[NetBehaviour] dbCinema series: Kandinsky2

[Jim Andrews]

Kandinsky2
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/kandinsky2

i noticed that interesting things were happening when the brush was
tangential to the curve it followed. so i made a new type of brush that is
always tangential to the curve it follows. or, actually, more accurately,
the brush is always a configurable, constant x degrees from the tangent
angle. when the brush is painting text, it's good to have it 90 degrees to
the tangent, as is the case in some of these.

this image set introduces the text brush. you paste in a text
and the brush uses one word after another as a nib. you set the font of
the text, its size, how long it uses a word before moving on to the next
word, and other parameters.

as is the case with several of the dbCinema series i've made, this one uses
images from a google image search of "Kandinsky". i like his work a lot. and
it's well-suited to this sort of digital work. kandinsky saw his approach to
painting as drawing on principles of music. such as harmony. he talks about
this in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5321 ).

coincidentally, when i visited london last year, i visited the science
museum and happened upon the harmonograph (
http://images.google.ca/images?q=harmonograph ). and the little book sold in
the science museum bookstore about the harmonograph by anthony ashton.
subtitled 'A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music'. what a beautiful
little book.

apparently all the curves producable by the harmonograph are Lissajous
curves. I eventually added the lissajous curves to dbCinema as a
configurable geometry.

dbCinema was originally meant to supply the visuals for the interactive
audio work i do. but it's turned into its own thing, really.

kandinsky's writings about harmony and the visual don't have anything 
obviously to do with lissajous curves.

the basic idea here is that we have a brush moving around the screen 
sampling/painting from pictures of kandinsky paintings. the brush moves 
along sinuous trigonometric functions.

there's a theorem in math that says that any curve that can be drawn can be 
represented as a linear combination of trig functions. they can be like 
scrawls or very orderly.

music involves waves of sound. trig functions involve representations of 
waves, either sonic waves or visual waves or whatever waves.

curves and waves, musical motion, visual motion, narrative motion, emotion, 
change, beauty, harmony, dissonance, pattern over time.

Kandinsky2
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/kandinsky2