pixelPaint by justin simoni
Requirements to view this piece:
I know these are steep, but this is an ongoing project and (as I'll explain later) meant for the Very Near future.
A fast computer, the computer I created this on isn't fast enough.
The Macromedia Flash 6 Player
1024 X 768 Resolution, millions o' colors
Please note that this is a work in progress and what you're seeing is a very early experiment into this whole idea.
This all started out when I thunked; What if paint strokes could dance on the canvas?
What if every paint stroke had it's own characteristic; reds would not only suggest violence and alarm, they would actually exhibit it! What if the entire mood of a dismal painting could be enhanced by the painting acting like fog? How would a painting be critiqued if every single time it's shown, it's details are completely different? The Conceptualists would leave it at that, the Impressionists would jump on the chance to exhibit this power, the Cubists would find yet another dimension to play with and I decided I would make it happen.
Bending the Rules by Blocking the Pictures
Such an idea would need to lend itself a new medium. Mere paint will not work, since it's essentially colored mud you slap on a canvas. Digital mediums come in handy here; since time based movement has been at your disposal since you saw your first CD ROM or animated GIF.
The technique would then be to use not paint strokes, but pixels to use as information when drawing the painting. Pixels can give us the position and color values needed to render a painting. But pixels are boring. You're not rendering a new image, you're merely duplicated something already created. You need to give the pixel more qualities to give it more of a brush stroke characteristic.
One characteristic you can give is size. Pixels are essentially little dots, or little blocks. Painters can make brush stokes in any way they please, using size, shape, opacity and even depth at their disposal.
With a little experimenting, you can give what started out as pixel information, size; you can say instead of a square, you're now a rectangle, or a circle, or a blob, or a outline of your face or a random blob. You can also give it opacity the same way. Depth would be a bit harder since most computer screens are two dimensional, but you can very easily add texture by applying not just plain color information to our superPixel, but colorize an already created texture. Our computer-based brush has one over the homely paint brush though, movement.
Our new kind of brush now has its own size, opacity, texture, position - but we can also make it dance. Why can't my brushes on my paintings move; why can't my rendered rivers flow, why doesn't my sun and moon move with the tides and the Earth? I've asked it to move, but all I can barter are action lines and strokes that created the "Illusion" of movement. Well, we can do better than that.
pixelPaint
Interesting concept, no? Some implications that I plan to explore in the near future:
Recognition
My current products of this technique abstracts the base image to some degree, but are the images still recognizable without seeing what they're based on? Can an image that was itself abstract to begin with, become more recognizable when applied the pixelPaint technique? What sort of objects are more recognizable? Are human faces more recognizable than everyday household items?
Enhancement of an Image using Motion
Can motion be applied to an image to enhance it? Can the brush stokes become smart enough to intuitively render the image to evoke the right reaction, or a reaction at all? Who becomes the artist? The creator of the Engine behind the digital image or the creator of the Engine itself? Is this art, or is this just a glorified Photoshop filter?
Real Soon Now
3/18/03
In a bizarre change of thinking, I've decided to take the idea of abstraction via pixelation and make paintings out of the pixelpaintings themeselves. Rather than have a computer make less work for you, I've had it make much more work for me, applying up to 512 pixel squares of acrylic paint onto canvas. The Following works have been shown publically:
The Eye, 24" by 24" - Pirate Gallery in Denver, CO, 12/6/02 - 12/22/02
Nicole, 512, 36" by 72" - 40th Annual RMCAD Student Show in Denver, CO, 3/7/03 - 4/2/03.
7/04/02
I added another effect, having letters be the paint strokes. Very appropriate for Authors, such as Kerouac.
6/01/02
I've put up the most recent version I have. I haven't had much time to work on it, but my classes at RMCAD have really sparked my imagination on other possibilities - color theory would fall in love with this entire project.
This version has two different effects; The square that rotates at random speeds and direction and the circle that grows in random sizes. No one has told me they've cried viewing these, so much work is to be done!
5/22/02
I'm releasing pixelPaint in its current form because I fear I may not have as much time as I would like (read: 18 hours/day) to work on it. At the moment, I'm moving, starting at a new school and looking for a new job. The most current version of this piece is actually sitting on my desktop at home and I'm slapping this together at a Goth coffee shop in Denver. The version you're seeing is about 20 work hours younger than the most current version. Such is the nature of the web and we shall not dwell on that whole idea ("versioning" of artwork, post modernist bs, etc) any longer
I plan to release the source of this project in a Copyright-Free channel soon, although I fear at the moment, the code is written to sloppily, the requirements to run the database, the image manipulators are based on things not on every hosting environment and everything else is too great for anyone just to pick up. But, I do want to see what else people can do with these ideas.
If you would like to be notified of future developments of this project, please sign up to the announcement list:
This list is set up just for developments on this project only.
Justin Simoni
5/21/02
I'm Justin Simoni. I'm 21. That's scary. I go to The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, Colorado and run away from a boring, artless future everyday of my life Say hello.