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Video: Winterforms (2006)

Posted Tue, November 6, 2007, 5:45pm EST

Winterforms (2006) from Josh Knowles on Vimeo

I have a collection of videos I’ve made for various reasons over the years which have been languishing on my laptop’s hard drive for too long. So. They’re going online. I’ve never used a video sharing site to host my own videos. I don’t use image sharing sites (like Flickr) to host my images because, well, they’re my images. And I can put them online just fine, thank you. It’s not complicated to share a .jpg. Video, though, is a bit different. It’s not as trivial a process to share a video as you would an image. Too many codecs to worry about and, I, at least, have to fight the desire to encode everything into gigantic files no one would ever download. Blah.

I poked around a few video sharing sites. YouTube is horrible — the MySpace of these sorts of sites. Ugly. Crap community. Vimeo I kind of liked, though. It’s simple. Not too many frills. But it appears to work with the least amount of hassle. And that’s what I want: The least amount of hassle. And a bit of good interface design. My criteria. (They also support full HD, to note.) So I’ve posted a few videos there, and I’ll embed some here on occasion, as well.

So, this video. This is my final project for two classes at NYU’s ITP, Dan Shiffman’s Nature of Code and Luke DuBois’ Algorithmic Composition. Fall 2006. They both dealt with the same sorts of concepts centering on the algorithmic creation of art. Nature of Code tended to be more visual-conceptual. Algorithmic Comp was about music. Both great classes, by the way.

The visuals are forms created using math that models the natural development of plants. Phyllotaxis. L-systems. And such. (Much good info came from Algorithmic Botany.) The audio is based on temperature data during the winter of 2005. You’ll hear it slowly cascade downward and get darker in the middle and then brighten at the end as the temperatures rose and fell.

So that’s it. Enjoy!