Response to Jim Campbell piece, and other assignment

I looked at Jim Campbell's piece "Low Resolution Works: Self Portrait of Paul DeMarinis". In this work, a greyscale image of DeMarinis that is stored in computer memory is converted to sound, with each pixel being mapped to a pitch according to its brightness (darker is lower, lighter is higher). A speaker emits the tones, and a microphone detects them and reconverts them to pixel brightness values, and displays them on an array of LED's, with each of the 192 LED's corresponding to a pixel. Extraneous noise can also be picked up by the microphone, distorting the image. The subject of the portrait, Paul DeMarinis, is an artist specializing in sound, performance, and computer art.

I do enjoy this piece, although I would make a few tweaks if it were mine (discussed in the next paragraph). It makes me think of the inherent distortion of information as it is transmitted between people, converted between media, compressed and re-compressed, etc.

If it were up to me, I would make the LED grid of a much higher resolution, using many more LED's. I think a higher resolution would more easily show the distortion made by extraneous noise; as the piece is now, it is too low-res to tell. I would also make the tones flow into each other, rather than having a staccato gap between each, but that is just my aesthetic preference. I would also install the piece in a place that will have more noise in it than shown in the video on Campbell's website; there is hardly any extra noise. Finally, I think it would be much more engaging if it would involve the viewers more. I would have a camera set up so that gallery visitors could have a snapshot taken of themselves, which would then be used instead of DeMarinis's portrait. This would engage viewers, encourage talking between the viewers (therefore encouraging noise distortion), and cause each iteration to be different, and the viewers would be able to easily see the distortion (especially if a higher-res display is used).




Please research and answer. In project 19, you created arrays that used 0s and 1s. In project, 20, you created arrays that used decimal numbers. Please explain why decimal numbers were used in project 20.

In project 19, you only need to code for one frame (which is easily inverted). It is easy to visually represent the "on" and "off" LED's with 1's and 0's, respectively, and that way you can see the image just by looking at the code. It makes the code long and bulky, but since you are only coding one frame, it is not unmanageable. In project 20 you are coding eight frames, so showing eight cells per line, eight lines per frame, and eight total frames would be ridiculous. To save space you make a 2D array, with each row representing a frame. Each element in a row is a decimal number that, when converted to binary, is the representation of "on" and "off" LED's. For example, the top line of the first frame is all off, or 00000000, so it is just 0. If the second row of the first frame is 00100100, it is converted to decimal and represented as 36. This way, the code is much more streamlined. Project 19 could have coded it this way, but I think the book wanted us to understand how sprites work.