Inspired on a television show called Blindspot, From Black Squares generates a set of lines and ellipses that runs through and 800x800 screen. On the sixth episode of the first season of Blindspot, a strange tattoo is shown near the end of the show that looks like a black square. Only to find out that the black square contained a set of lines and ellipses that ran through in a turtle shell shape. These lines and ellipses represented a steganography clue that was highly important to the plot of the show. This inspired me to create an algorithm that replicated this steganography clue.
I started by combining the scribbles code and pointillism code used in class as a base and started changing values. The values for the line segment of the code were easy to modulate but I found that changing the pointillism code to what I was going for very challenging. Eventually, with the help of Dave Kemp, I was able to generate black squares that were similar to the tattoo from Blindspot. I generated a total of 9 black squares; each square was written to generate up to seven ellipses all randomly placed and lines that randomly ran across the screen at the speed of 45 fps for 18 seconds. After 18 seconds, the code will export as a pdf and stop/quit.
The entire purpose of From Black Squares is the process of obtaining and being able to see those lines and ellipses clearly. After 18 seconds, the code exports a black square. This black square then needs to be taken into Photoshop and the color value of #1A1110 needs to be replaced with white; this is when the process for one image is complete. This process is also done onto the tattoo on Blindspot. The black square is scanned and some values on the tattoo that aren’t 100% black is changed to white thus giving clarity.
I plan to present this project by projecting the 9 generated images together. And all nine images have gone through the process of changed values
Before
After
