This exercise in Telematics and participation is just one out of many—Amodal Suspension by Ralfael Lozano-Hemmer and Absolut Quartet by Jeff Lieberman & Dan Paluska immediately come to mind—but it stands out in a particular way that is relevant to some of the work we were doing back in the PLW a few years ago. UndefPrint is only open to participants that can write code. The general public is excluded. At least a bit of knowledge of Javascript and computer science is required to get anything out of UndefPrint. The idea that code is a mode of expression in a way similar to simple speech, doodling, or any other gesture that can be performed in public is not new, but it is an important one, because it puts code next to activities that come naturally to most humans—like speech or hitting on a keyboard to produce sounds—even when coding doesn’t come naturally for anybody. Perhaps in the future we will be able to speak code—and math—the way we can sort out objects in a crowded room. One can only hope.

Here is the code that draws the pattern in the image above, the fifth in my series of submissions:

for (i=0;i<=pWidth();i++){
  for (j=0;j<=pHeight();j++){
    pSymbolB(219+(Math.floor(Math.sin(j*i))%3));
    pPixel(i,j);}}

And, some fooling around with triangular patterns:

Did I ever mention how much I like simple nested for-loops?

215606 [t-rex]

215649 [car]

215660 [phone]

Along with many other icons in the tiny icon factory, this image reminds me of the Rorschach inkblot test, created by the Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach in 1921. The image might not really represent anything other than itself, but we still manage to see other things in it.

When I looked at this icon for the first time, I also had access to the name it was given: sperm. With the help of this name, I can immediately see the cute little spermatozoon curling upwards like a seahorse, but if I stare long enough I wonder whether I see nothing at all. Do I actually believe that the 1×2 pixel rectangle hanging from the top right corner of its head is actually an eye?

Yes I do.

On other things, this is icon number 131313, a very realistic depiction of pong.

Superscript from France has created a nice online wallpaper editor and repository. The tiling of the motifs is implemented in the simplest way, repeating them over a square grid. I wish they implemented something like rotations of reflections to create more complex patterns, or even symmetries that are not square, like triangular or hexagonal, but that would complicate things a lot, and sometimes it is better to have something that is somehow limited, instead not having anything at all, other than the idea of something really powerful that was never made. As limited as they might be, the expressive potential of tools like this one is nearly infinite. I also wish they rendered white as transparent so we could have different colored wallpapers just by changing the background color of the body tag, and I wish the drawing interface was more fluid, perhaps a bit more like the one we made for Tiny, that understands strokes rather than clicks.

Superscript’s wallpaper application looks like a natural sibling of the Tiny Icon Factory, and a good resource to decorate the backgrounds of your webpages. This is one of the 888 motifs already available there (you can also make your own of course, and I’m sure by the time you read this there will be at least 900):

All the icons in the following illustration are painted the same way, with a slightly tealish ambient color, a redish diffuse and a white and subtle specular (and infinitely faraway parallel light rays), but I could think of changing the material of all the Popeyes to spinach green, and then it would be easy to spot where the Popeyes are in the qbert staircase.