Bin Badder is a Mac-only piece of art software that I wrote for the online magazine Unlikely 2.0, sometime in the past half-decade. I found it recently when vanity Googling myself, and decided to update the software a little bit and put a copy of it on my site.

(A brief discourse into vanity Googling – I was trying to solve an issue about Google’s cache of this site, which would involve some knowledge of SEO. I think I’ve got it now, so I can stop turning up webpages like this one, which states “People like Pete Hindle are clueless morons of the first degree”, according to Google. Annoyingly, the Sunday Mail can’t get their head around webpage design – it must be, like, 1993 in their office – so you’ll have to dive into the source code for the webpage to see me being humiliated by the middle classes.)

For the original piece, I wrote:

Bin Badder takes the form of one of those annoying you-must-click-through programs, and is a political statement regarding the resurgence of terrorist activities in the west. I make no excuses for using a stupid scripting language for a minority platform – here, the political message directly mirrors the method of distribution. Because such a outré political message is unlikely to be received without knee-jerk response, and only a minority would ever consider the proposed link seriously. Therefore, limiting the choice of viewing to a minority makes little or no difference, as the piece is essentially didactic. And most people respond badly to being didactic-ed upon.

I think the message slightly loses it’s potency this side of the financial meltdown, as we are more concerned with money issues currently than a nebulous “terrorist” organisation whose effectiveness cannot be proved. I don’t doubt that there are terrorists, but I’m pretty much going to cite Bruce Schneier on the social effects of our current security strategy if you wish to start a debate on the subject.

Thanks to Unlikely Stories for hosting the original of the piece, and please take a poke around their site at some of the interesting things they have.

For now, you can refresh to see the subtle yet intricate changes, or download the program yourself to dissect how it works.

unnamed_signage (Processing Sketch)

See that, above? That’s something I’ve wanted to do for years.

If you understand Processing, the programming language that pretty much foremost amongst the art/coding subset, you usually have a pretty good grasp of mathematics. Personally, despite my grade B at GCSE, I’m pretty shakey. That’s why it took me at least two years to be able to draw a bunch of dots in a circle, using Processing.

I am happy I’ve done it though; it means that I’m no longer banging my head against it as a problem that is beyond me. One more thing I can cross of my list of things that I want to do with Processing.

I’ve written in more depth about the mathematics behind the program, and posted a video of it in action, at my vimeo page. If you’d like to find out about what it’s about, read that. I’ve also uploaded the source code and the program itself as a stand-alone application for Windows, OS X and Linux, and you can download that below.

draw_a_circle2 (source files and apps)

UPDATE: The Vimeo page seems to have completely failed me (again) and so I’ve put a version up on Flickr using their new video function. If it doesn’t embed in the RSS feed, check out my photo page over there.