A month later, I’ll be heading down to Florida for this year’s warmest Flash conference - FOTB Miami. The average temperature in Miami in April is 76º, which certainly seems appealing given the chilly weather that has assailed North America lately. On top of the climate, Conference organizer extraordinaire John Davey has put together a great program for this 3 day event. I’d list the names here, but there are too many - check out the site for all of the details. The conference is an excellent value, and a rare chance for those of you in the Southern USA to get to a Flash conference without a lot of travel. Get your Early-bird tickets now, and your drinks-with-umbrellas-in-them in April! Flash on the Beach Miami, South Beach, 04-06.09-04.08.09

Search engines for images tend to be goal oriented - users are typically searching for a specific thing. In this case text-based searches that allow queries like ‘dog wearing a hat‘ or ‘squirrel eating pizza‘ are quite useful. When the goal is to allow a user to browse a base of images without a specific goal in mind, however, this type of system becomes less helpful. How do you present a database of thousands of images for a person to peruse? Obviously a slide-show is out of the question - and presenting page after page of thumbnails is just plain wrong.

With this in mind, I have been developing a series of conceptual search tools for The Glocal Project. These applications have two purposes: they allow the user to wander through the database following non-random paths, and they also act to build relationships between images that can be examined in physical installations of the project in public spaces. We are sharing these tools so that they can be used online, as well as in the workshops that we lead for local highschool students. Eventually, source code all of these applications will be released to the public.

The first of these tools is the Glocal Image Breeder. It allows users to breed images - and look for ‘children’ that may contain common elements from both images. The result is a non-goal-oriented search engine that takes the user through a myriad of possible ‘relational maps’ within the Glocal Database. As additional people use the Image Breeder, more and more relationships between images are exposed. These relationships will then be used by our presentation software to create smarter compositions of images when projected or displayed (you can see a short video of our first prototype installation here). 

This type of relational search tool could be useful in navigating any set of large images. In an art-historical context, it would be interesting to apply this concept to a database of artworks - it maybe that the computer is able to reveal relationships that may not have been previously obvious. Commercially, it could be applied to catalogues of stock-photos, giving customers a new way to find images.

This tool is still in development - there are a few bugs to iron out and I’m certain the interface could be improved. Any questions or suggestions would be very much welcome. In the meantime, give it a try - the more the engine gets used, the smarter and more robust it will become!

Here are a few hints:

1. Double-clicking an image will zoom in and reveal a bigger version. Double-click again to return.
2. Images can be bred with themselves.
3. If you are having trouble finding a compatible pair in the first set of images, choose the first two. The first 6 images are known pairs, and should always produce good results. 
4. Use the slider at the top right to zoom in our out.

The Glocal Project is a massive contributive artwork. Two months before the launch of the project, we already have upwards of 8,000 submissions from more than 2,000 participants around the world. 

One of the most challenging questions has been: how can we make sense of such a large collection of images?

Obviously the first place to start is to catalogue as much information as we can about each image. Some of this information is easy to gather: place, date, place, tags, and other basic information is readily available through Flickr. We’ve also written some simple scripts to record luminosity and to put together a colour pallette for each image. Perhaps most interestingly, we’ve also integrated compositional analysis software, which looks at each image and assigns it a ’signature’. This signature can then be compared against others in the database to find similar images. This is a very useful tool, since it allows us to find relationships between images that may not have been obvious to human analysis.

I began thinking about these image signatures as a kind of genotype - genetic information that describes each unique image. With that in mind, I wondered wether it would be possible to breed images! The process starts off simply - the image signatures are spliced together at two insertion points:

Sig 1: 1111|111111111111|111111

Sig 2: 2222|222222222222|222222

Child: 1111|222222222222|111111

We then take the child signature and run it through the similarity engine, looking for images in the Glocal pool that matched the child most closely. Happily, this process worked. Below, you can see the three images that result from ‘breeding’ the initial two images. In the offspring, we see the circular element from the parent image on the left in all three images. The most successful child here is the middle one, where we see both the light circular shape from the ‘egg’ and the colour abstraction from the image on the right. 

This process can be repeated over generations. In the next image below, I’ve selected the two outside images and asked for images that could be their offspring. In almost all of the child images, we see the consistent circular image in the middle of the frame. There are a few outliers, which may have been imperfect matches - or, more interestingly, which may have picked up on ‘dormant’ portions of the image genotype from previous generations. 

We can proceed through these ‘trees’ in a generational fashion, or we can diverge and back-breed. If you take a close look at the image at the top of this post (click to get a larger view), you will see that there is a fair amount of inter-generational mixing. 

As this process continues, we can explore the relational landscape that exists in the Glocal pool, and in the process we construct ‘family trees’ which present a possible way in which the images could be related. I imagine an anthropologist, stumbling onto a box containing 8,000 images, might apply similar techniques to make some sense of what stories and histories lay within. These ‘imagined phylogenies’ could be constructed from any database of images, and of course with a larger database the relations would be more clear. Given a large enough database, we could see fairly seamless trees constructed in which the offspring very strongly resemble each of their parents. It may also be possible to apply these techniques to historical databases of images, perhaps providing some useful information about image relationships.

We will be posting the ‘live’ version of this tool very soon. In the meantime, you can see more images in our Glocal Visualizations Flickr set, along with other visualizations that have been produced as part of the Glocal project so far. As always, questions and feedback are welcome and appreciated!

The New York Times is featuring an elegant visualizer showing the one word that voters are using to describe their feelings on Election Day in the US. This clever little Flash app cycles through words, weighing them by popularity and providing optional sorting to see the difference between McCain voters’ feelings and those of Obama’s supporters. 

This is a visualization that is not over-designed. It’s simple, easy to understand, and it works. I hope that other media outlets take note - perhaps we will see more simple tools like this in the future.

