In that summer movie mood? Jeremy Rotsztain has been working on a new series of digital art that derives Jackson Pollock-style action paintings from Hollywood action movies. Software processes the video of explosions and other action sequences from classic movies and “paints” them into abstract art, leaving a trace of the action as splattered color on the screen. The process component is a nod to the tradition of Pollock’s own process-based work, but with tongue at least a little in cheek. As Jeremy describes it:
Action Painting runs with custom authored software (written in C++ with openFrameworks) that uses computer vision to analyze movies for motion. For each frame of video, the software samples the changed pixels, saving them to the computer’s memory. It then rearranges all the sampled pixels on screen to compose a series of abstract expressionist images, which are presented as large format prints and video installations.
Action Painting (Masculine Expressionism) (2009) [Jeremy Rotsztain site]
It’s more fun to watch in action than in just the stills:
There’s a long tradition of works in Processing, OpenFrameworks, and even Flash that unwraps film into two-dimensional art in different ways. Brendan Dawes has his work Cinema Redux, which he also mentions in his wonderful book Analog In, Digital Out