LED Artwork Disappears Right Before Your Eyes

March 2, 2011 by Mike Nathan 47 Comments

take_a_picture_demo

If you walked into an art gallery and saw nothing but blank canvases lining the wall, you might be compelled to demand your money back, or assume that you had discovered the world’s laziest artist. If this gallery happened to be displaying work by [Brad Blucher and Kyle Clements] however, you would be mistaken.

These two artists have collaborated to create a series of works titled, “Take a Picture“. Each picture they have built is constructed to look like an empty canvas when viewed with the naked eye. If you were to take a picture of the canvas with your cell phone or digital camera however, a whole new world would open up in front of your eyes. Their artwork is constructed using infrared LEDs, which cannot be seen with the naked eye, but are visible to nearly any CMOS or CCD sensor on the market. The images range from simple smiley faces and objects to abstract geometric shapes.

It’s a very simple, yet novel approach, and we happen to think it’s pretty cool. The artists have not said what they have planned for this project in the future, but we’d love to see it expanded using larger LED arrays to display higher-resolution images, or even short movies.

Keep reading to see how they went about creating these works of art as well as a promo video demonstrating the effect.

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Creepy Robot Eye Follows You And Winks In Response

August 14, 2008 by rossfairgrieve 3 Comments

Opto-Isolator is an interesting art installation that was on display at the Bitforms Gallery in NYC. This single movement-tracking eye creates a statement about how we view art and is a response to the question “what if art could view us?”. The somewhat creepy display not only follows the person viewing it, but mimics blinks a second later and averts its gaze if eye contact is kept up for too long. Its creators [Golan Levin] and [Greg Baltus] have done a great job mimicking human behavior with such a simple element and the social implications of it are truly fascinating.

If they wanted to, [Levin] and [Baltus] could possibly crank up the spook factor by adding facial recognition and programming it to remember how certain people interact with it, then tailor its behavior to wink at different rates or become more shy or bold, depending on the personality of the person watching it. Of course, that would require that someone goes back to it more than once…

[via Glass Tumbler]

Making Art With Javascript

June 30, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 5 Comments

Mozilla coder [Aza] is connected to the past and the present: he wanted to celebrate the release of Firefox 3, but pines for the days when one could use small amounts of code to make compelling art. As a way of addressing both things, he has released ContextFree.js, a javascript port of [Chris Coyne]’s Context Free Art. Users can visit Algorithm Ink, where they can draw various compelling designs with just a few lines of script. ContextFree.js compiles the scripts and turns them into visually arresting geometric designs. Users can also browse through designs made by others, easily save them as JPGs, or even modify them by adding their own bits of code. What’s more, it’s not out of the question to use this to generate random images on a website, creating a unique visual experience for every single visitor. You all know what we want to see, though: JavaScript gurus working some real magic with this. Better yet, said gurus can play around with the core open-source code and make something truly their own on the most fundamental level. Definitely check out the video above to get an idea of how easy this is.

[via Waxy]