Notre Dame Cathedral b, Kandinsky 3b
I’ve been working on a new Javascript engine for displaying graphics on the net. If you’ve seen any of the dbCinema slideshows, you may recall they didn’t have fade in/out. Well I was finally motivated to create this feature. Not so much for the dbCinema images as for something else which I’ll post when it’s done. But, in any case, the engine works well also with the dbCinema images. The images often have continuity between successive images, so fade in/out helps with the presentation and experience of those images. The transformational dimension, as opposed to the transitional, is more at play.
There are a couple of nice controls. The ‘Speed’ button lets you adjust the duration images are displayed, and also the duration images fade in/out. And you can pause it. And go forward one image or back one image. Or view the thumbnails of the images. You can also read about the images.
From Kandinsky3b
The text in the Kandinsky images is a quotation from Kandinsky’s 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He had some interesting ideas about art. About colour and forms. And their relations. He was involved in Theosophy, a kind of (Platonistic, concerning forms) spirituality in which art was important. I expect it was a matter of the ideas of Theosophy more or less dovetailing with his views. In any case, Kandinsky’s philosophy of art is resonant today for algorithmic artists. Because he looks at basic shapes and their “spiritual values”. Like triangles, circles, lines, and so forth. And of course his art highlights his concern with basic shapes and with colours. And algorithmic artists of course have frequent occassion to deal with basic shapes because those are the shapes visual computer art is made out of also.
Additionally, he was very involved in a kind of synthesis of arts. He sort of took his cue from music, and wrote about this. If you look at his work, you see that although it is abstract, there’s something going on with ideas of harmony and composition. It’s a kind of musical approach to colour and form. He was interested in how different shapes and colours make us feel, and drew on musical analogies rather a lot.
From Notre Dame Cathedral b
The Notre Dame Cathedral b series also has a spiritual dimension. It is a new sort of collaging of pictures of one of the great cathedrals of the world to create a different view and something that hopefully shows appreciation of that beauty while being something different from it.
dbCinema can do interesting sorts of collages with various types of pictures, but architectural pictures perhaps especially. Partly because it is working with basic shapes and collaging them in unusual ways synthetic of new imaginary architectures.
In any case, I think the new Javascript engine with fade in/out provides a better experience of these images. Most of the images, by the way, are 1280 x 1024, so make yer browser big.
I’ve started to use Firebug, which is a Javascript debugger for Firefox. And the debugger Microsoft made for Internet Explorer. Wow do those ever help with the creation of Javascript projects. Previously, I’d just used my poor old noodle and a lot of alert statements. Which is very slow. These debuggers made the above projects a lot less painful.
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4 Responses to “Notre Dame Cathedral b, Kandinsky 3b”.
This is beautiful. I hate to linger on a particular aspect…. but the fade in/out with these particular images works so well. That transition really adds depth to the works…. which is interesting because my first impulse is to think of depth strictly in spatial terms. Yet, if I were to approach these images, say, in the space of a gallery… I would need time to experience the depth.
I imagine most people working with web art at some point or another have to deal with depth on the flat screen. And, usually, I find attempts at depth to be something that requires a “willing suspensions of disbelief” on my part. Or, the work has an exaggerated sense of movement into the piece.
But I am very impressed with this experience you’ve given me on a Friday afternoon, after my students have gone home, and I, myself, was planning to leave. AND, not to sound hoity-toity, but you do no injustice to Kandinsky’s work (which is always a risk when working with a well-conceived, well-executed, and well-loved body of work).
I think the spatial depth isn’t so much a matter of the fading as the shading in the individual images, Davin. But the shading also is a matter of opacity. In dbCinema, a ‘brush’ is usually a mask (in the Photoshop sense): it’s a grayscale image that lets other images show through the mask, and the grayscale of the mask establishes alpha levels, or levels of opacity, in the images seen through the mask. It turns out that when a dbCinema brush has, at different points along the brush, different opacity levels, what it ‘paints’, as the brush moves along the screen, can appear to be textured and spatialized.
Also, the Kandinsky images were the first ones I made in dbCinema using the ‘Flash brush’ feature. Whereby one may import any Flash SWF and use it as a brush. The SWF, each frame, is turned into a grayscale bitmap image and used as a mask for the Kandinsky images. The nice thing about SWF is that, unlike the other dbCinema brushes (which also are vector images), they can change shape from frame to frame, and this also helps create texture and spatialization as the brush moves across the screen.
The fading provides continuous transition. The individual images are screenshots taken at various time intervals–they are already linked in a progression; the fading highlights and summarizes that progression.
I think fade in/out, even if the images weren’t involved in a real transformation or progression, suggests transformation. For instance, if we see pictures of a person fade in/out, the suggestion is there of transformation of the person between successive photos. More than it would be if there was no animated transition between the photos. That is part of the ‘meaning’ of animated transitions between stills. For there is more emphasis on ‘becoming’ rather than simply on ‘being’.
Thanks for checking them out, Davin.
Jim–
I sincerely hope that you are printing out these images (48″ X ??, and framed) and showing them for sale in solo shows at galleries. With their beautiful imagery, and extremely cool back-story, they would be winners, at least, that’s my guess.
Am I wrong on this?
Thanks, Alan.
I haven’t printed any of them, actually, haven’t made a dime on the project, and have had no shows of dbCinema.
I’ve been developing the app, the art, and the site for the app and the art, though.
Currently the app itself is quite advanced, there’s a shockwave version and a desktop version of dbCinema itself (which is much more featureful than the Shockwave version), 24 art series of images developed with dbCinema, a pretty good Javascript slideshow app (which I’m still writing) for those images, lots of video tutorials on how to use the desktop version, and a bit of writing about the project.
I’m hoping to get the dbCinema app itself to the stage this year where I can sell copies of that software package online.
And I can certainly see quite an extensive gallery show on dbCinema. There are those 24 image series that could be shown on different monitors. And pieces like London Hypotrochoid, which is nicely interactive. And the dbCinema app itself…
It’s quite a big project. And it’s what I’ve been doing full time. So it’s kind of a do or die thing for me.
The art part is coming along like gangbusters. I hope I can make the rest of it happen.
Thanks for your interest, Alan.
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