Learning to code creatively…

I am learning many new skills in this Synapse residency. For one, I have started learning creative coding using Matlab, and am loving it! I was interested to learn code can even be used to create poetry! 

In this project though,  I am working with filters that can be applied to images, in order to change an image. My collaborator Ted has been excellent in helping with this, giving me many tutorials and providing code for me to play around with and learn from.

I’m really excited about the possibility for randomness in the final product when generating digital images. Within the code, a colourmap must be generated in order for the colours to be manipulated. However, this colourmap can be ‘seeded’ with a series of random values, generating a random array of colours. I am happy that in a sense, I can keep the messy, lumpy, hypercolour aesthetic I had been developing in my previous work.

Ted and I are now able to take an image from the environment and apply our filters. Currently, we have been using an image of the John Curtin School of Medical Research (the building where we are doing this project) as it contains many different types of visual information. In the test images below, one of the images has been converted to greyscale, while the other two use random values to generate colour. The next step will be to perfect these filters and start using them on sculptures that I have created.

A low pass median filter has been applied here. It retains edges but smoothes patterned regions. The colours have been replaces with a greyscale colour map.
The same median filter has been applied but a randomly generated set of values determines the colours in the colour map.
A different set of random values has been used to create the colour map in this image.
The original test image of the John Curtin School of Medical Research. The resulting test images were re-sized dramatically for faster processing, hence the change in aspect ratio.

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