This photo shows 3 of 4 projections panels in the VAG cupola. Note that the image on the right has not been fully mapped to the panel shape (yet).

I have been working since January on The Glocal Project, a large-scale contributive art project being run out of the Surrey Art Gallery's TechLab. The  team as a whole has been developing a series of simple software applications designed to act as creative and pedagogical tools for both individuals and educators.

A couple of weeks back, we had the chance to bring some of our work out of the lab and into the Vancouver Art Gallery, where we presented a large four-screen projection in the Gallery's rotunda cupola.

A grid of images from a single camera feed mapped onto the cupola panels

Technically, this presented a challenge. Not only did we want to have four linked screens in which images could overlap - we also wanted the projections to be 'mapped' to the four curved panels of the cupola. All four panels together would be shown in 'flat' form on four plasma screens. To add to the confusion, we would be running four live camera feeds into the system - three webcams and one wireless DV camera. 4 cameras. 6 computers. 8 screens. As has been the case for much of the Glocal project, we turned to Processing for a solution.

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."

Tutorial notes: This is a short (well, sort of short) tutorial intended to demonstrate how to use Spherical Coordinates. The example here will be built in Processing, though a similar effect could be achieved in virtually any environment. This is a low-level tutorial - it assumes basic programming knowledge, but doesn't do anything particularly complex. Click here to see what the resulting looks like in action (click!). It looks fairly basic, but I am going to follow this tutorial up with some examples of how we can use this system as a base to do some more interesting things. Enjoy!

Typically when we are working in three dimensions, we use the standard Cartesian coordinate set - x, y, and z. While this is suitable for most cases, it is easier and smarter to use a different set of coordinates when we are rendering spheres, or placing objects in orbits around points in 3d space. In this tutorial, we'll take a look at Spherical coordinates, and we'll walk through an example in Processing to show how it all works.

Spherical coordinates are much easier to use when we are dealing (surprise, surprise) with spheres. This is a similar reason to why we use polar coordinates when we are describing circles or ellipses in two dimensions. Indeed, spherical coordinates can be thought of as polar coordinates with one extra dimension:

Cartesian 2d: x,y
Cartesian 3d: x, y, z
Polar: θ, r
Spherical: θ, ø, r

I am just finishing up a tutorial post on using spherical coordinates. It should be up on the blog sometime over the weekend - I need to go over it with my editor's comb one more time, and insert some links here and there.

While I was uploading the sample files to my server, I stumbled on an old Processing project that I had completely forgotten about. In Freeze Tag, a group of Tagger particles chase a group of targets. When they catch the targets, they freeze them. Targets can be unfrozen by their friends, but they risk becoming frozen themselves in doing so.  It's a fairly stable system, for a while, and it's fun to watch.

Check it out here. I would like to revisit this and maybe combine it with some newer projects that I am working on. I'll add it to my list! As always, comments or questions are appreciated.