The design itself is now finished. Unfortunately though, since I’ve widened the main content section a fair bit, it’s put some of the individual posts out, such as images behind code sections. Actually, mainly images behind code sections. I’ve gone through and cleaned up all of the ones I’ve found so far. If you happen across any that are still out, it would be greatly appreciated if you could leave a comment on the post to let me know.

Something new I have incorporated with this theme is my Twitter stream, running down the bottom right of the page. I’ve had it running on my other blog, Still as Life, for a while now, figured it’s about time to put it it on here too. My tweets are more web design oriented than computational arts, and even more so just what I’m up to in general. So when I am working on something, I’ll usually be tweeting about it, be it web design, computational arts or something else. Follow me if you are on Twitter and want to keep up to date on what I’m doing and my latest projects.

The background image I have used is a still from the output of one of my recent Quartz Composer audio visualisations. I’ll be putting it up here when I get a chance, along with a couple of variations on it.

Have a great one!

I’ve been pretty quiet on here the past few months unfortunately as I have been pretty busy, though if you follow me on Twitter, I am relatively alive. Hopefully you’ll be seeing a few more blog posts from me soon as I’ve got a number of things on the go, and a few things finished that just need to be written up.

I’ve been playing with Quartz Composer a fair bit and have a few new audio visualisers for you coming fairly soon, along with a new design for this blog based on one of these visualisations, so keep an eye out for it soon! The graphic design is almost finished, so hopefully I’ll get it all done up and live in the next week or two.

For a bit of a look at what I’ve been up to for Christmas and new years, have a look at my other blog, Still As Life and leave your comments about what you’ve been doing too.

Have a fun and safe holiday everyone, and enjoy 2009!

For anyone that doesn’t know what a fractal is, it is effectively a geometric image that repeats itself infinitely no matter how far in you zoom. They are usually irregular appearing images, but they are “self-similar”.

The koch is a snowflake star shape and is one of the earliest fractal shapes to be recognised.

For an interesting look at how it replicates as you zoom in and how self-similar it is, have a look at the Java applet over at ArcyTech.

If you look at my Deviant Art account at all, you’ll notice that it is absolutely full of fractal stills. I also had some big A1 and A2 fractal prints on exhibition, as well as an animation, at a recent inter-university festival between QUT and UQ. So I can easily say that fractals are definitely where my love in art is at. Since I first began experimenting with fractals, there has been one particularly big influence in my work, and that has been the work of Scott Draves aka Spot.

Spot’s work has been of interest to me basically since I began working with fractals and it continues to do so.

He has done a lot of work in fractals and started the Flam3, Electric Sheep and Dreams in High Fidelity projects, all of which are quite influential on my work, both in fractals and in other computational arts.

Not all of his work has been focused on fractals, but many of his idea’s share similarities with them. One example of this are his Dub Visuals which take chaotic still images and morph them, to form other still images in a flow similar to that of the evolution of his fractal animations.

I have previously done fractal animations where they are synced with music, both music performed by another artist and music that I have composed myself. However, this hasn’t been done in real time and has been a long process to setup each portion of the animation and sync it up with the music. Ultimately, I would love to develop a way of rendering fractals, even low quality or low resolution fractals in real-time based on audio input. Basically this would be combining the work I have done previously with the basic concepts of what I did for KKB210 where I did a series of lines and boxes that responded to audio input. The lines one was probably getting close, though ultimately no where near as detailed as I would like it to be, and definitely nowhere near as chaotic and fractal-like as I want.

That is my aim though and hopefully I will get to it sooner or later.

This semester, I am moving on to KKB211 – Computational Arts 2, so again, this blog will be used as an online portfolio of my development in the area of computational arts. The aim is to develop a series of works by the end of the semester that can be used as exhibition pieces as part of a computational arts exhibition at QUT Kelvin Grove.

It will also act as a process diary to help my keep track of my development and help me filter out the not so good works so I can focus more on the ones that are worth pursuing.

• Setting up the blog portfolio using WordPress.

Tutorial 2 – Week 3 – Impromptu

• Introduction to Impromptu.
• Making a MIDI Based Piano Using Scheme and Impromptu.
• Making a Drum Machine Using Scheme and Impromptu.

Tutorial 3 – Week 4 – Processing

• Introduction to Processing.
• Drawing a Box in Processing.
• Motion in Processing.
• More Controlled Motion in Processing.
• Trails and Smoother Colour Changes in Processing.
• Images in Processing.
• Tennis/Pong in Processing.

Tutorial 4 – Week 5 – Flex

• Introduction to Flex and Moon Buggy.

Tutorial 5 – Week 6 – Pure Data

• Introduction to Pure Data (Pd).

Tutorial 6 – Week 7 – Quartz Composer

• Introduction to Quartz Composer.
• More Complicated Patching in Quartz Composer.