Passage

Passage one of the works of art that I have found most affecting. It is also a computer game. I don't want to say much about it, so just try it. It's free.

Braid

I got to try Braid yesterday. Braid is an artsy, critically acclaimed game that has made a lot of best-of lists.

Mostly, it deserves the hype. As a game, I don't have much criticism. It's a fun and original puzzle game. As art, I think some of the text isn't at the same level as the visual art.

It's not a game to miss, though. So try out the free demo.


Braid trailer from David Hellman on Vimeo.

My favorite image from the series I mentioned Wednesday.

Dyson

Dyson is an extremely beautiful game. It's also fun for a few hours. Experienced games will probably get bored after a day or two, but it's still in active development, and it's free. The music is great too.

Download it here.

Art

I made this image the old-fashioned way: by hand on a Nokia 700 internet tablet. I made a long series of similar images. I wanted it to communicate some very specific concepts to the viewer, and I was once very coy about explaining those concepts.

At this point, I think the ability of art to convey abstract concepts is very limited relative to language, so I'll just explain it. If you want to view the series as originally conceived, with limited explanation, you can see it here.


I wanted to make art using as few of the elements of visual art as possible. To that end, the only artistic decision in these pieces is whether a pixel will be black or white. The lines and shapes of the piece are a question of scale, just the aggregate of very small decisions. With that limitation, I tried to make art that reflected the shapes of light and dark that you see in the natural world. Not the light itself, just the shape of light and dark. I also wanted the image to attract the eye, but not to any specific area of the image, so that the eye would tend to wander over the image.


The Nokia tablet images were only black and white, so the lines looked a bit jagged. I took those bitmaps and traced them in Inscape to smooth the lines. Technically, this goes against the concept, since the lines are smoothed by adding grays between white and black. The eye still percieves it as black and white, though, so I decided it wasn't cheating. Below is the original image for comparison.

Variations on Variants

I first saw Josef Albers' work and the Portland Art Museum. They had a series of variants that I found quite attractive, all with a similar set of rectangles in different colors. When I got home, I found that Albers had created a lot of these variants. You can see a few here. It seemed to me that he was experimenting with the interactions between the different colors, while keeping the shapes constant.

I thought that would be interesting to create color variations pragmatically, so I described the rectangles of the variant as HTML blocks - the same blocks that separate columns of text on a web page.

The original image was something like this, but with different colors:


The HTML block version turned out like this:

What you're seeing is actually this text.

<div style='width:480px;height:480px;background-color:#f1f1f1;position:relative;'>
<div style='width:83%;height:60%;background-color:#3f6093;position:absolute;left:8.5%;top:19.1%;'></div>
<div style='width:398px;height:87px;background-color:#3f4e87;position:absolute;left:41px;top:105px;'></div>

<div style='width:287px;height:49px;position:absolute;left:91px;top:143px;background-color:#333e40;'></div>
<div style='width:287px;height:25px;position:absolute;left:91px;top:167px;background-color:#25312d;'></div>
<div style='width:250px;height:12px;position:absolute;left:115px;top:180px;background-color:#354447;'></div>
<div style='width:287px;height:150px;position:absolute;left:91px;top:192px;background-color:#333e40;'></div>
<div style='width:250px;height:113px;position:absolute;left:115px;top:192px;background-color:#435152;'></div>
<div style='width:212px;height:174px;position:absolute;left:128px;top:206px;background-color:#3f4e87;'></div>
<div style='width:212px;height:136px;position:absolute;left:128px;top:206px;background-color:#25312d;'></div>
<div style='width:212px;height:99px;position:absolute;left:128px;top:206px;background-color:#354447;'></div>
<div style='width:25px;height:50px;position:absolute;left:302px;top:230px;background-color:#25312d;'></div>

<div style='width:25px;height:50px;position:absolute;left:152px;top:230px;background-color:#25312d;'></div>
<div style='width:99px;height:73px;position:absolute;left:190px;top:206px;background-color:#435152;'></div>
</div>


Your web browser takes these instructions and draws boxes of the specified colors.

After I defined the size and location of the rectangles, I wrote a php script (a computer program often used to create web pages) that selects four random colors and fills in the rectangles. The image you see below is the defined rectangles filled with four random colors and their combinations.

You can create your own variations here, just click on new colors.

First!

I plan to blog here about my art and technology projects. In part for self-promotion, it part to provide useful information and appealing art.