Project Megapixels

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 6:32 pm

Also keep in mind that there's a fairly sizeable movement to *reclaim* the Swastika from its Nazi connotations.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 6:41 pm

OK, then let's move on.

Mozy bonz · Post by **Mozy bonz** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 12:17 am

Kinetic IV · Post by **Kinetic IV** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 12:29 am

Damn, the more I read the more interesting this thing gets. And I love the graphic....it definitely captured my attention. I even like the name: Megapixels...hell I like the whole concept.
And the font just sets that image off...it looks so damn good. This is one of the first large scale art installations I've seen that's actually making me want to participate in it.

regionalchaos · Post by **regionalchaos** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:04 am

Beautiful Mozy! Scale it up to about 700 pixels wide for me and we will be a lot closer to opening up the site.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 3:34 am

Great work everyone. I'm going to be out at Jury Duty today, but I'll be back online tonight. I'll register the domain projectmegapixels.org tonight.

Mozy bonz · Post by **Mozy bonz** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 9:13 am

Thanks everyone! That means so much to me.

dragonfly Jafe · Post by **dragonfly Jafe** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 9:35 am

Site page looks awesome...

regionalchaos · Post by **regionalchaos** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 4:13 pm

<brainstorm>
A baby can represent hope and the future well. Although it doesn't represent fear. Maybe the image of baby might be good to incorporate..
</brainstorm>

regionalchaos · Post by **regionalchaos** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 4:18 pm

FEAR!

Gatecrasher · Post by **Gatecrasher** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 8:08 pm

So now that the cats out of the bag, I can let y'all know that I'm the one that took that picture. Not bad for a first year burner. I'm in 'the biz', so it was easy, I can't believe no one took a picture during the event before.... Also (side note) If ANYONE knows of other cool events anywhere in the world that would be good to take a picture of. PLEASE TELL ME.

In a very unlikely turn of events, you may have seen me set up what looked like a long slippy-slide Saturday morning, which ended up being a large arrow pointing to the man made of 4 pieces of 10ft x 100ft black plastic. Think "-->"

Through horrible luck, the picture was taken about an hour before I 'placed' my object, so it's not in the picture. I was told it would be taken around 10:30 local time, it was in fact taken more like 9:30.

I'll have the image taken again next year, or someone else will I'm sure. Here are a few things you all should consider.

Imagery is taken in the morning around 10am local, and they won't gaurantee a time slot, so make sure your picture is available from really early like 8:30 until at least noon. Don't mess up like I did.

Also, the satellite can do a flyover roughly every 3rd day, so there isn't a gaurantee that it will be Saturday morning. I just got lucky. I or someone else will let everyone know when the flyover will be.

Finally, and most importantly. The imager takes 1 meter black&white imagery and simultaneous 4 meter color imagery, and then fuses it on the back end. If each pixel isn't AT LEAST 15 feet across, you won't be able to see colors. I also recommend for fidelity reasons that every 'pixel' of art be made up of 3 imager pixels, meaning Color Art should probably be 12m per side..... Sounds almost undoable to me. (You might get away with something 4m on a side, but be prepared to be very disappointed, since obviously the image pixel centerpoint won't line up with the ground target pixel centerpoint)

I highly recommend making line-art, and black plastic will work great, high contrast, cheap, easy to place.

Also. I used ground staples, which were about 4 inche long 'U's of metal, and I placed them every 8 feet or so on the sides of the tarp..... It sort of worked but the wind started ripping them up, so I spent about half an hour just running around the piece re-stapling after the wind would rip a piece up..... If I did it over again, I would use staples again, just get a hell of a lot more of them.

