Self Portrait

Explanation:  Eheheh, I seem to have stumped people with this one! This was an experiment that I did not too long ago, inspired by the following video:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPoj8l….  I took a picture of myself (shrunk down to only 13x13 pixels) and then wrote a computer program that scanned the image one pixel at a time and printed out each pixel’s RGB values.  So then I had a long string of digits.  I wrote a second program that took those digits and assigned a color to each one:  0 is red, 1 is orange, 2 is a light green, etc.  Then it drew a bunch of dots of the corresponding colors.  Finally, the program connects nearby dots of matching color.  There weren’t quite enough pixels to fill this square, so to fill the rest of the space, I typed my “signature” and looked up the ascii code for each character and used the resulting numbers until I had enough.

I could honestly stare at this for a long time.  It’s seemingly random, and yet some interesting “patterns” emerge if you look hard enough.  For example, for some reason there’s a rather large region in the upper left corner that has no connections; no dots of matching color are near each other in that area, but everywhere else there are lots of connections.  Also, there are a few “boxes,” where four dots of the same color come together and connect to make a square.  But these boxes only occur in the color orange.  No other color makes boxes.  Finally, there almost seems to be a gradient.  If you zoom out and just scan over the image from top to bottom, it seems to go from dark at the top, to light in the middle, to dark again at the bottom.

This was kind of fun to do!  If anyone would like me to do a similar “portrait” for them, let me know; I’d be interested to repeat the process and see what comes of it.