:MeetPi

Some time ago (almost a year ago, I think) I was playing with some ideas about manipulating video. My thinking was that video could be conceived as a volumetric texture. In other words, each frame of video could be stacked to create a 3D volume. Passing an arbitrary projection plane through this volume would lead to some interesting effects. Because the depth (z) dimension of this video is effectively time, an arbitrary plane of intersection would allow you to play with time and space on a 2D area (the screen). I was hoping this might allow people new sensory access into time and space, and thus allow for the development of a different appreciation of reality.
Of course, as with anything that has become programmatically trivial, this idea is not new. My favorite example of slicing video volumes is the Khronos projector project, which lets you deform a z axis-aligned projection plane interactively. Talking about some of my ideas with Mitchell revealed that his brother had also been toying with ideas about video volumes and intersection planes. Indeed, even before digital technology, photographers were playing with slit shot photography. In fact, here’s a page listing around a dozen projects that do similar things.

So anyway, the ‘Net’s nothing if not replication and redundancy, so here’s my contribution. I wrote a small program in C that runs as a command-line application to process image sequences (it does not work with video files, so you need to export them to image sequences before processing, which is a pain). The program’s pretty simple and should compile on windows, Mac or Linux assuming you’re configured the FreeImage library right. You can download an executable for PPC Mac 10.4 here, or grab the source code here (.cpp and .h – you’ll also need FreeImage). Go have a look at the full page for a more expanded description, screen shots and video examples of the process in action. It’s fairly mind bending stuff.

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I have Thai student who is working on a graphic novel.  He recently came to me with an interesting problem.  He wanted to know how to write sounds effects into his comic in English.  I guess he wanted to avoid unfortunate problems like this.  So, I sat down with him and started going through his novel, page by page, adding in sound effects.  Some were easy (klang) others challenging (what is the sound of someone pulling a loose hood off their head?)

What was even more interesting was the fact that there are Thai words (or, like in English made-up words) for sounds that don’t exist in English.  In fact, there are places where you’d have a sound in Thai where you just wouldn’t in English – for example, upon entering a room filled with a picture of carnage.  There’s a sound effect for that in Thai, but in English it would be despicted with silence, and perhaps the vocalisations of characters.

I did  come across an article called “The Semantics of Sound” which seems to provide some interesting comment on sounds in comics.  Worth a read.

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My colleague Mitchell Whitelaw has established a blog called “the teeming void“. Have a look at it if you’re in the mood for some mind expanding theory and generative ideas.

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One model for human/computer interaction I’ve been thinking about for some time involves the idea that the human mind is an integral but often ignored component of a computation triad made up of software. hardware and wetware. I’ve just started fiddling with TAMS Analyzer, an open source qualitiative coding program for the Mac and Linux.

Coding is the process by which you mark-up text with codes that represent information within text. It’s a way of essentially annotating text in a highly structured way so that themes and ideas in the text can be highlighted and analysed. The problem is, this task needs a wetware processor. Only a human being can read an email and extract the nuances from the text. It’s one of those tasks that computers absolutely suck at doing.

Here’s another example. MS Word is a sophisticated word processor, but without human input it won’t write anything. Again, it’s the wetware that adds a vital component – that of writing. So what? That’s all pretty obvious, I agree. But maybe if we start thinking of the human operator as an absolutely essential part of processing tasks instead of as a clunky meat-thing that’s prone to clicking the “wrong” buttons, we can design software that takes more thorough advantage of software, hardware and the incomparable processing capacity of the human brain.

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I’m posting my PhD here for anyone who’s interested in reading it. It’s a PDF that weighs in at around 3.5 megabytes – which is not much for the amount of work this document represents. It’s all completed and passed, so now I throw it back into the electronic miasma from which is came. If you use it in any way, shape or form please acknowledge me in some way. Here it is: Towards a critical theory of the Internet

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