Cheers,

GC

Mozy bonz · Post by **Mozy bonz** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 9:38 pm

Thanks Gatecrasher
I have been using your suggestions to work out pixel size for the project. I have also been using that data for pictures I have been working on to post as my own suggestions for megapixel. I have not posted any of them yet. Still working resolutions and color out. The picture needs to be more of a positive negative picture (Ying Yang so to speak). If it is done write the scan of the sat should pick it up. I know it’s not going to be a high resolution but we can use that to our advantage. Kind of like smudging pastels or like watercolors… big blobs of color in the right shape. All of the grid should disappear and leave a nice picture.

Ok then back to my crayons and coloring book

this one is not a suggestion for Megapixel

MrGod · Post by **MrGod** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 11:04 pm

Your project sounds great! Count me in on a pixel or three.

Here's yet another idea to consider on how to build it on the playa.
Start with your 1 meter colored squares/pixels.
Sew them into 3 meter by 3 meter squares (9 pixels per square) and put a grommet in each corner. The stitches must be very strong so the squares can handle whipping in the wind. If there were 900 of these, you could put them in a grid with thirty 3-meter sections on each side. The result would be a 90 meter on-a-side grid.
Ask volunteers to bring a little over 900 10-foot long posts - could be 2 x 2 wood or 3/4" EMT conduit or something else fairly rigid, strong and cheap.
Pound the posts two feet into the playa at 3 meter intervals producing a grid with 33 posts on each side. (you might want to drill the holes in the playa first and then drop the posts in.
With the posts pounded in, the tops of them should be about 8 feet above ground level.
zip tie the grommets of the fabric sections to the tops of the posts somehow (eye bolts in top of post?).

Having the whole array overhead does some interesting and useful things.
It creates a gigantic shade structure. Wandering around under the colored fabric would be quite beautiful I think.
It makes it easy to add pixels anywhere in the array without having to walk on already installed pixels.
An eight foot height is tall enough to walk under even with a really tall hat but not so tall that it would require ladders to mount the fabric sections (a short step stool or a chair would do.
It keeps the array off the ground thereby keeping it cleaner and in no danger of people driving on it.

Getting 1000 pieces of conduit sounds daunting but if 100 people each volunteer to bring 10 pieces, there you have it.

The whole thing would ripple in the breeze. Because all the fabric will be parallel to the ground, it should hold up to a pretty good wind. Just to make sure, it would be a good idea to guy the posts on the outside edges of the array to the ground.

It is truly a huge project. 900 3x3 meter pieces of fabric (that's over 8000 square meters!), 900 posts, at least 3600 grommets, 3600 3 meter-long sewn seams. Wow!

If you did a two-color graphic image, you might be able to get away with 3 meter pixels and get enough resolution. That way you could use 10 x 10 tarps of two different colors instead of sewing a lot of 1 meter pieces.

Thanks for making me stay up way too late on a work night!

Mr. God

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 3:31 am

Thanks for the info gatecrasher. I was worried about the color aspect and I think your post pretty much seals the deal that we'll need to go strictly black and white. Does the sat produce any images in black and white only, or is it strictly a fused image?

The plan is to have this done by wednesday night and leave it up for the rest of the event so that we've got a definite photo op sometime in there.

regionalchaos · Post by **regionalchaos** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 8:26 am

What about a cross section of a head, with regions for hope and fear, then have the person looking at something in the future. Maybe like rays leaving the eyes to represent looking...

Similar to something like this (sorta):

Disclaimer: I'm just tossing out ideas, not claiming they are good ones

Mozy bonz · Post by **Mozy bonz** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 10:21 am

I think the end picture will be more of a gray scale and with color it will just shade color into the gray scale. Take any picture and start blurring it. The faster the recognizable picture diapers the hard it is to make that picture work. That’s why high contrast works well in this instance. The color may not pick up as well as we would like but remember this is for the burners on the ground also. And big color looks great from the ground.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 7:17 pm

I found a better satellite. Now we just need to get the photo taken. The quickbird has a 2 foot resolution. The company charges $16/sq kilometer with a 25 kilomter minimum order. That's only $400. I've sent the company an email to confirm.

