Personal BART Sign

UPDATE: The BART Sign app is now available on the App Store!

I’ve been working on this personal BART departure sign to run on an old iPad, because I’m often trying to figure out at the last minute which station to make a run for. It will be available soon It’s available now on the App Store, for both iPhone and iPad. No creepy robotic voice though… yet.

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Moon Landing Mug

Now available at my store: I’ve designed a mug based on my 360-degree “Moon Landing” illustration.

(UPDATE: Not currently available for sale)

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Panoramic Drawing

These are some “stills” from my first experiment in creating a hand-drawn 360-degree panorama. Click through to see it in action.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing something like this for a while, so was happy to discover that Photoshop has pretty good support for this. Also helpful were tutorials here and here. The drawing was all done digitally, although some people manage to use real media.

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8-Bit Bone Machine

My “chiptune” (technically “fakebit”) cover of Bone Machine by the The Pixies:

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I’ve been Parodied! A History of the British Sky

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this is way better. I recently became aware of this project by Oxford PhD student James Gilbert:

I have compiled the following time-lapse video, inspired by Ken Murphy’s “A History of the Sky”.  Ken’s time-lapse is actually a mosaic of 360 smaller individual movies, each showing the San Francisco sky throughout a single day.  The result is a brilliant and unique visualisation of an entire year of weather in just a few minutes.

I present Her Majesty’s equivalent, “A History of the British Sky”, recorded from the top of a building near the Welsh border.  I’m sure you’ll agree that the time taken to process over 3 million individual photographs is repaid ten times over in this video.  Such a wealth of information in one view; it’s a feast for the eyes.  You can see the change in the length of the British day, for example. And you can clearly pick out the season of summer.

Here’s his video, which truly captures the UK’s meteorological diversity:

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Bay History Pan-Lapse

For this commission for the Exploratorium’s Bay History exhibit, I created a panoramic time-lapse, showing the museum at its new home at Piers 15 and 17.

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Time-lapse: Last Night at the ‘Stick

KQED hired me to shoot a time-lapse over the course of the last scheduled game day at Candlestick Park. They put together this tribute:

(Looks a lot better if you switch it to 720p or better.) The original post is here.

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Takesplit: Tool for Grouping Time-lapse “Takes”

I whipped up this little command-line tool for automatically grouping a bunch of image files into individual time-lapse sequences.

This came up after a shoot where I shot a bunch of sequences on the same card. The process of manually finding the individual takes in the big undifferentiated set of images from the card was fairly tedious, and it occurred to me that this could probably be automated  by looking at the intervals between the shots. So I created this Perl script that seems to do a pretty good job. You run it like so:

takesplit.pl -i /Volumes/CARD1 -o ~/Photos/2014-01-05-TLShoot > ~/Photos/2014-01-05-TLShoot/summary.txt

It copies the files to a set of directories, one for each take, and outputs a summary. More info on its github page.

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Event: CODAME: SENSES (11/1-11/2)

Tonight and tomorrow (11/1-11/2) I’ll be showing some of my work, along with many other visual artsts, at the CODAME: SENSES Art + Tech festival:

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Time Shift Exhibit at the Exploratorium

Just in time for the reopening of the Exploratorium at its new location, I completed my Artist-in-Residence project, Time Shift.

timeshift

The exhibit is for the museum’s new Observatory gallery, which explores human and natural processes in the local environment. My intention was to use time-lapse techniques to reveal patterns and processes that typically go unnoticed.

Over several months I shot a series of sequences around the Bay Area, of subjects such as ships at the Port of Oakland, the cycle of tides, people commuting through downtown San Francisco, weather, and airplane traffic at SFO.

I created a custom iPad application, which visitors use to browse the archive, and select videos which are then displayed on a large external monitor.

Here is a compilation of some of the footage used in the exhibit:

Time Shift Compilation from Ken Murphy on Vimeo.

I’ve also created an app for iPhone and iPad based on the project.

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