I was looking through some old files the other day (like you do at the end of a year) and came across this old typography experiment done in Processing.
If you have a copy of my book, Analog In, Digital Out, you would have seen some of the stills from this sequence. It uses the […]

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One of the things I’m always keen to explore are systems for dynamic layout of content - whether that be the positioning of photographs, type or sections of an interface.
I’ve played around with Treemap algorithms, which can look really great and can cope with lots of objects that always fit inside a predefined space. […]

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I was clearing a few files from my harddrive the other day and came across some old sound visualisation stuff that I built a while back in Processing.
So I whacked them up to Vimeo so you can take a look. These all use the same core algorithm but with slight iterations or different visual […]

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Like many designers and programmers the process of iteration is an important part of the development of any idea and the execution of that idea. Below is a small example of the process that I always try to employ - start small with something simple then iterate the idea and see where it takes […]

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Slimdevices’s Squeezebox is a fabulous piece of kit that streams your music collection to your stereo system over your wireless (or wired) network. You can browse your entire music collection using the supplied remote and a very intuitive text based interface. But what about navigating the Squeezebox using album covers, so you can choose […]

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One of my favourite albums, and one that is regarded as a milestone in jazz is Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I’ve been playing around for some time with various techniques to visualize sound, but beyond the transient effects offered by software like iTunes, which are nice, but for me always seem disconnected from […]

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Mistakes often lead to new insights and new thinking. This project came out of a complete mistake. Whilst uploading some pictures to my server via my usual FTP software, I mistakenly had the transfer type set to TEXT. It should be set to BINARY or AUTO. When I went to view the images I […]

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Yet another experiment with the fabulous Flickr and the Flickr API. This time it displays my latest pictures in a kind of spiral vortex pattern, but more importantly uses a blur effect to create a sense of depth of field that relates to time. The most recent pictures being more in focus than the […]

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More experimentation with the Flickr API. This plays around with the idea of using small bars made of the average colour from a photo instead of the traditional thumbnails that you normally see.
100 photographs are loaded in from the current Flickr public photo pool and a vertical bar is then made for each photo. […]

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Moving on from BitmapData manipulation of images, this demonstrates the BitmapData class on video - though it could easily be any MovieClip that is in motion.

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Just some simple experiements with the Flash 8 BitmapData class. Feel free to download the source code, but rather than use as is, add your own twist - there’s plenty more scope for what is possible by manipulating the BitmapData thingy. Also check out some things you can do with video.

Black & White

[kml_flashembed movie=”/flash8bitmapdata/bmd_bw.swf” […]

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This is one of a number of ideas I’ve been playing around with in my attempt to make a quick cutting music video, controlled by the music itself. After Effects already has the ability to do this kind of thing, but the software I built in Max is all real-time. This kind of technique […]

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Analog control of digital devices and media has always appealed to me. Like the controllers for a PS2, they allow degrees of fuzziness in a world made of very strict ones and zeroes. Life is not black and white, so for deeper interactive experiences we need to look at control devices that allow our […]

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Calling this a guide to New York is a bit of stretch, but I just wanted to list a few of the places and things I like in my all-time favourite city. One day I’ll add a few more things to this list, but I think I’ve been saying that for that last few […]

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A snow globe is a very tactile object. You see it. You pick it up. You give it a shake. Snow falls. It’s a great ‘interface’ that doesn’t need explanation. So out of that simplicity was born the idea of using the physical nature of a snow globe to control images and sound on […]

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Created in January 2004, Cinema Redux explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. […]

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What would happen if you take every single frame of a film and instead of displaying the frame in it’s normal aspect ratio you make it only 1 pixel wide?
So with that question I built a piece of software in Processing that could take in a live stream from a DVD and construct images […]

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This was a small memorial to the victims of 911, created in Processing, using the victim list from remember.worldatwar.org. The heights of the columns indicate the age of the person.
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I pretty much get the train everyday into Manchester. I sort of have a love hate relationship with these train journeys. I hate them because the trains are pretty bad and not totally reliable. But on the flipside trains and other methods of public transport are always interesting places to observe people and places…
[kml_flashembed […]

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Weirdly this strange little project seems to really amuse people. What happens when you combine the bottom of a McDonalds take-out bag (the icons on the bottom are very cool) with the world’s most famous search engine, namely Google? Enter a search term and find out. It’s stupid and useless. I think that’s why […]

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Amazon is all well and good, but like me you’ve probably thought to yourself ‘why can’t the search results be displayed vertically’? After all horizontal text is SO last year.
So after a couple of hours messing about with this SOAP protocol thing and the Amazon Web Services API I ended up with the lovely […]

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During a Flashforward event in New York I bought a Sony video camera from a store on 5th Avenue and then a few days later I shot this footage, starting outside the New Yorker hotel. This little film was also shown at a BD4D event in New York.

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One of my all time favourite scenes is this one from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The composition is quite incredible - the placement of the actors, the type of lens used and the actual colours of the actors clothes. Every single detail has been considered.
In some ways it reminds me of Soviet posters […]

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For a BD4D event in London I created a timeline of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies using the theme of birds on a telegraph wire (albeit an abstract one), inspired by ‘The Birds’.
The idea was to present what could be very dry information in a more interesting way, adding to the experience of exploring the work […]

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