1. “I think there’s way in which the kind of primitive digital aesthetics…

    “I think there’s way in which the kind of primitive digital aesthetics…: “

    ‘I think there’s way in which the kind of primitive digital aesthetics I’m referencing suggest a romance around ideas of infinity, progression, and the future. I think that romance can engage a sort of sublime in lieu of the immensity of nature that we historically associate with landscapes.’

    Michael Bell Smith

    “

    (Via Random Access Memory.)

    January 26, 2008
    Category: electronic culture
    Tags: , , , ,
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  2. Satellite films

    Satellite films

    I started off by being totally blown away by maps.google.com. I wanted to make a “satellite film” travelling over endless landsacpes, a flight for hours over different kind of landscapes, zooming out and diving back in stopping and observing and then flying off again.
    Obviously this wasn’t really possible, but I wanted at least have small snapshots of landscapes like big ciies with skyscrapers and suburbs. So i found this terraserver from microsoft and noticed how easily it was possible to grab tiled images at different resolution levels. This is the curl one-liner i came up with:

    curl “http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
    tile.ashx?t=4&s=8&x=[7730-7830]&y=[756
    23-75628]&z=11″ -o “x=#1_y=#2.jpg”

    So i runned this script over various locations of the US, just trying to have a reasonable big radius so hopefully i would capture some inteesting structures. Was a beautiful feeling to just let it run off and download 1000 of pics from a satellite somewhere over LA.
    After that i used processing to compose big tif files out of the single tiles. I ended up with 2-3gb tiff files, at one point reaching a pixel limit when trying to open them in Photoshop.
    Eventually i managed to load them into 3d and make some flyovers.
    Ideally they would be endless, or even in realtime, zooming in out flying along some shoreline take a turn left look at some almost isometric skyscrapers….

    TT // 2006

    (Via Thomas feeding your Traum.)

    [tags]satellite, movie, map, geography[/tags]

    May 08, 2006
    Category: graphic design
    Tags: , , , ,
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