Just reminding everyone that I also run an art and security blog which is often a little more active than this. You can find it here: http://sintixerr.wordpress.com

I go into a little more detail there about stuff like my Webcam Audio Visualizations written in Quartz.

Awhile ago, a friend said something on twitter to the effect of:

“I dreamed about making art last night, does that count?”

His question got me thinking: I thought I saw for sale a headset (called “Mindset” from a company called “Neurosky”) that claimed to read your brainwaves (alpha, beta, theta, gamma, etc) and allow you to use them to play video games.

I wonder if I can record my brainwaves to make art while I sleep with that?

A few months later, and after a lot of custom code was written,

I have the first proof of concept done that says yes, I can!

This video clip wasn’t generated while I was asleep – that will be later – but it was generated in part from my brainwaves. My mind influenced 6 sets of x,y,z coordinates, 6 sets of colors, and a few other attributes. The music playing in the background influenced line count, line length, and rotations/speed.

In some very real sense, listening to and watching the visualization as I was making then went on to influence the next few seconds of the recording by the patterns watching it generated in my brain. Remember, this is just a proof of concept/demo, but enjoy. I think it’s cool *make sure you turn your sound on too*:

Brainwave Music Visualization #1 from Jack Whitsitt on Vimeo.

Next up, for the actual “art” instead of just “proof of concept”, I’m working on being able to manipulating paintings, photos, and other images over time with brain waves. This would be the “make are while dreaming” piece.

The other project Im building simultaneously is an add-on to a paintbrush for photoshop or gimp (or some drawing program) that changes the brush properties according to your neural activity…..so if you were, say, drawing with a pen tablet, the actual output would be a cross between what you consciously intended to draw….and the influence of those brain waves.

Ok, I know. Lot’s of zombie pics on this site. This batch, however, while they are from the same raid I posed about last time, are actually examples of what I really wanted to accomplish visually. One of the ideas had been to take a retro/70’s documentary style film strip of the event and have the film developed as if the shots were taken from a tourist camera while said tourist was running for her life. I used a half-frame 35mm camera and some slide film.  I then projected the developed slide film through one of my old-school film-strip projectors and took digital photos of the projected results. The results are awesome and I feel like they really tell a story. Enjoy:

Catching up on some posts here – it’s been awhile.  First, here are three quick sketches I did a couple of months ago.  I really really really felt the need to draw that night. These drawings feel a lot like some of my older portraits (from years ago).  Whether they are really alike or not,I  dunno. Each was done in less than 5 minutes with almost no light at all (just a monitor). Photos of the sketches were taken with an iphone…intentionally for the non-clear effect. Also, all three are musicians.

So, on my way to Chicago recently , I managed to lose a shit ton of stuff on the metro: 2 L-series Canon camera lenses, misc cables, and….3 or 4 of my favorite shirts. Eek. So, while the lenses were one issue, I also needed other stuff to wear. On the recommendation of my wife, I actually went to Zazzle to create myself some shirts out of my own art. I like the art and stuff on threadless and red bubble, but the shirt quality left something to be desired. A friend had used Zazzle for his stuff and I really thought the shirts came out well. So, I ordered myself some with my own art.

Wait, hrm. If I’m going to make myself some, why not leave them up for everyone else – just in case? Good idea. So I did, and added a few more. Not all of what I do lends itself to this sort of thing, but I like to think what I put up works well.

You can find the store here on my site: http://jackwhitsitt.com/store/

Or you can go straight to my Zazzle Store (Easier to Use): http://www.zazzle.com/sintixerr

It’s been a fun process making these shirts and other products out of my art. Not only is it actually difficult to figure out which pieces will work on clothing – many of my own favorites do not – but not a single one was “ready to go” out of box to put on a shirt. Each one of them took some editing…many of them some creative editing.

For instance, “Dead Jen” went from an interesting photo to something very graphic:

Before

After

This was also my chance to get a lot of my old doodles and sketches into better shape.  “Strained Peace”, for example, was a very old sketch that I only had a 136×200 pixel scan of. I managed to take it to 2400×3500 pixels. Crazy

You also may notice a lot of what I put on the shirts are faces, portraits, and characters. Well, yeah. It’s what I do.

Anyway, more will be going up. Let me know what you think.

After many years of using other people’s tools to make data visualization art, I finally wrote my own. You can find it here for download:

http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/pkviz-packet-visualizer-and-animator/

It’s called pkviz and it is primarily intended to take network traffic and puts it in a form humans find easy to play with to find unusual patterns and anomalies. It helps them do better analysis.

In action, it looks like this:

What I find interesting, though, is that there is an overlap between what is useful about line, shape, form color, etc and what people find aesthetically pleasing. So, instead of just using it for analysis, I make art. Like this:

This is a photo-drawing combination piece I recently made similar to the ones I was making at Artomatic. Instead of rushing it, however, this one took several days and was my first real attempt at making a “finished” piece using this technique.

The portrait is of Amanda Fucking Palmer (of Dresden Dolls fame) and the photo I used was one I took of her in Los Angeles at a secret show she had for 30-50 twitter followers the day before Coachella this year.  She twitters links to “art of the day”about her or the Dolls every day and I was hoping she’s tweet this one out – which she did! (stoked!).

The photo was projected on paper hanging on the wall. I used a variety of pastels, paints, markers, and some charcoal in the drawing.  I like how her hair glints from the gold metal paint, and I used some white paint to cover up more serious “oopses”.  I’m not entirely happy with it – it feels a bit forced to me – but it’s a good start. I’ll definitely be doing more.

Now, for something altogether different. Everyone knows I have a ton of film strip gear. I’ve been promising myself since October that I’d do something with the gear itself. I finally did so and made a sculpture out of one of the projectors. It is fully functional, just much much more attractive (and cleaner inside). The plan is to make a few of these for shows…and make specific film strips for each projector.

Here is what I started with:

The end result is a “steam punk” looking projector and is my first try at hand painting anything since elementary school…much less attaching parts to things (first, I had an aborted “military camo” version, but it was accidental and sucked!).  Here are some shots:

Hopefully, I’ll add some more, smaller detail work to this but I’m just not sure what to add yet. I’d like to make the next ones a little more elaborate. I’ve ordered some neon/LED lighting…and I’d like to replace the inside projection lamp with something a little newer and a little less 500-watts-y. I’m going to be building a modern “sci-fi” one, a gore-covered “zombie” projector, and possibly also an Amanda Fucking Palmer Punk Rock Cabaret Special to give to Amanda. We’ll see.