The Data Portraits API allows you to access the Scan History collected by Data Portraits installations by yours truly and Lisa Gwilliam. It is currently a REST-like API, meaning that the apparatus for fetching data is a simple URL. There is currently only one function (getScans) with several options for grouping and response formats. Here’s a basic run down. …read more
V. Carpaccio's Portrait of a young woman rendered as a Data Portrait
QR codes are images of data. They are digital entities that reside on analog materials. Furthermore, you can embed any kind of data you want in them (thank you Denso Wave!) up to 7kb numeric. I wanted to make images with these images of data. Not an image inside one bar code, but an image made up of thousands of bar codes each with discreet data. These images would contain the visual information that we interpret as humans, and they could also store a substantial amount of data that could only be interpreted by machines. The image (or actually, the material the image is printed on) is suddenly a random access floppy disk, a browser, a tracking device, a vehicle for presenting dense layers of intersecting information, and some of this information must be excavated with machines. This is where the idea for Data Portraits starts. …read more
.. to my updated website!
So, I finally broke down and switched over to a pre-fabricated “CMS”.. WordPress. What can I say. For all my technical savvy, WP seemed like a tool for dummies, and yet there it loomed, ominously, beckoning me out of my comfy custom-mysql-php safe-space.
As it it turned out, it hasn’t been too terrible. I’ve managed to port most of my custom features into a custom wordpress theme and plugin. I’ll be posting some notes about that whole process in the Internets category. I also added a Bio, CV, Contact page and Image section with stills from my videos very (very) quickly.