This is a rough demo of a new iPhone music app that I plan to release in a few weeks. It’s a sort of musical instrument/meditation tool/artwork. The patterns are made from images of spinning quilts and rugs, and the audio is shifting loops of contemporary Christian music played backwards. The final version will have more advanced sound control and several modes with different samples, spin patterns, and sound options. I will probably also be porting it to Android.

I’m going to start posting mixtapes once in a while, here’s the first one:
http://qotile.net/blog/images/qotile.net_mixtape1.mp3

tracklist:
1 Ban the Game by Men Without Hats
2 Hot Chocolate Boy by Beat Happening
3 Every Night I Die at Miyagis by Ariel Pink
4 Animal Kingdom by Meat Puppets
5 Negro Observer by Butthole Surfers
6 Frenzied, Handsome, Hello! by Deerhoof
7 Telerad by Gay Against You
8 Holland, Say Hello by The Year Zero
9 Time Catharsia Mx by Pluramon feat. Julee Cruise
10 Just Like Honey by The Jesus and Mary Chain (remastered a little)

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[NSFW] I love these mix mp3s from my friend Jeremy. If I took the time to keep up with music and make mix mp3s, mine would probably be very similar but not as good.

I wrote a script that takes the lifetime of the cellular automaton Conway’s Game of Life and extrudes it into a three dimensional object. The script is written in Python and runs within the Golly cellular automata simulator. Time is equated to the Z-axis, and every live cell/pixel is converted to a cube, output as raw vertices in a text file that can be opened in Blender, an open source 3D graphics program. Because the script inefficiently renders every individual cube into a text file, I’m currently unable to render objects that are much larger or more complex than the images below. Optimizations to the script like combining faces, eliminating hidden faces, and switching to a binary vector file format should eventually reduce this problem.

Download the script here.

To use the script, you’ll need Python, Golly, and Blender. Run Golly, load or draw your starting pattern, then choose Run Script in the File menu and find my script. Enter the number of layers to render; initially try around 10 for large patterns, 100 for small patterns. The script will create a file called 3dlife.raw which you can import into Blender with File->Import->Raw Faces. On my computer, Blender will struggle or crash if the raw file is much more than 150MB.

examples rendered with LuxRender:

“The greatest war the world has ever seen is about to commence. It’s so great that even the Swiss are getting involved this time! This is a beat-’em-up based on the British TV show of the same name, which lets you match six of the world’s leaders against each other - Maggie Thatcher, Ronnie Reagan, Michael Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, Ayatollah Khomeini, and P. W. Botha. Of course, each of them has their own ways of fighting. You select an opponent and a champion, with you playing the opponent, and if you defeat the champion three times, it’s on to another one….”

Niels van Dijkhuizen made a MIDI interface for the Cynthcart that does it all through simulating keypresses and paddle movement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL2oBjugmx0

Awesome DIY article about FPS and human eye perception.

I’m in a show opening Saturday, September 5th, 5:30PM - 7:30PM at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary. The show is curated by James Cope and also includes work by Brian Fridge, Amy Revier, and Edward Setina. I’ll be showing three new prints and a print/video combo.

This book looks good.