My brother just forwarded this cool post about the aesthetics of 'digital decay' to me. If anyone comes across this here entry, click on through to that link because it's really neat. And I'm in it, too, somehow!

Anyhow, I've been messing around in Quartz Composer again recently and just figured out how powerful the Queue and Iterator patches are—and finally knowing how to use them has opened up what I can do with it considerably.

Slitscanning isn't novel by any means, but it's still an amazing thing to behold, and I was reminded of it yet again recently by Keith Schofield's latest video for MIMS (he's used it to great effect before)

With these things said, I present my latest personal project to you: QC split scannin'

Somewhere in alpha or beta, maybe gamma or whatever
download it here through mediafire!

It requires the following things: a mac, an isight, and os 10.4 or above. The split-scanning can be adjusted in resolution if your computer has trouble keeping up with it or if your computer is so incredibly beefy you could run it at full resolution (640 x 480 for the camera, 640+ splitting lines)

As a live-camera toy, it's just sort of fun to play around with:

The qtz file I have can be hooked up to other sources, like movie files or what have you, and it becomes a tool for analysis.

Aside from rendering even the quickest action in Bill-Viola-like stately fluidity, it presents the movie as a scrolling timeline, revealing pans, cuts, the motions of the characters, the changing of light and shadow. Technically, it's a series of 1-dimensional images (more conventional slit scanning keeps the "scanned" row static—this moves it down a unit each frame, presenting the illusion of a complete image being shown)—but with the sacrifice of detail in an individual frame, you're allowed to see the change of the film over time.

If you look in the flong.com link above, there are myriad ways to implement this technique—I'd like to integrate a few into my project (Keeping the Khronos project in mind, especially). I'm really interested in what Quartz Composer can do (as long as I'm putting off learning Processing, ha ha)

Also, I have this half-finished video synth implementation that would work gggrrreeeattt with this (the main problem I was having completing it was that grabbing input from video means dealing with the herky-jerky-ness of video grain and motion—not that it's a bad thing, just not the aesthetic I was looking for )