Don Havey

So the Art All Around competition is due tonight. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the premise is this: Create a plan to paint a large number of oil tanks located on the waterfront in (our fair city) Portland, ME. Some of the tanks will only have their tops painted, some will have their sides and their tops painted. The site is visible by land, sea, and air… but really only from a moving vehicle. The tanks are located adjacent to a major highway, and owned by the Sprague Energy Corporation; it is not public land.

Angel and I are submitting two proposals (since the depth of the proposals is very limited by the competition guidelines). Here they are:

** UPDATE: Chris sent me his excellent entry with permission to post it. Check it out below. **

Circles

The enormous silhouettes of local citizens walk in tireless circles around the tanks, while others bask in the sunshine on the tops.

Distortion

A texture of fluid lines challenges the shape of the cylinders, complementing the fact that they are experienced primarily while the viewer is in motion. Algorithmically generated via Processing.

Complements of Chris Nannig

Chris did this study in super-warped color adjacencies. I think it’s great.

Enjoy. Let me know what you think…

I had this idea the other day: Make a screen that, when placed on the ground anywhere in the world, allows you to see the exact opposite side. Like your own portable hole through the center of the earth. I suppose it was inspired by this amazing installation.

Of course, I immediately dumbed down the idea a bit. I might pursue it eventually, once we have globally-available 1-foot-per-pixel satellite imagery, but for now, it’s not possible… without a lot of money (sponsorships appreciated!).

The variation became more of a programming challenge than an actual project. I decided to create an application that would choose a single color according to a user’s geographic coordinates, based on the satellite imagery available at that location. It essentially functions the same way as the original idea, except that it outputs only one pixel’s worth of color.

I made a quick prototype yesterday using only PHP. To test it, I hooked it up to a traceroute script and had it choose one color swatch per ‘hop’ on the traceroute, resulting in a color palette for the given route. Here are the steps:

1. Using PHP’s PEAR Net library, execute a traceroute from the development server to any given domain or IP. Return a list of IP addresses of the hops along the way.
2. Using the IP-to-geographic coordinates script that I made for the IP-mapping globe tutorial, translate each IP address to a longitude/latitude pair.
3. Send each of those coordinates to a Google Maps page hosted on my server (developed with the Google Maps API), which centers a small map on that location and zooms in to the highest available satellite imagery resolution (that’s done via a custom Javascript error handler).
4. My development server (running on Windows) takes a screenshot of that page using PHP’s COM commands. This part is very hacky, but trust me, using this workaround is much much easier than trying to grab the actual map images off of Google’s server… which also violates their Terms of Service, of course.
5. PHP’s GD2 library analyzes the part of the screenshot that contains the map and averages the colors for that geographic location.
6. Each color swatch is saved as a new png and output to the browser.

Unfortunately, since it’s set up to run only on a Window’s server (the screenshot command is not *nix compatible), I can’t show a working version. If there’s any interest in the code, I can post it, but again, until I find a more stable way to do this, it remains a development-server-only project.

The image above is the route between me (Portland, ME, USA) and the website nanoq.gl which is in Greenland. The traceroute is as follows:

Saco, ME, US -> Portland, ME, US -> Fulton, NY, US (x2) -> New York, NY, US -> Minneapolis, MN, US -> New York, NY, US (x2) -> Tim, Denmark -> Copenhagen, Denmark -> Nuuk, Greenland (x2)

It takes about 6 minutes per color palette, because the traceroute takes a while, and of course, the screen capture routine requires a delay between each page request to ensure that the page loads properly (Google Maps applications are loaded via the onload() function).

Kind of boring, but maybe some will find it interesting. I haven’t seen too many projects that analyze satellite imagery. Maybe that’s because no one finds it interesting… but I’d guess that it’s more related to the fact that it’s so damn hard to interface with map servers, and most interesting applications would probably defy somebody’s Terms of Service and get shut down anyway.

N x N is a custom portfolio generator (in progress).

The question that motivated the project was: making a portfolio is a theoretically simply task… why do I always hate making one? The answer is: hidden, arduous tasks. Thumbnail cropping, ordering, creating a layout that compliments the projects…. These seem like small jobs but end up making the “quick portfolio” perpetually illusive.

The solution, as I see it, is this: Look to the grid (it will never fail you).

N x N is primarily a dead-simple framework for uploading and displaying images and projects. No fancy tools, just a familiar, form-based, step-by-step process that results in an equally simple, elegant portfolio. Of course, the layouts and general presentation can be customized, but not to the same level that an application such as WordPress can. I think this is a good thing. Standardized results.

The target audience is craftspeople (e.g. Etsians), design school students, and groups of individuals who need to quickly compile a joint design portfolio.

Estimated completion date is mid-April, depending on how some other projects shape up.

Curiobot is a project created by myself and Angel. Introductions necessary!

Angel is my girlfriend. Has been for a long time. She is very good at making things by hand, and we team up on projects occasionally. I designed the Curiobot website, she manages the content. End of introductions.

The thought behind Curiobot was to create an image gallery of the strangest and most interesting products available online. The type of objects that almost could not exist without the internet’s niche-market-expanding power. It’s an ongoing fascination of mine: the physical objects that the internet generates through encouragement.

I’ll borrow a bit out of Curiobot’s concept statement:

Curiobot aims to be a hybrid website. Not in the environmentally-conscious sense of the word (although we like that too)… more like in the Frankensteinian sense of the word:

We want to be half museum and half garage sale. Half library and half amusement park. Not a blog: they’re too personal and text-based. Not a shopping site: their navigation schemes are static, sales-driven, and bland. We’d rather be explorable… and entertaining, and inspiring, and helpful. We want to make you say “What the hell is that?”, “I wish I had thought of that”, and “Oh my God, I finally found one!” all in the same day. We want to extend the blog mentality to encompass the universal languages of imagery and cool-stuff-for-sale commerce.

[...]

Our unbiased approach to aggregating products is different from general product search sites. There is no external motivation here besides wanting the best of the best and the strangest of the strange. We actually seek out the things that the big search and retail sites do not want. The products that only one person in ten thousand actually buy. The big sites think that this is a bad thing. We know, however, that although only one person in ten thousand buys it, nine out of ten people might still think a product is amazing… they just don’t know where it would fit in their apartment. Think of this site as your fantasy storage closet.

We generate a small amount of revenue through click-through traffic to merchant sites when applicable, but products are admitted to the database regardless of their retailer. We hope that our site will eventually benefit smaller sites and individuals, who are making their own unique imprint on the internet product market, by pulling their products into a more easily accessible realm.

At the moment, we’re moderating all of the products that are added, but at some point in the future, we’d like to let Curiobot loose into the world of mass-contribution websites. Who wouldn’t? I mean, we’re really good at finding unusual stuff on the internet, but we think our talents would pale in comparison to those of a billion people combined.

At its worst, Curiobot is a site that encourages wasteful I-didn’t-know-I-needed-that buying habits and widens the market for obscure and useless goods. At its best, however, it helps dissolve the distinction between useless and useful, and celebrates our need for both.

There you have it. Not too much else to say about the content. I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite items in the gallery: Plush Giant Squid, Lamplamp, Daisy Pen Vase, Stick-On Sunroof, Parent-Child Dance Shoes, Rolling Clock, IV-Drip Plant Pot.