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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

For the raid, my goal was actually to create an 80′s style fim strip of the raid (to be projected)using a cheap half frame 35mm camera.  I did get some great shots, but I had the camera 90 degrees the wrong way the whole time (horizontally positioning the camera resulted in….vertically framed shots. ugh).

I’ll try and figure out a fix for that later, but for now I wanted to post some of my digital shots from the raid. I think they’d some of the best shits I’ve gotten in awhile. In keeping with the theme, though, I did break one of my rules and really played with the colorization of the shots to make them feel more apocalypse-movie than they did by themselves. Let me know how you like the results?

Last I left this blog, I had plans to head out to Eastern State Penitentiary to do a model shoot with my wife and a group of DC Strobist photogs. We did end up going and the results were fabulous.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with ESP, it:

is considered one of America’s most historic former prisons…Its revolutionary system of incarceration was the first to establish the policy of solitary confinement, emphasizing principles of reform rather than punishment. Notorious criminals such as bank robber Willie Sutton and Al Capone were held inside its unique wagon wheel design. When the building was erected it was the largest and most expensive public structure ever constructed, quickly becoming a model for more than 300 prisons worldwide.

When we went, we were escorted into areas of the peniteniary normally closed to the public. It was dark, dank, and – more than anything else – dusty. There is still moldy, rotted toilet paper in some of the cells left over from when the facility was closed down in 1971.  Walls were collapsing, old equipment rusted through, and you could fell the mold clawing at you.  Usually, this is the kind of thing you only see on movie sets.  I’ve been walking through thousand-year-old temples in Cambodia, but despite how “recent” its history is, all of the human detrius laying around still helped ESP give off much more of a creepy, immediately visceral vibe than the temples.

Regarding the shoot itself, I still felt a little out of place around the Strobist crew because I don’t use off-camera lighting. I still feel like I’d like to concentrate on working the camera until I know it was well as I breathe. Then, I’ll work on using lights to enhance the shots and increase the number of options I have. If I do it before Im totally comfortable with the camera, I think I’ll use the lighting as a crutch and that, psychologically, they’ll limit my creativity.

Working the shots was also interesting. The models themselves wonderful and many of them were willing to sacrifice both comfort and clean clothes to help get the shot. On the other hand, I really don’t feel like – in these group situations – I get to develop the kind of photographer:model relationship that I think would lead to some good shots.  In my installation art, I always need to get a feel for the relationship between the space, the viewer, and myself before I really make good art.  In model photography, I feel like I’d like to work the models into the space and into the kind of shots I want. Instead, we get a few minutes at a time and pass them off to someone else (or there are many people directing at once).

Still, I managed to get some images that I’m very, very happy with. In particular, Lacy (one of the models) put on a nightgown and went stumbling down one of the darker, wetter hallways in the penitentiary looking quite zombie-like.  You can find the whole set below.

Enjoy.