Happy Things is another “speed project” by Theo Watson and Kyle McDonald. The software captures positive human reactions to the Internet, analyzing your face through the computer’s webcam when you are browsing. Every time you smile, it posts your screenshot online, along with the web page that you found amusing.

http://kylemcdonald.net/happythings

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch, by Ben Baker-Smith, is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.
Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.

http://infiniteglitch.com
http://bitsynthesis.com

Body Dysmorphic Disorder is a Kinect hack by Robert Hodgin. Made with Cinder and the Kinect sensor. Runs in realtime.

http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=472

White Glove Tracking, by Evan Roth:

“On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively. Please email links to your apps, video, source code, and/or screen shots to evan[at]eyebeam[dot]org. Work will be exhibited in an online gallery and depending on popularity and interest potentially in a forthcoming physical gallery exhibition as well. Huge thanks to everyone that contributed to the data collection.”

http://whiteglovetracking.com
http://evan-roth.com

Nonmanifold_mandible, by Ben F. Carney, investigates loss of control over human emotions. To parallel unreasonable human behaviours, control over a digital charachter’s facial expression is given to four channels of emotive audio, allowing for violent reactions and a loss of identity.

http://www.benfcarney.com

Fracture is an iPhone application that allows you to paint cubist style portraits using your own photos. Aesthetics employed by abstract masters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque have been studied and recreated in this fun creative app. Simply use your camera or search your image gallery for 1 or more photos, adjust the settings to your specification and you are ready to start painting

jamesalliban.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/fracture-cubist-iphone-app/

[via creative applications]

Iterating my way into oblivion is the new project by Carlo Zanni, a Server Side generated movie where a guy is listening to a voice reading YouTube Terms of Service.
“When YouTube changes its Terms of Service, the server behind the movie gets the new text and through a text-to-speech software renders the voice over which is then imported into the filmed sequence.The movies are always different while maintaining their narrative.
This project loosely refers to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, speculating on the relationships between creative energies and corporate policies evoking the morphing of enlightened arcana into established powers.
This work follows two previous experimental movies done in the past four years for which I coined the neologism “DATA Cinema”, suggesting a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live Net data, to create ever changing cinematic live environments.”

www.zanni.org

The Heart Chamber Orchestra – HCO – is an audiovisual performance. The orchestra consists of 12 classical musicians and the artist duo TERMINALBEACH.
Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition and visualization environment. The musical score is generated in real time by the heartbeats of the musicians. They read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them. HCO forms a structure where music literally “comes from the heart”.

www.heartchamberorchestra.org

SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network), by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma and Vincent Rabaud, is a system comprised of a camera, monitor, and two computers that can be set up in public places – especially in situations where a CCTV monitor might be expected. The software consists of a custom computer vision application that tracks pedestrians and detects their characteristics, and a real-time video processing application that receives this information and uses it to generate music-video like visuals from the live camera feed. The resulting video and audio are displayed on a monitor in the public space, interrupting the standard security camera type display each time a potential rock star is detected. The idea is to humorously examine and demystify concerns about surveillance and computer systems not in terms of being watched, but in terms of how the watching is being done – and how else it might be done if other people were at the wheel..

http://deprogramming.us/sven

Auto Smiley (A FAT + openFrameworks speed project) is a computer vision application that runs in the background while you work. The software analyzes your face while you are working and if it detects you smiling it sends the the ascii smiley face letters as keyboard presses to the front most application. Auto Smiley has many uses from just straight up convenience to enforcing honesty in your online communication

http://fffff.at/auto-smiley/
http://www.theowatson.com

The CodeOrgan analyses the “body” content of any web page and translates that content into music. The CodeOrgan uses a complex algorithm to define the key, synth style and drum pattern most appropriate to the page content.
Firstly, the CodeOrgan scans the page content and removes all characters not found in the musical scale (A to G), and then analyses the remaining characters to find the most commonly used “note”. If this is an even number the page is translated into the major pentatonic scale of that particular note, it becomes minor if there is an uneven number.
Secondly, the CodeOrgan defines which synthesizer to use. This is based upon the total number characters used on the webpage – there are currently 10 synthesizer effects and the one chosen is picked based upon the percentage of content.
Lastly, the CodeOrgan selects a drum loop based upon the ratio of characters on the page versus the number of characters that are actually musical notes – there are currently 10 different drum loops to pick from.

http://www.codeorgan.com

Peter Nitsch just launched his new project: ASCIImeo, a web application that renders Vimeo’s videos in different textmodes.