I've ordered the domain name projectmegapixels.org. It should be pointed at the server in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Lysergic · Post by **Lysergic** » Sat Dec 17, 2005 3:22 am

Ah Gatecrasher reaffirmed my original thought that we need something black/white style but I agree with mozy that we could add some color for the folks on the ground, and I agree with mrGod'z suggestion of putting it up higher, so as to have a multipurpose function and I'd be willing to bring 10 emt 3/4" conduit..Maybe you could split the 10' poles into two doubling what you have but 5 feet kinda makes you hunch...

When you get the website up, I'd be interested in helping with the some of the website if you want mozy, just let me know which section. I'm decent with css/html and learnin' the photoshop via the GIMP!

Lysergic · Post by **Lysergic** » Sat Dec 17, 2005 3:23 am

Nice the website link is working

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 6:52 am

Just an update the http://projectmegapixels.org has been registered and now points to the site.

regionalchaos · Post by **regionalchaos** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 7:33 am

Mozy sent me the nice image for the site. I'll try to spend some time working on it tonight. Hopefully we can get the registration and commitment code up in a few days.

emily sparkle · Post by **emily sparkle** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 3:17 pm

i was going to suggest you send everyone to a national chain like joanne's. that way you could have a better chance of consistency. any burner-owned fabric chains out there?

the cool idea i had [while lurking back here] was that squares could be blowups of current magazine covers or something that formed a big picture of something. they make cheesy inspirational posters like this but i can't find an example right now... it would be zoomable, but difficult...

line art makes more sense...

i would love to participate in this...

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 5:52 pm

emily sparkle wrote:i was going to suggest you send everyone to a national chain like joanne's. that way you could have a better chance of consistency. any burner-owned fabric chains out there?

I think that absolute consistency isn't all the important (even assuming we stick with a color image)

the cool idea i had [while lurking back here] was that squares could be blowups of current magazine covers or something that formed a big picture of something. they make cheesy inspirational posters like this but i can't find an example right now... it would be zoomable, but difficult...

That would be cool, but difficult to coordinate the overall color. Plus I would worry about how to make this hard for the wind to rip apart, or worst yet, rain.

i would love to participate in this...

Excellent. Watch this space for more info.

ETA: Thanks for renaming the thread.

polykarmatic · Post by **polykarmatic** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 8:12 pm

Count me in for a pixel or 3 also. Now I'm off to projectmegapixels.org to check it out and bookmark it. I'll be in touch.

(I bought the Laminated Poster of Burning Man from Space a couple of weeks ago.)

Lincoln Ne.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 3:45 am

RegionalChaos made some site changes last night. Please check it out at http://projectmegapixels.org/megapixel/ ... index.html and let us know what you think. You can register on the site, but you may need to reregister later when he finishes.

regionalchaos · Post by **regionalchaos** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 8:58 am

I greatly encourage any design enhancements or suggestions. The best way that people can contribute to enhancing the look of the site is to provide me with html that I can cut and paste into our site's code. If you want to email me html suggestions you can contact me at: regionalchaos (at) gmail (dot) com.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 6:21 pm

Hear ye! Hear ye!

I am proud to announce that the project website is now up and accepting registrations. If you're interested in helping out by bringing pixels, just signup.

http://www.projectmegapixels.com

Great thanks to Regionalchaos and Mozy Bonz for the work they put into this.

LeChatNoir · Post by **LeChatNoir** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 7:09 pm

Can't get it, sputnik!!!

Yikes!!! Did so many people go to sign up that it crashed?!?

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 7:20 pm

OK, I screwed up the name:

http://www.projectmegapixels.org

LeChatNoir · Post by **LeChatNoir** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:02 pm

More trouble shooting...

Registered new account
Finished and sent to login page
Login attempt failed
Got confirmation email
Clicked link and got "page cannot be displayed" error

Project Megapixels

Would you participate?

Cats out of the bag

Megapixels

yo

Ah

Love the Idea.. Really Love it!