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Klee Flowers is a series of 140 images made of pictures of paintings by Paul Klee.

I made the images in dbCinema, which is a graphic synthesizer and langu(im)age processor I’m writing in Adobe Director, which is a ‘multimedia authoring’ program sort of like Flash. In dbCinema, one creates ‘brushes’; each brush is assigned a concept–you type the concept–and then dbCinema does a google image search on the concept and retrieves images from the net related to the concept; then dbCinema uses those images as ‘paint’.

Last night I finished adding some more nibs for the Voctor and Vector brushes in dbCinema (and have started to try them out). These brushes use vector images as nibs. A nib functions as a mask for (in this series) the Klee paintings. If you use Photoshop you may be familiar with the idea of a mask: it is a grayscale image that lets other images shine through it (at different levels of opacity, depending on the mask’s shades of gray). The brush also supports dynamic opacity; the opacity of the brush varies over time. Dealing with opacity in this sort of work provides depth and subtlety of shading and detail.

There are more dbCinema image series at dbCinema. That page also links to some writing I’ve done about dbCinema and a video talk I gave in Vancouver about it.

Below also are some (streaming) video tutorials I’ve put together, so far. The app itself is not online, so these video tutorials just give you a sense of its features and how it behaves. These are from oldest to newest, so the interface has changed somewhat from what it looks like in the first few, but not unrecognizably. In any case, you see from these videos how deeply configurable dbCinema is. You can adjust several hundred parameters.  When I make a parameter adjustable, that’s mainly because I hope adjusting it will make a significant difference. But usually I just didn’t know if it would; making a parameter customizable, in this case, is a way to navigate our unknowing in an art space such as this where we don’t know much but enjoy finding out.
 
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/1.htm
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/2.htm
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/3
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/auxtoolbar/auxtoolbar.htm
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/UnderlyingImageAlignment/UnderlyingImageAlignment.html
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/ScreenshotOptions/ScreenshotOptions.html
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/playlists/playlists.html
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/RestoreDefaults/RestoreDefaults.html
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/video/imagetype

Boo (k),
ja

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