“The player is an evolution of earlier video experiments I was doing in Alchemy. Still using Jari Komppa’s TextFX7 engine for the glyph conversion and AS3ANSI for the rendering, this version features improved speeds and a control UI including fullscreen mode.When this project was first conceived, I had considered using the Youtube API, but after reading through their TOS that idea quickly vanished (obstructing the video is a violation). Vimeo didn’t pose the same problem, and in retrospect, it was a wiser choice considering the greater quality and style of most of their videos.”

http://www.asciimeo.com
http://www.peternitsch.net

Action Painting (Masculine Expressionism), by Jeremy Rotsztain, is a series of “action paintings” in the style of Jackson Pollock, composed using data from action movies as material. Thi work uses popular action sequences from cinema – when Jason Bourne drives backwards through the streets of Paris in a nail-biting police chase, when the underdog Rocky Balboa battles Apollo Creed, when a helicopter chases a high speed train through a tunnel in Mission Impossible. It takes these sequences from the adrenalin-filled culture of action cinema and playfully transplants them into the highbrow cannon of modernist painting. Action Painting runs with custom authored software (written in C++ with openFrameworks) that uses computer vision to analyze movies for motion.

http://www.mantissa.ca/projects/actionpainting.php

Composition with Javascript is an interactive work by Kostya Loginov and Vlad Yakovlev, made using HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery, based on Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Grey” (1920). It allows everybody deconstruct the original painting and form it again in whatever he or she wants. Lines are shiftable (just drag it with your mouse) and colours changeable (click on it). Texture of the painting was preserved for authentic look. One can play with composition, forms and colours, alter the harmony of the piece or even destroy it and compose something pictorial.

http://www.compositionwithjavascript.com

Dreaming of You is a system for tapping into your computer’s dreams. There are three parts to this program. The first is a screen saver that visualizes screenshots that it downloads from a web server. The second is a program that periodically takes screenshots of your computer and uploads them to the server. The third part is a preference widget that displays information about the program and allows you to toggle private mode, which temporarily disables taking screenshots.
Dreaming of You was realized by Jamie Burkart and Richard Caceres in 2007 while living at the Crystal Palace in Santa Cruz CA.

http://richard-c.com/touch/

Jonathan Puckey is a graphic designer based in Amsterdam. He modifies photographs using digital tools for “Delaunay image vectorization” (Scriptographer, a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator and Color Averaging by Jürg Lehni). Be sure to watch the demo video showing the full process…

www.jonathanpuckey.com

Rhonda is an amazing 3D drawing tool developed by Amit Pitaru and James Paterson in 2003, when they were collaborating for a project named Insert Silence. For the last several years this software has been shown in galleries, museums, festivals and conferences but now, thanks to Zach Lieberman (openframeworks) and Zach Gage (synthpond) the program development is restarting, in order to create stable releases of Rhonda for various platforms.

www.rhondaforever.com

Bulding Rome in a Day is part of the Community Photo Collections project at the University of Washington – GRAIL Lab. which explores the use of large scale internet image collections for furthering research in computer vision and graphics.
In this particular research the team is “considering the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.”

http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome

HasCanvas, developed by Robert O’Rourke, is a tool for creating and sharing Processing sketches and runs on John Resig’s Processing.js. Visitors can experiment with the scripts already added or log in to compose their own scripts. All they have to do is browse to any url on the site to get a blank canvas and then, when ready, check a box to share it. The project is part of the Chrome Experiments initiative, which promote the new HTML5 standard and the Google Chrome webbrowser.

www.hascanvas.com
www.sanchothefat.com
www.chromeexperiments.com

Pa++ern is a project by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi. Originally created for the exhibition at B-Gallery (Tokyo), the work is a combination of an installation and an original esoteric programming language for embroidery. In fact, it connects an embroidery machine with Twitter, using a special language to encode designs in the 140 character limit.

http://www.rzm-dev.com/pattern