I’ve been examining the visual patterns produced by the Whitney Music Box (see previous post). If you watch the animation for any length of time, you’ll notice that the dots form spoked or starfish-like patterns periodically. These patterns often cause chords to be played by the music box. I was curious to understand the sequence […]

This weekend I’ve been playing, once again, with the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, using both graphics and audio. While Whitney was interested in turning musical ideas into motion graphics, I’m doing the inverse — turning one of his key animation ideas back into music. Whitney made a number of films based around […]

I’m still working on making artificial yet authentic 17th century vocal music, so I thought I’d provide some MP3 samples to listen to, and give capsule reviews of a few of the different software packages I am using, in particular, Flinger, and Tracktion. If you haven’t read my previous post about this project, check it […]

Here is a screenshot I took while I was working recently, to document a fascinating project. The project involves resurrecting a bit of technology from the 1600s. In the screen snapshot, I am entering numbers into a text file. I am copying the numbers, as you can see, from a digital facsimile of an old […]

According to a recent post in the Flickr Blog the ‘favorite’ color of the Flickr community is a warm brownish taupe. The blog points to a nifty application, favcol which computes the average color of all the images on Flickr recently tagged ‘favcol’. In actuality, that brownish taupe color is what you tend to get […]

I’ve been a little obsessed with cuckoo clocks for the past few weeks, and here are a few cuckoo-related oddments. A friend of mine gave me an unwanted cuckoo clock, and I repaired it and hung it on a wall at home. Every time the cuckoo chime goes off, it makes me giggle. Sadly, most […]

The Jesuit Polymath Athanasius Kircher is a personal hero of mine. I constructed this Kircherian coverpop, which contains a collection of images from his books, which covered such varied subjects as geology, magnetism, architecture, music, egypt, and china. Stanford University Library’s Department of Special Collections has graciously granted me permission to use these images. The […]

I’ll be giving a free lecture-workshop at USC tonight. Most likely I will be demonstrating how to make a Karl Marx toy in Flash, but I may change my mind. Come by and say hi! Here’s the official blurb: Interactive Art & Toys in Flash Tuesday, Feb. 28 7:30-9:30 @ (USC Campus) SAL 127 Jim […]

I’m working on some new coverpops, and here’s the first one out of the gate. This is a collection of Star Trek Comics, from 1970 to the present. The images were provided by Mark Martinez, at the Star Trek Comics Checklist. Thanks Mark! The images are arranged horizontally by time (older comics on the left) […]

Kakuro Puzzles, for the uninitiated, are numeric crossword puzzles. If you like Sudoku, you will probably like Kakuro too — they both can be quite addictive. There is a collection of free kakuro puzzles in my puzzle section. Last year, I wrote three inexpensive Kakuro puzzle books for Ulysses Press. They can now be pre-ordered […]