NO ONE RECEIVING
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We spent a good bit of time after the honeymoon throwing together an “art installation”, or something not unlike that, for a show organized by my friend Ben last Sunday at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick. Becca and I had grandiose plans for the installation to say the least — involving a robotic waveform plotter of which you’ll certainly hear more later — but what transpired ended up being pretty cool. I hooked up my oscilloscope, a Tektronix 2235, to a microphone to listen to the music performed by Jim, Arthur, and Danny from Hexa. The music went into the scope, got picked up by an iSight camera, and pumped through a patch I created with the ever-amazing Pure Data to map it to the ASCII character set. It was then writ large and bright upon the wall by an LCD projector.

This is certainly not the first time someone has converted live video to ASCII art! But the oscilloscope’s beautiful monochromatic green scan lines became very beautiful and hypnotic in the ASCII land. When the scope got tiresome I switched it up to some abstracted live performance video. (unfortunately I didn’t save any of it during the actual show, cause it was cool to see Danny banging on the piano entirely made up of ZC$%#&$)

Becca and I want to hack PiDiP’s pdp_ascii.pd to spit out Postscript files for a single frame of the ascii stream. This would allow one to create an Illustrator file of the stream, hack it up into 8.5″ x 14″ sheets, and print it out gigantic style, which is my dream. I want a wall of this stuff. I’m obsessed with it. I’ll keep you posted!

PS there are more images here.