April 24, 2009
Jim Campbell Exploration
Electronic artist Jim Campbell visited Stanford today and presented a broad overview of his work at the HCI seminar.
His Ambiguous Icons projects probe the boundary of image coherence: when does an image breaks down into individual pieces, when do the pieces merge into a larger whole? I had seen Running, Falling at the San Jose Museum of Art before: a 2D matrix of single-color LEDs is pulse width-modulated to act as a low-resolution video display. Viewed straight on, one only perceives a pattern of flickering lights. However, when a plastic diffuser is introduced between the viewer and the LED array (Campbell calls it his "reconstruction filter"), the gestalt of the video image emerges.
The talk inspired me to write a quick Processing sketch that explores the design space of this concept. Given a video file, the sketch renders frames from the video as an array of low resolution circles or rectangles. A blur filter over the set of rendered shapes assumes the role of the diffuser. To explore the space of options, sliders for the number of samples, for shape size, and for blur radius are provided. As a test videos, I pulled some of Edison's first kinetoscope strips from the Internet Archive Edison Motion Picture Collection.
Download Processing Source: campbell_02d-090424a.zip