Painting via RSS
Former Wired News editor and all-around smart guy Tim Barkow constructed an amazing graphics experiment last year on his site Thinkcorps. The project involved painting via RSS.
Tim deconstructed a photograph of his girlfriend, Patricia, breaking it down into individual pixels. He recorded the RGB value and grid location of every pixel in the image. He then sent out an RSS feed every two hours containing coordinates and RGB values for thirty of the pixels in the photo. The image was slowly drawn at a rate of 360 pixels per day.
One year of RSS feeds later, and we see a complete photograph of two women holding their shoes as they wade in a river. The image has finished building, and you can view the final product alongside the RSS that built it at the project’s site, pkdot.com
Tim’s Painting via RSS experiment is a hack of the VSSTV, or the Very Slow Scan Television. The VSSTV uses a set of red, green, and blue syringes to fill a sheet of bubble wrap with color. Very, very slowly. Now who says there’s nothing good on TV?
