Wild Bill Recommends: Top-Shelf Linkage

“Generative artifacts, graffiti archaeology, and interactive chaos, anyone?” — Wild Bill recommends these highly addictive, interactive websites for your personal entertainment, enjoyment, and enrichment. Please to enjoy them, and thank you for your generous attention.

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.

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.

About the Author

Jeff Starr = Creative thinker. Passionate about free and open Web.