Rather than continuing to blanket this blog with videos from my current project-in-progress, I've set up a Vimeo channel which those of you who are interested can subscribe to. I'll be posting a lot of videos there as changes are made, to document the process and to gather feedback where I can.

Here's the URL: http://www.vimeo.com/coloureconomy

There are a couple of new videos up there already - please drop by and have a look.

What if pixels were free? What if they could trade their computer-given red, green, and blue values in pursuit of a profit?

The Colour Economy imagines an artificial economy of pixels, in which individual 'traders' exchange colour. In this pixel performance, the seed image creates a region in the bottom right which is wealthier than the regions surrounding it:

As the economy develops, this wealthy population separates itself physically from the traders with little colour capital.

Here are three video renders of the system unfolding:

The Colour Economy: The Gap Between the Rich and the Poor from blprnt on Vimeo.

The Colour Economy: In the end, we will have more important things to worry about from blprnt on Vimeo.

Market conditions fluctuate in each run of the simulation, so though some general things remain constant with each seed image, the performance happens differently every time.

Flashbelt 2008 is looking to (once again) raise the bar for creative web technology conferences. I've said this again and again over the past five years - if you are going to choose one conference to go over the year, make it Flashbelt. The speakers' list this year is perhaps the best ever - here's a little taste:

• Robert Hodgin (Flight404.com)
• Jared Tarbell (complexification.net)
• Mario Klingemann (quasimondo.com)
• Seb Lee-Delisle (sebleedelisle.com)
• André Micheller (andre-michelle.com)

And there's more. Check out the conference site for the full list, and to get a taste of what each presenter will be talking about.

The theme of my talk this year is emergence. It's a concept that has been central to my work from the start and over the last year or so I have been thinking a lot about the role that emergence plays in the creative process. Here's my official session description:

"Emergence refers to the way that complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions. In this session we'll look into some of the ideas behind emergence, and will explore in detail the role it plays in the creative process. We'll talk about the role that emergence plays in a variety of diverse areas, including AI, economics, and philosophy. Along the way, I'll show a variety of new generative works which tread into emergent territories, and will unravel some of the underlying code that brings these projects to life."

I've posted a quick set of images from a Processing sketch that I've been working on this week. It started with a desire to understand spherical mathematics a bit better, progressed into some experiments with swarming on a sphere, and ended with a whirling tornado of umbrellas! 

I'll post a video here when I get the chance - in the meantime, check out the Flickr set. 

I am loving Carolin Horn's Anymails - a playful visualization of e-mail traffic using animated single-celled creatures. It's nice to see something as ordinary as e-mail represented in such a fun way. I want my e-mail box to look like this!!

Why isn't this site real yet? Imagine a place where information is available about every single species on the planet. Now imagine a site that everyone can contribute to, uploading photos, reports of sightings, and helpful facts. The folks over at Razorfish have certainly done an amazing job of imagining the interface for such a site - you can see screengrabs and a video of their designs over at eol.org.

EOL stands for Encyclopedia of Life, and it is the brain child of American biologist E.O. Wilson. Like a WikiPedia for living things, it is a very ambitious project. Relying on contributions from people with expertise around the world, the organizers of the project expect to have actual, authenticated species pages available by mid 2008.