Hanan (Yitzi) Jacob
yitz@datalife.com
summer makeup project for class: Visual Intermedia
professor: Betty Beaumont
circleBoy & journeyVision
circleBoy & journeyVision are two programs I wrote over the course of this summer to envision and demonstrate the levels of abstraction that are introduced by computing which the average user is often unaware of.
[NOTE: Both of these programs run only under The Be Operating System (BeOS). ]
journeyVision
journeyVision is a program based loosely on the sample program PageFlipper which is included in the optional BeOS install. journeyVision displays the contents of all the files of your computer one at a time in a simple bitmap format which often displays like static. In some of the snapshots you can see a circle which is an artifact from the original PageFlipper program as a tribute to the original creator of the software.
The purpose of this program is to display the actual contents of your computer with only the most minimal of abstraction. every pixel on the screen correlates to a byte on your hard drive.
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circleBoy
[download BeOSx86 r4.5 version here circleBoyx86.zip]
circleBoy is a program written almost entirely from scratch.(There is limited basis for it in the program entitled 'CircleToy', hence the origin of the name. However the similarities are almost nonexistant due to my many changes(the length of the program has easily doubled.))
circleBoy displays the first 7kilobytes of any files on your computer, as a series of distorted ellipsis, one at a time, at an interval of 2 seconds per file.
The purpose of this program was to offer a new and unprecedented abstraction of the existing information, in a similar vein to midi files whose values express the way in which abstract instruments can make music.
of note is the remarkable similarity and patterns that can be found in certain kinds of files. displayed below you can see the file name of the currently displayed file above the actual rendering of the file, this will help you to notice patterns which represent textual information, keymap information, and digital content.
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last modified: 5/9/99
