Doctor Who / Orphan Black Fan Parties At Comic Con San Diego 2015

Quick recap from last weekend – Just got back from filling in as DJ / VJ with the Eclectic Method at Comic Con San Diego at the fan meet ups for Orphan Black and Doctor Who. As a huge fan of both shows it was a special honor to be up on stage doing my thing alongside the stars and writers from the shows.

BBC America has official run downs of each event, keep a look out for a certain nerd behind a laptop in these videos,

I also took a couple of photos of random people who had some awesome (assorted) costumes,

And these were two of my favorite moments from the meet ups that I managed to catch on video,

That's about it! Hope the fans who made it out had a great time just like me!

Randomized Life Safari

On my flight home from Eyeo Festival this year, inspired as usual, I revisited a recent code sketch for creating randomized shapes to include a few new degrees of freedom.

The Random Shape generator can be played with interactively in a web browser by following the link above, but as I was going along I kept taking still image screen grabs as I twisted the shapes to look like birds, fauna, landscapes and other creatures.

At the end the series seemed rather like a slideshow from a safari to an odd digital world and I've collected some of my favorites below.

On a technical note, these are all drawn as layered 2D triangles, no 3D fanciness involved.

Birds and Creatures

Flowers and Terrain

TV Comment Bot

Last weekend I participated in an event here in Brooklyn called Art Hack Day where a bunch of artists and technologists with different skill sets all got together to implement new projects in 36 hours and finish with a gallery opening. I teamed up with David Newbury and Blair Neal on an installation we called “TV Helper” which is now also running as a Twitter-bot called TV Comment Bot.

The TV Helper is designed to make new TV shows out of existing ones by inserting new subtitle text over any video feed, replacing the original plot and dialogue of the show being watched. When possible the TV Helper algorithms will reference specific objects it “sees” in the video stream in the plot lines being created.

Additionally the genre of the new show can be a customized by the viewer using the set of provided knobs to be a mix of 8 different styles: Sports, News, Politics, Humor, Crime, NASCAR, Religion and Horror.

Here are some of my favorite results of feed from the home edition that is now running 24/7 since the Super Bowl on Feb 1st. You can find hundreds more on the Twitter feed.

If you're interested in hacking together a bit of this yourself, the two main tools used were the DeepBeliefSDK based analysis app that I wrote recently and this MadLibs generator created by David Newbury. We combined these using Quartz Composer / Syphon / OSC to create the simply text overlays for display.

The whole thing looked a bit like this behind the scenes:

Early display prototype.

Signal path sketch.

Software screenshot.

Testing, testing.

Me with the project!

Home edition.

Since this can run in real-time I'm also curious to try this out as an additional overlay during a VJ set in the future. We'll see how that goes.

Lastly a huge shout out to the Art Hack Day organizers for baby sitting all us artists while we worked. If you'd like to see more of the results from the event my friend Alejandro blogged about the awesome Oculus / Unity drowning game they made. You can find additional photos of the action (several of which are on this page!) on Margarida Malarkey's site.

[Update] Also on Art Hack Day: Deluge, read the details on the cool WiFi Taser by Max Henstell and another write up in this Makezine post.

[Update 2] Below are some more recent pictures from the Apple WWDC event, political press events and of course TV.