Web collage
I’ve been playing with the unfortunately named Web Gobbler, a program that downloads images from the net and makes collages out of them. It’s an interesting effect, a bit busy for my taste, but an endless stream of images with fragments of meaning. It feeds into the brain’s tendency to extract patterns out of noise.
As usual, I play with a new toy and I end up with more questions than when I started. Is there a way to programmatically discard the less interesting images? Can I generate more interesting collages by filtering the input images? In other words, can I treat the thing as a black box and manipulate the inputs and outputs?
As for looking under the hood, Web Gobbler is open source, but it’s in Python, and I don’t know Python. I looked at the code and there are lots of comments to explain what’s going on. If I were in the mood to learn Python, this would be a good program to start with.