WebSpaceInvader

During a recent residency at the Kube Gallery in Poole, Dorset I decided to start work on an idea surrounding the computer mediated, representation of self. This piece was the result of the work completed during that residency. It is influenced by our increasingly digital lifestyles of blogs, tweets, text messages and facebook. As so much of our lives appears as pure data, we can build fairly accurate images of people based purely on this information.

This piece of work explores the theme by using a webcam to capture a live video stream and present it as ASCII text and therefore represent our physical appearance as nothing more than textual data. This is the first phase of this project and I have a couple of ideas for taking this further but both are completely different directions!

Click the image above to view the project. You must have a webcam to view this project.

I have recently been working on creating an ambient art work called ‘Tracier’, which was displayed in the Kube Gallery in Poole, Dorset. The live, interactive piece is built using Flash and takes a live video feed from a web cam. This feed is heavily processed inside Flash so that just ‘ghostly’ movement is displayed on a projected screen. Using motion tracking, Flash then takes ‘tracings’ of the image along with sampled colours, these are eroded and displayed resulting in kinetic visuals. The piece was created to add visual interest to any public space not just an Art gallery setting. Click the thumbnail image to view the video of Tracier in Action.

The image below is just a larger image.

I don’t normally post development shots on the site, but thought I’d break the rule with some screenshots from a third person game that I’ve been working on in Unity3D. At present the art is looking fairly accurate but I’m not currently happy with the HUD and this needs more work and refinement. I would appreciate any feedback you want to give me, I can’t say too much about the game just yet except it probably fits into the survival horror genre.

This retro portrait was created for Photoshop Creative magazine. The tutorial focuses on turning the original image into a layer mask then building up paint effects below the mask with oil brushes. A suitable colour scheme was chosen and textured paper to bring a unity to the composition. This is a fun tutorial, that most people could complete and will work great on any portraits you have in your image collection.

Click the image above to view larger.

This tutorial created for Web Designer magazine is a two part tutorial over two issues of the magazine. The tutorial focuses on creating and structuring a web site in Flash, loading each section of the site as required by the user. The site uses a preloader system to allow each section to load before being displayed whilst displaying feedback to the user in a loading bar. The whole site is built using AS3.0 and the stucture is a good template to use for building your own rich interactive sites, though you will obviously want to add your own design.

Click the image above to view the file.

This image was created as a Photoshop tutorial for Photoshop Creative Magazine. The tutorial shows how to turn a subject into smoke by cutting out the model and applying various effects with smoke brushes until the desired look is attained. The image was supplied by the magazine and relies heavily on a number of layer masks and adjustment layers.

Click the image to enlarge.