After too many hours of messing about and getting nowhere very fast I took the decision to limit myself to the 256 values and to work with that. It means I’ve had to seriously reduce the pixle dimensions of the images within the max patch which pretty much rules out any ideas of conveying the romantic style I’d been hoping to work with. Now what I end up with look more like abstract versions of those invader mosaics you see on buildings around the world these days.
No matter, it just gives me several other avenues of cultural resonance I can work with. The space invader thing for a start, the problems inherent in broadcasting meaningful image data to the future etc, the compression of data for transmission etc etc, the modern pixel/icon representation of landscape etc etc etc.
So here’s the new patch:
I added a mechanism by which the image could be converted to audio with the 1s generated a click/pulse and the zeros nothing. A tone playes for the whole length of the image audio to demonstrate where the code begins and ends.
click here for audio because I haven’t worked out how to embed it yet….
I like the sound that is coming off this thing and would like to do something with it. Maybe I’ll build a sonic attack mode for the artist version ‘forget real science’ fermenter I’m planning to build and see what effect it has on the culture of bacteria, algae and nematodes.