You may remember from my earlier blog post that I’ve been working on a databent typeface. It was mentioned a fair while back now, but I have been doing bits of work on it every now and then. Here’s a bit of my progress so far:
Ass you can see some of the characters are more recognisable than others. In fact, looking at it again I can’t really remember what some of them were. As I’m planning on having most characters mapped out, in upper and lower case, progress will be a bit slow, so I’ll aim for April for a completed font.
On Thursday 4th February I was Stoke-on-Trent for BitJam. I still don’t have anything ready to show on stage but thought I’d use the night as a testing ground for some of my ideas. I wanted to investigate ways in which to interpret what was happening around me. The main performance of the night was from a chap called Arctic Sunrise
For my first test I fired up Alchemy and attempted to draw the music. Alchemy fortunately has a few tools that can make your sketches react to sounds. They are Create > Mic Shapes and Affect > Mic Expand. Here’s the result of using both of them together
And a nice little animation of those done using GIMP and Openshot.
The next method was to use the Echobender script on a webcam pointing at the stage. Obvious errors in the sound recording actually kinda complimented the video. However, I’m a lil bit disappointed by the speed of the script at the moment. I may investigate doing something similar in Processing.
The final method involved a bit of post-processing. I made a short compilation of clips I shot at BitJam and then opened the video in a text editor and replaced loads of text with other text. The output was then reencoded using Avidemux
So, there you have it! Now to figure out how I can turn this into some sort of performance
One of my overall goals is to find a way to databend live video. I’m sure there’s a way to do it with Processing and Pure:Data but I’m not yet proficient in those programs so they’re out of the question for now. In the meantime I thought to try and hack the Echobender script to databend my webcam images.
tonyg provides a great tutorial on how to convert live webcam images into audio, which I’ve used as a starting point for my hack.
The process for making it works is as follows:
Images from the webcam are saved to the computer
These are converted to a .bmp file then renamed to a .raw file
Sox applies an audio effect to the .raw file
The .raw file is converted back to a .bmp then to a .jpg
The updated webcam image is displayed to a window and updated once every second
Sound overly complicated? It probably is. Like the Echobender script you’ll need ImageMagick and Sox but we’ll also be using Webcam, which you can install via “sudo apt-get install webcam”
If you haven’t already, create a file called “.webcamrc” in your home directory (/home/yourusername) and enter this text into it:
[grab]
delay = 0
text = “”
[ftp]
local = 1
tmp = uploading.jpg
file = webcam.jpg
dir = .
debug = 1
Now create a file called grabframe, place it in your home directory and fill it with this:
To start things running, open up three terminal instances:
In shell number one, run “webcam”.
In shell number two, run “while true; do ./grabframe ; done”.
In shell number three, run “display -update 1 output.jpg”
Voila!
I know it’s quite slow, but I haven’t yet found a way to update faster and it’ll still be restricted by the time it takes Sox/ImageMagick to perform their conversions.
Thanks again to tonyg, Imbecil and Mez for their help and inspiration
After seeing my newly created twitter background, Jon (aka scribbleboy) asked me to do one for him. So I did. In fact, I did several versions
He asked for something red, so I took a few birthday pictures and did the equivalent of putting them through a shredder!
It seems recently that there’s been a bit of a backlash against databending. Reading some of the threads/comments over at 8bitcollective.com suggests that people are getting tired of people posting everything that they’ve processed through Audacity without much though to its artistic content. I tend to agree, so I thought I’d do something more with the output of the bends in order to make these ones. I took them through GIMP and edited them a bit, made them seamless for tiling and changed the colours slightly.
I'm a software artist based online and in Birmingham, UK. The work that I do looks at interesting ways in which to interpret data, technology and how it relates to art and the creative sector. For more information look at the Projects page or found out more About Me
