It keeps progressing, daylight extending closer to the edges of the field. A little more than a month to go before it peaks and begins to wane.
I’m just posting the averaged skygrid this time, the version with cropped boxes as pixels doesn’t really work well at this size and if I’m going to do it, I’ll probably do it with boxes larger than 10 px by 10 px, so it’s easier to see the interactions.
Click to embiggen:
We’re at the end of March, so I assembled the skygrid images into composites for everyone to see. Last time, each section of the grid was an average square 10 pixels by 10 pixels. This time around, I figured I could do averaged sections which give the base color change, and do squished and cropped sections which include a small bit of photographic detail. Here’s the average skygrid (click to embiggen):
And here’s the squished skygrid (again, click to embiggen):
To make it more obvious, here’s the average skygrid at full resolution around sundown:
And here’s the squished skygrid at the same time of day:
You can see the cloud shapes in each of the frames in the second one. You can even see diagonal progressions in several areas, as the same bank of clouds travels across the camera’s field of view over several minutes.
I’m pretty happy with this. The only tweak I wish I could do is get a more true color balance from the camera, but this is a security camera, and the people who built it were probably not looking for calibrated colormetric data in the video stream.
Got some last-minute kinks worked out, and the camera is in its housing and set up on my deck, ready to snap pictures of the sky. One such is right here:
Lovely image of clouds at dusk, in case you’re wondering what that is we’re looking at. Here’s a couple pictures of the installation itself:
And here’s a shot from the time-lapse camera itself, of me taking its picture:
I’m a little blurry because it’s not really set for close-up images. : )
So I continued to play around with the Axis network video camera I was graciously loaned, and got it set up so it automatically uploads HD-sized video stills to my FTP site, starting at 5:00 am and ending at 9:00 pm. In fact, it should just be finishing up right now. However, from about 7:15 on, the images were basically black, because we’re not even at the equinox yet and that kind of day duration won’t be prevalent until the solstice. But it works! Awesomesauce! To celebrate, I whipped up a quick time-lapse video of my neighbor’s roof and the sky:
Since I’m interested in the sky colors, I did a crop of the sky quadrant and averaged out the values to create this time-lapse:
And just because I was feeling silly, I cropped out the right-hand roofline and averaged out the values to create a final time-lapse:
I just have to figure out where to mount the camera and I can start a six-month collection regimen of a new skygrid! Woo-hoo!
So, the reason I posted the digital Dao De Ching is because I had a small epiphany of how to work the Chinese encoding in a different way, which lead me back to the original, older encoding concept, and I figured I’d go ahead and post it just to be complete. The new concept is basically something akin to my Average Typefaces, except this is the average of all the characters in a given chapter of the Dao De Ching. Running every single meaningful character together (I removed the period and comma characters as they were kinda boring), yields this particular image:
An alternative method that involves using transparency in Illustrator to organize the characters yields this similar but different average:
I used two different Chinese fonts for each of these averages, so the shapes are different. It is obvious that the Dao that can be averaged is not the eternal Dao!
300… I’ve captured 300 QRs. Here’s the group average, as shot:
(the graininess comes from the fact I photographed three or four QRs on computer monitors this time around)
Generated average:
Average of all 300, as shot–
And all 300, freshly generated:
Since 300 is a big and round number, I figured I’d do another breakdown of the QRs by size, generating averages that are slightly more meaningful because there’s greater overlap. (Here’s the first one.) First, the histogram of QR sizes (given in pixels on the bottom axis):
For the pixel sizes with more than one entry, here are those composites:
216 pixels:
248 pixels:
280 pixels:
312 pixels:
344 pixels:
376 pixels:
408 pixels:
504 pixels:
These averages clearly show the control blocks, the orientation blocks, and the data fields used int he QR specification.
I was browsing my Vimeo stats and I’m quite surprised that every one of my top ten loaded videos is not a wind turbine, is not an icosacomposite, is not the MBTA… They are all Average Cinema pieces.
Which means that a decent number of people are loading up silent colorfield videos and are, for a good portion of the time, letting them run in their entirety. I never expected anyone but myself to do something like that. Who knew? Anyway, thanks for watching, everyone!
This was something that had been in the back of my mind for a while, just a lark, just something to play with. I thought I’d cruise through Google Earth and take screenshots of various cloverleaves along the interstates in the area. Funny thing: there aren’t as many traditional 4-lobed cloverleaf interchanges as you’d expect, a lot of them are more in an H-pattern of on/off ramps with controlled intersections. I suppose that’s a little cheaper than graded, circular ramps allowing nonstop interchange. At any rate, I started on I-95 around Boston and got twenty cloverleaves as a start, including this lovely one from right at the Delaware border in Maryland:
Look at that! Almost as perfect a circle as you’re gonna get with aggregate and asphalt on actual terrain. Trés magnifique!
At any rate, I got twenty screenshots and then tweaked them to 1000 px by 1000 px, with the center of the cloverleaf as close to the center of the square as possible. I figured it would be pretty cool, but I was surprised by how cool:
That’s pretty sexy. Then I normalized the levels:
Oh, yeah. That’s nice. So—I hope you appreciate these as much as I do. I’ll probably be doing more in the near future.
You won’t get Philip Glass or restaurant chatter, since I do these as silent color fields, but I did up the two newest Cinema Icosacomposites as Average Cinema pieces, too.
