The more observant of you will have noticed that the site went down recently. A hacker got into my host and basically wiped every website I own, and other websites owned by other people. So I lost the database, and files. But luckily I had semi-recent backups of the server files, but sadly not the database (the post before this is from Google Cache). But I’m gonna look on the bright side of this and use it to start over, I should be uploading my old videos however. Although having said that, I feel this might give me a nice push on re-recording the videos, and even release some more. So fingers crossed…

Thanks, de.monkeyz

This is just a random post of me going on about something I like for a bit. Hopefully I will make a video based on this soon, as well as some other stuff that people actually might want.

But this post is basically  me talking about how you can use data to create good looking things. I’ve always had an interest in arty things, but I’ve never had the hand-eye coordination to do any of it. So I pretty much resigned myself to a “I’m not gonna attempt to make art” mentality. Since I went the way of the programmer, I didn’t really think I would get opportunities to make anything “beautiful” as it were. I think a few other people might think that too, programmers and those who aren’t. But in the 4-5 years I’ve been looking at programming, developing my skills, and teaching others. I noticed that even without the hand-eye coordination of a professional painter or the creative ability of a digital artist. I was able to make my own things, which to me is MY art.

Any application I make is mine, it does what I want it to do, and it was done using my ability. I think that’s an art form in itself, but that could just be my own pride or arrogance. But maybe a less common practise, is using raw data to create great looking things. The context in which I’m using this is creating music visualizations. I may have mentioned that I have done that in the past with Flash, and more recently with Processing, an abstraction of Java. Well that’s how I refer to it, since the code is taken by the program and just has it inserted into a Java class and various bits of code added for it run as an applet. I wouldn’t recommend Processing as a practical language, but I would recommend it as a great testing platform for visual ideas.

As an example, this is my project for my Multimedia unit at University (I would recommend turning down your speakers due to the opening menu music). I made a music visualizer, as everyone was doing games, and I didn’t want to do the same as others, and as I said I wouldn’t recommend Processing as a practical language. But the main reason was I had experience in this area with Flash in the past, and it was amazingly fun then, and it was just as fun now. Now, I would not say my work deserves an award for beauty, but I would say that despite my lack of artistic ability, it has been popular enough for me to be proud of it. To get to the real point of this post, and get out of my egotistical ranting, what I wanted to show was that every visual I made is generated from data from the sound per second. In this instance it was 1024 floating point numbers between -1 and 1, that’s it. You can be surprised on just using tiny insignificant data like that, you can create interesting things.

Making things look good isn’t just reversed to something as obvious as music, a classmate of mine had an idea to access Flickr and display photos upon a world map based on the longitude and latitude of the photo information. So the real point I want to get across is that I think every programmer out there should try to create something to represent their idea of “beautiful” via code. It could be anything, it could be something like my music visualizations, it could be something like my friend’s Flickr display. It could even be an interesting way of using mathematical formula to generate patterns. So I urge anyone who read this, and cares, to give it a shot!

Thanks as always for reading, de.monkeyz