Surface 2

Here's another surface colour experiment on Sonic the Hedgehog. I think this one works a little better - this time I've used Sonic the Hedgehog 2, selecting only the levels with a material name in the title (playing fast and loose with definitions here by including sky...) What you lose in this attempt is the larger perspective on how colour is used to visualise the plot arc, which was an interesting feature of the last one, but what you gain is a perspective on how surface colour and virtual material are linked.

Surface

I'm currently working on a hypothesis that an early stage in the development of virtual materiality in video games was the manipulation of surface in 1980s platformers. As an experiment, I've made color palettes from screenshots of the first six (out of seven) levels of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, to see if color choice alone is enough to guess the materials the level is supposed to appear to be made up of. I'm not sure my hypothesis is on solid ground yet, but I think the illustration is quite thought-provoking. Color really is a powerful tool.

Desktop Wallpaper 2.5.11

My latest desktop wallpaper is a photograph of an illuminated manuscript of the Koran which I saw at the Islamic Arts Museum on a recent trip to Istanbul. This is one of the wallpapers I've been the most satisfied with so far - I like the tension between media and the way the use of the photo as wallpaper imposes flatness onto an image with a shallow depth of field. Its not too busy, but you can still enjoy picking tiny details out of the small part of the image that's in focus. Hope I can make more like this in future.