Assignment
Write a program defining a system which generates near infinite variations on a core form. This exercise flows from the ideas presented in Karl Gerstner's Designing Programmes. Focus on a strong Macro composition with details at the micro level. Present nine forms showing the range of your completed system.
Concept
The idea was to take a system that already contains a lot of detail and put it through a computer vision process to create a artistic composition.
The input is screenshots from Google maps satellite imagery, which have an immense amount of detail. Choosing coastlines and different levels of zoom create the macro composition.
The process involves finding areas of different colors and creating abstracted shapes using the JMyron/WebCamXtra plugin for Processing. The user controls the different thresholds for color detection with the mouse and selects seven layers of shapes. The layers are imported into Adobe Illustrator, where artifacts are removed and shapes are filled (since there was an error in Processing when filling polygons this way).
Results
The results are a bit hit-or-miss since the system is quite simple. The computer vision create many artifacts, such as straights lines across the whole image, which distract from the interesting details. It would be nice to take even larger screenshots, and have the screenshot loading be dynamic.