What One Word was built by Gabriel Dance, Andrew Kueneman and Aron Pilhofer.

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This clever project by Dutch artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen creates evolved sculptural forms in Plywood, Nylon, and Stainless steel, using evolutionary computing techniques and 3D printing technology. The entire production process is automated, from design to execution. The artists have a lot of other interesting projects, including an ‘image-breeding machine‘ and a tickling robot or two.

In a nutshell, Harris believes that the online medium is in its infancy. This is a stage characterized by exploration and tinkering, but hampered by a lack of conceptual substance. He urges online artists, creators, and designers to ‘grow up’, by focusing more on ideas, and less on the easy promise of tech:

“I see a community that is distracted by relentless experimentation (experimentation is great, in moderation), constant tinkering (tinkering is great too, in moderation), advertising, games, purely aesthetic design, but most of all by the dizzying evolution of technology.”

He goes on to argue that it will only be by escaping these distractions that the community will be begin to produce work that is lasting and meaningful. 

I am surprised by the rancor that these comments have generated - mainly because I agree with them. In my own FOTB session, I discussed my challenges dealing with what I call ‘Excessive Complexity Disorder’ (which I have also nick-named Yngwie Malmsteen’s Disease). I suggested that a lot of us can be so focused on making our projects as complex as possible - maybe to impress colleagues or to increase ‘blogability’ - that core concepts behind these projects get diluted. This is certainly in line with Jonathan’s remarks above.  

As for the issue of aesthetics, it has long been my main criticism of both my own work and the work of others in the Flash community that it too often commits to aesthetic at the cost of concept. I have been working very hard over the last few years to incorporate stronger ideas into my work, and thus it is easy for me to find agreement with Harris’ comments. At the same time, it may be that some or most of the creators have no interest in making ‘conceptual art’. This is certainly a valid choice, but in discussions that I’ve had with colleagues at conferences in the past, this doesn’t appear to be the case. Indeed, most of the people that I have spoken to seem to have a genuine interest in taking their work to the ‘next level’. So where does the conflict lie?

Criticism of Harris and his presentation seems to be coming from a few common fronts:

The first, and unfortunately most popular attack seems to be on his personal character - where he is being publicly branded as arrogant, self-serving, and (gasp!) academic. Such accusations, apart from being insulting, don’t have a place in a reasonable discussion and I am not going to offer them much consideration here. I will simply say that a lot of these remarks smack of anti-intellectualism, which I find particularly sad in a community full of so many bright minds.

The second criticism seems to be brand Harris as an outsider, and therefore suggests that his remarks are somehow invalid or inappropriate. Several people have suggested that his comments would have been taken more seriously and more kindly if they had been delivered by a ‘member of the Flash community’.  This is troubling to me. While I enjoy the privilege of speaking regularly at Flash conferences, I am always very happy to see new faces. They bring viewpoints and opinions to the table that are sometimes missing, and they often ask questions and provide answers that we may have otherwise overlooked. This argument seems to suggest that valid criticism can only come from within the community itself. Who decides who is in this community? Is there an entrance exam? 

More interesting and perhaps most valid are questions surrounding the worth of experimentation and tinkering. In his presentation, Harris does make repeated mention of both, and I understand that some people may have taken this as an affront. However, in my mind, the point is not that experimentation is worthless - instead there is a simple argument that for tinkering to be worthwhile, it needs to eventually transition into something more meaningful. Certainly Da Vinci was a tinkerer. But neither the Mona Lisa nor The Last Supper were experiments. Experimentation is a necessary part of the creative process - but it is only a part of it.

In case this post has starting to read like a Jonathan Harris booster, let me say that I certainly don’t agree with him on every point. He has a tendency towards utopianism in both his presentations and his work, which I can find a little bit hard to swallow. This outlook is most clear to me in the first two of his ‘questions worth asking’:

1. Can it make someone gasp or cry?
2. Does it feel as special as a love letter?
3. Does it truly represent our time?
4. Will it still feel relevant in 25 years?
5. Does it say something that’s never been said before?
6. Does it compare to the masterpieces of other mediums?
7. Could it have gone further?

• Plumage - http://www.blprnt.com/plumage
• Variance - http://www.blprnt.com/variance
• At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman (1995)
• The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs (1999)
• A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram (2002)
• The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (2004)
• Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky (2008)

As always, I’d love to hear questions and feedback - blprnt@blprnt.com

*actual venue may vary

I’m doing some last-minute preparations before I get on the plane and head towards Brighton, England, for Flash on the Beach, 2008. My presentation is getting a bit of a polish, with a few new things being added and a couple of bad jokes being taken out. I’ll be talking about my Colour Economy project, which, given the current political crisis, seems conveniently relevant. For those of you who have been prescient enough to get tickets to this sold-out event, here are some sessions that I am looking forward to:

Drew Trujillo (Dr. Woohoo)’s Transforming Pixels to Atoms session sounds interesting. It seems like a lot of Flash-types are treading into the fine art territory and it will be interesting to see what the good doctor has to say. 11:30am Monday

Carla Diana will make us all jealous by speaking about robots - and her involvement as the lead industrial designer for S.A.M, an emotionally expressive robot. This will certainly be a nice change from the usual pile of pixels. 11:30 Tuesday

Speaking of piles of pixels, Mario Klingemann’s talk promises to be anything but usual. The session description is a bit mysterious - maybe he’s made a robot too? A pixel robot, perhaps? I know I’ll be there to find out. 2:45 Wednesday

Of course, these three selections represent just a small piece of the available programming - I didn’t even mention Robert Hodgin, James Patterson, or Jonathan Harris. But now I have. If you are going to be in Brighton and want to hook up for a pint, get in touch.