I like tinkering with Flash in my spare time, and have amassed a small collection of what I call "experiments." Many of the original projects started as a means for me to learn about code/Flash, and as I became more familiar with the application... I started making more and more experiments.

These were all amazingly fun to work on, and fun to obsess over while I was working on them. I hope they provide some small bit of entertainment. Enjoy!

Launch → COLOURFUL ECHO: MUSIC VISUALIZER DISPLAYING DATA AND COLORS BEHIND YOUR MP3'S After happening across the Echo Nest API, I got inspired to play around with audio and Flash. I wanted to create a Flash app that allowed users to upload their own music, and in turn create their own visualizations. I had a lot of difficulty working with Amazon's Simple Storage Service, and learned a great deal along the way. In terms of projects to date, I've probably learned the most working on the backend portion of Colourful Echo. There's a fair amount of customization available here. In addition to being able to upload your own mp3, you can also set the color of the visualization (the project also hooks in to the ColourLovers API). To get more tech-related details for this project, check out the original post here.

Launch → FLICKR TWITTER THINKER Designed with the intention of easy user-interaction, FlickrTwitterThinker is a kind of mash-up project that combines both Flickr and Twitter. When browsing, users can type in keywords to search through recent Twitter comments (happy, sad, excited, wondering, etc). These comments are then positioned in a thought bubble, alongside Flickr images. Open to anyone who wants to participate, this project pulls in photos from Flickr that have a specific tag associated with them: either FlickrTwitterThinkerLeft or FlickrTwitterThinkerRight (to determine where the thought bubbles appear). By adding a simple tag, users can have their own photos appear in the project automatically. Read more info on the project, or see it in action.

Launch → FIRST SNOW: A FLICKR-GENERATED POEM Another Flickr-based project, First Snow is based on a poem I wrote in 2004, First Snow visualizes the text through a combination of audio, music, and images drawn randomly/dynamically from Flickr. Launched in December of 2007, my original impulse was to have the project "track" the progression of winter. As more people uploaded photographs of winter and snowfall, my goal was to have the project keep pace, to update itself as often as others updated Flickr. As new images became available, new views of the poem/project would also become available. All images used in this project are shared via a Creative Commons Atribution Non-Commercial license. In that same spirit, I've also released the poem under the same license. More information and background on the project is available here.

Launch → ASTRONAUT: A FLICKR-GENERATED PROJECT While exploring the Flickr API, I got the idea to animate a song using the lyrics as keywords. At the time, I was listening obsessively to a song by my friend Dan Frick, entitled "Astronaut." Featuring the full song and 50+ images pulled from Flickr, this project is a sort of online music video (that changes with each viewing). To date, this project has gotten a fair amount of press, and is arguably one of the more successful things I've made. More background information about the project is available here.

Launch → ROUND This project is a visualization of a round (a song in multiple parts, sung at staggered intervals). I recorded myself singing all four parts, and used Flash to time out the audio overlays. The song, entitled "Zing Dem Hern," is a round I learned while in choir in high school. Since that time, the song's stuck with me. When making this project, and even now... I know all the words and notes, from memory.

Launch → YOU ARE I AM A collaborative project between me and the folks at You Are Beautiful, the You Are I Am project is an exploration of repetition and variation. Participants were given a sticker labeled "I Am," followed by a blank. After filling out their phrase, each person was then photographed. It was often surprising how much you could tell about the person... based on how they described themselves.

Launch → ONE FICTION A visualization of a poem I wrote, One Fiction attempts to combine the old and new. While the look and feel of the piece resembles 1980's era technology, the subjects referenced are even older. Using a new technology to talk about ancient stories appealed to me, a great deal. Bonus points to anyone who can name the poetic form used.

Launch → GOULD At an early stage of learning Flash, I discovered that audio could be "synched" to the animations on the main timeline. Gould was one of my first attempts to play with this exact timing. The left and right sides represent the left and right hands, with each bar representing a note. While not immediately apparent, each lit bar corresponds exactly to a note as played in the piece. Interesting sidenote: I got so excited working on this project, I actually called in sick to work to finish it.

Launch → 3 YEARS 3 MINUTES After seeing iPhoto and Picasa process my photographs, I got the notion to display all of my images in a Flash - one after another, in a blurred sequence. Spanning 3 years and set to music, this QuickTime movie displays nearly 12,000 photographs in 3 minutes. The artist in me says this project was inspired by how fleeting and temporal our memories are; the nerd in me says this project was inspired by Flash Gordan, and the scene where Dr. Hans Zarkov gets his mind probed.

Launch → EVOLVING GENESIS An early exercise in learning about strings and string manipulation, Evolving Genesis is an exploration in randomness. At set intervals, a string of text is generated and attempts to recreate the first line of Genesis. Inspired by Joe Davis' "Self-Assembling Clock," I found myself questioning the boundaries between what is considered "impossible," "improbable," and "miraculous."

Launch → HEAD IN HANDS I tend to get fixated on particular songs, and end up looping them incessantly. Head in Hands, a song sung by my friend Kevin Seal, is definitely one of those songs. Playing again with synching audio and visuals, I attempted to animate the text/lyrics of the song. This was my first (ad only) attempt at anything involving typography, so stand warned.

Launch → VIRUS A "found poem" comprised of virus names, this animation presents the poems as a long narrative sequence. I created this in my early days of working with Flash, and was on a kick where I liked having a computerized voice "read" the poem to the user. "Found poems" are fun to me because they highlight the potential for almost any text to contain poetry - lists, in particular.

Launch → PI10K One of my first ever experiments, pi10k combines audio and mathematics, giving sound to that most irrational of numbers: Pi. By assigning each numeral (1, 2, 3) an equivalent note (A, B, C), this project "plays" back pi through your speakers. Users can choose from pre-defined scales, or create their own custom note-to-number mapping. This experiment has made its way around the web for a while now, and tends to get a lot of attention around March 14th (3/14, otherwise known as Pi Day).