Abstract no. 1

I started an experiment this summer that resulted in some imagery I'm quite satisfied with.

My fiancée and I travelled to Berlin this summer and met a nice couple outside a beer booth in Tiergarten. He started talking to us since he'd gotten his thumb smashed while leaning on the beer booth too close to the door, and we discovered some common interests.

One of them was digital art, since I mentioned I am a software developer, and they mentioned they worked with film, interactive art and scenery. They recommended I check out this interactive art programming environment vvvv.

A couple weeks after coming home, still on vacation, I remembered this conversation and went to check out vvvv. In short, it provides an interface for channelling various types of input through various filters and operations and producing imagery, sound and other creative output. It looked fun, but was mostly about dragging boxes around, which is not really to my taste.

However, I was inspired so I looked for alternatives more suited for a programmer. This is when I discovered Processing.

Processing is basically an environment for programming Java with primarily graphical output in mind. It's very simple to get started, as it abstracts away most of the low level stuff related to putting images on screen. This makes it easier to focus on the creative side.

I watched a video on YouTube of Casey Reas, one of the people behind Processing, where he describes how he uses Processing to create art by defining some rules and behaviours, injects some randomness and rendering to screen in an additive way.

This was all I needed to get started.

I quickly found my own set of basic rules to get the imagery going, particles spawned randomly, rendering lines, circles and Bezier curves in between them as they moved around.

I excitedly posted a few shots on Facebook and got a good response back from family and friends. This inspired me to keep refining the process, gaining both more options and more control. I also figured out how to render at high resolutions so the imagery could be used for something more if I wanted.

Now, a few weeks later, I have opened my own web shop where I sell these images in print. It's for Norway only, for now, but some of the many images I've produced can be seen there.

I've decided to sell Giclée prints and glossy photo posters to start with, but I'll accept pretty much any type of order for printed media if contacted.

I envision this type of imagery could be very well suited for office spaces, stands, displays, as well as in the home, when properly mounted or framed.

It will be exciting going forward with this.