groove~

06:17 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

MAX Patch a Day . 06

November 20, 2005

Freqs

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:
sfplay~ [ sound file play ]
tempo~

Today's additional breakthrough:
Variables assigned to input slots on commands with numbers [seek, loop, line, etc]

05:37 PM | Permanent Link | Comments (1)

MAX Patch a Day . 05

November 19, 2005

Feedback with my 2 cents. Exploring 2 US pennies.

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:
reson~
buffer~ <-[clear]

11:17 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

MAX Patch a Day . 04

November 18, 2005

drinking soda

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:
lores~
train~

12:34 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

MAX Patch a Day . 03

November 17, 2005

a boy and his dog : tales from the couch

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:
delay~
biquad~

12:51 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

MAX Patch a Day . 02

November 16, 2005

Change Voice

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:
record~ [which they could have saved me the trouble and just named it 'awesome~']
buffer~
onepole~

12:43 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

MAX Patch a Day . 01

November 15, 2005

Assignment
Each day for the next seven[7] days create one[1] new audio patch using MAX/MSP. Each new patch should attempt to involve at least two[2] new objects. Here is day 1:

Today's new MAX/MSP Objects:
accum
random

01:09 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (0)

Broken Fall

November 13, 2005

This study combines my Img Analyzer with on of my old favorite Flash glitches. The audio is from the dusty switched dormant organ I was given by family from my Grandmother's house.

Dormant Organ : Act II : Broken Fall

10:09 AM | Permanent Link | Comments (2)