Still, the non-commissioned (and sometimes even completely spontaneous) images I have been able to produce with the Transformer Prime are very unlike any others I have created in years. And the portability of the tablet device (so much greater than even my smallest “netbook”) leads me to carry it with me, rather like the electronic equivalent of a sketchbook.

Actually, I have two of these devices…but one is for experimentation, which means it is usually running – or rather not running – a nearly completely unusable version of the Honeycomb or Cyanogen(Mod) versions of the Android OS.

The advantages and limitations of hacked hardware aside, my interest in this tablet has recently turned to the creative possibilities it opens up. I’ve painstakingly assembled a relatively reliable set of interesting drawing/image editing apps, an adequate CAD program, and even a resolutely-primitive 3D application. Most of these things are free, or cost less than a latte at my favorite coffee shop.

The interesting thing about art and design created on this platform is how different it is from what I normally make as an architect or artist, either on a PC or by hand. I’ve been trying to treat the limitations of dodgy software, a 7-inch touch-screen, and an under-powered processor as a set of opportunities for working differently (as opposed to restrictions). There is no precision possible under the circumstances…in many respects, these images are tantamount to digital finger-paintings.

The medium lends itself to iteration: these images and variations on them may be found in this web album.

On something of a whim, after I finished teaching my final course for the semester this week, I purchased a Microsoft Kinect “game controller.”

I am not someone who plays computer games, and I do not own a Microsoft XBox gaming console. But after becoming peripherally aware of some experiments in motion capture and computer interface control that made use of the Kinect, I decided to see if I could come up with a “Lewis use” for one of these things…a “Lewis use” being one that lends itself to the production of imaginary large-scale potentially-inhabitable abstract sculptures some people consider architecture (I certainly don’t fool myself).

And Kinects were on sale, and I had some store credits…if I must further justify this minor extravagance.

3D scanners were astronomically expensive when I used one while in architecture school, less than a decade ago…the price of this little piece of gaming hardware barely ran into three digits, once I applied my discounts.

It turned out to be a trivial “technical” task, compared to others I have undertaken, to “hook up” this toy to my office computer and find some opensource drivers and other software that would allow me to make something of the information it captures. Someone else has already done all of the heavy lifting, and I am not sure if there is any place here where I need to apply my pathetic computer coding skills.

Of course, the first subject for my 3D-scanning experimentation was myself.

These remind me of the illustrations used for science-fiction paperback covers in the 1970′s.  And I do see a great deal of Lewis-use potential here!

For the interested, the best description of the process of attaching a Kinect to a Windows PC that I have discovered is here (see the sidebar link for “Installation instructions”), and the same gentleman, Japser Brekelmans, also provides freely a quite capable piece of software called Brekel Kinect (see the sidebar link for “Download”) that seems to meet my initial needs as I investigate the capabilities of this re-purposed trinket. Mr. Brekelmans’ software is aimed at “motion capture” for the film, television, and gaming development, but it does a fine job converting the Kinect’s data stream into three-dimensional models that will presumably work with my architectural applications.

The self-portrait images above are renderings from a three-dimensional model exported as an OBJ file from Brekel Kinect; cleaned, corrected, and simplified (slightly, using quadric edge decimation collapse) with the open-source application Meshlab;

and then imported into Google SketchUp. Brekel Kinect also outputs a pair of image files with the model:

I used the RGB output to texture two “of myself” in  the quadruple-self portrait above (notice the elf peeking over my shoulder!). I can see the depth image type of output being useful for architectural illustration development.

Interestingly enough, SketchUp (unlike Rhino or Blender, the other applications I tested with the Kinect-output) had the most problems with the Brekel Kinect model, as it is imports only obsolete and limited model file formats (3DS) or completely unreliable ones (DAE) …this flaw may in the end be what drives me to move to other modeling applications, for future “Lewis use.” The original model required fairly extreme “tweaking” in MeshLab before I could import it into SketchUp successfully, but opened right away with the other titles.

The finished images above are of course output from SketchUp that were masked, layered, and otherwise manipulated with Adobe Photoshop, per my usual process described in previous posts.

Of course, the preceding statement reads as ridiculously, perversely conservative, and I like to imagine myself as consciously progressive. I am aware of the possibility that I am reacting to this sort of work in a solely reactionary manner, and therefore (and admittedly with a kind of unenthusiastic doggedness) I follow the work of several artists and architects who have developed an enviable reputation as designers, largely through their adroit manipulation of scripting languages, software, and related technology.

And sometimes still I even try my hand (so to speak) at this sort of thing.

I seem to spend a remarkable mount of time rediscovering my own misplaced work. That’s the subject of this post: some imagery I created in 2009 with some free software that I do not pretend to understand (and which no longer seems functional, after a couple of years of hardware and software updates). As far as I can remember, I changed settings; put some numbers in; hit buttons that read, “Render”; and saved the results. These were sorted and later digitally collaged, as my conscious (and probably unconscious) impulses dictated, and finally given ominous Post-Lovecraftean names.

Except for the technology, the process reminds me of a game I used to play as an insomiac child while lying in bed and wondering if I would ever sleep again: I would stair at the knots and whirls of the wood paneling of my bedroom walls until, in the dimness of the night-light, they took on the outlines of faces or strange animals. As an adult and an art student, I discovered that the celebrated Surrealist artist Max Ernst would play a more elaborated form of the same game, rubbing paper placed on rough planks or other surfaces with graphite or other media and developing his compositions from the forms he half-recognized in the results.

I wonder if this form of editing is more common in the work of generative designers than is generally acknowledged? Could it be that, as opposed to the beautiful manisfestation of an inhuman precision, much generative art is (under the pixels or the voxels) in fact a messy cut-and-paste job dictated by the most irrational human impulses?

The hand in the last image is in fact my left one…I hurriedly drew it with my right (using a painting program with a gaming mouse), and then “flipped” the bitmap image horizontally. I rather think this piece, which introduces a more typically traditional idiom for representation, is the least successful of the set.