“Perhaps it’s time for a bizarre diversion…” — Wild Bill recommends these bizarre Flash websites for your personal entertainment, education, and enjoyment:

monoface For a few delightful moments of splendid online fun, prance on over to the hilariously interactive Flash interface currently on display at monoface. Once there, click the "shuffle face" link a few times to get the general idea, and then graduate to plastic surgeon by clicking on the various facial components themselves. Each click mixes androgynous Flash flesh further and further into bizarro land, where smooth blending manifests disturbed visions of hermaphroditic unrest..

heiwa-alpha.co.jp Flexing some incredible Flash muscle, the good citizens over at heiwa-alpha (update 12/2008: site seems to be down..) have produced a Flash site of monolithic proportions. The sheer magnificence of the animated imagery and truly remarkable attention to detail make this surrealistic visual feast one of Wild Bill’s personal favorites. Indeed, for a delightful romp through the collective mind of some truly gifted Flash engineers, crank up the broadband, dust off the Japanese translator, and drop in for a wonderfully bizarre Flash diversion..

One of our favorite command-line screensavers, DAZZLE is a two-dimensional kaleidoscopic program featuring a timeless display of perpetually evolving psychedelic viewscapes. Users may interactively manipulate over thirty image-creation algorithms, or set the program to automatically generate hours of dynamically morphing displays of colorful patterns and geometrically complex graphics.

Continue Reading

“Generative artifacts, graffiti archaeology, and interactive chaos, anyone?” — Wild Bill recommends these highly addictive, interactive websites for your personal entertainment, enjoyment, and enrichment:

Gallery of Computation

This site peeled my hat back. I am completely enamoured and will most likely spend vast amounts of time exploring the endless creative potential opened up through this remarkable online experience. The Gallery of Computation takes computer-generated graphical artifacts and algorithmic image processing to a distant universe. Infinite thanks to Jared Tarbell for sharing his inspiring world with us.

Graffiti Archaeology

Here is another fascinating website at which one could spend countless hours surfing and learning. As avid graffiti enthusiasts, we were immediately hooked on this remarkably interactive presentation of society’s most unappreciated art form. Chronologically organized, Graffiti Archaeology is an insightful online documentation revealing localized patterns of urban expression within various graffiti subcultures. As the site says, "Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a time-lapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. Most of the photos are from San Francisco, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present."

Splatter

Splatter is a fun interactive Flash application enabling users to splatter virtually vectorized viscous globs of sloppy, splattering lines. Or something. The program follows the user’s cursor coordinates around the screen, leaving a continuous flow of digital "paint", which flows at a rate determined by that of the cursor. Splatter is extreme fun for the common surfer, and perhaps esoterically useful for graphic designers and web developers. Also check out the offline version of Splatter, available for download here.

CanvasPaint

Finally, check out this online emulation of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Paint program. Firefox 2 and Opera 9 users enjoy the option of saving created images to a local hard drive. Other users may create images but not save them. Besides demonstrating some elite programming skills, CanvasPaint is also a very handy tool to have available online. Indeed, online apps such as this are rapidly changing the landscape of software development and deployment. As described by the CanvasPaint site: "[Canvas is] a near pixel-perfect copy of Microsoft Paint in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, using the <canvas> tag as specified by WHATWG and supported by Safari 1.3, Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9."

LiTha-Paint Quality web-based vector drawing in effect. Check out LiTha-Paint, a promising new online vector drawing tool. The software is currently in alpha, yet is already full-featured and easy to use. LiTha-Paint steps beyond the paltry selection of Flash/VML/SVG online drawing tools, providing versatility and universality via HTML and JavaScript. Perhaps all this Web 2.0 business is worthwhile after all..

Update: Unfortunately, LiTha-Paint crashed due to lack of funds (welcome to the club). However, this particular post has now served its purpose by providing insight (via the comments section) into the wonderful world of mikons.com, a very inspiring online vector graphic site that enables users to create visual symbols and share them with a growing network of other vector artists. In their own words:

Welcome to Mikons.com, a new form of self-expression that connects people through visual symbols (personal tags). Our mission is to give you a fun and easy way to create these symbols that tell your story, let you decide how you want to share them, and use them to connect with people anywhere in the world.

Update [ January 10th, 2007 ]: Well, apparently LiTha-Paint is back in action and looking better than ever. Apparently, they found a way to make it happen — good for them! With any luck, this will be the last time I have to edit this post ;)