The Mondrian Machine

The Mondrian Machines

(The biggest challenge is knowing when to stop.)

The Machine

Make Art, Win Shirt? Read on!

Wednesday night, 12:15 AM - it was one of those midweek days where you just put in a full day doing a million things at the same time. People constantly calling you...

This has to be done... That has to be done... B u t t h i s h a s t o b e d o n e N O W !

Mondrian Palette Dragging my ass home from the trenches of web design, I slopped together some sort of dinner and headed off to bed. Of course, after a day such as this, a million and a half things go through your head. While dozing off, I began to think about frames in Netscape (I have no idea why I focused on this passing thought). Anyway, I began thinking about recursively dividing frames in two. Netscape has prevented this infinite recursion. However, if you stutter the recursion by adding a link to divide the frame in two, you can work around this roadblock. At the same time, you've gained audience participation!

The next day, I HTMLed my idea. I created two frames documents, one with a horizontal partition and one with a vertical partition. The horizontally partitioned document places the same HTML document in both frames. This HTML document is linked to the vertically divided frames document. In each frame of the vertical frame document is an HTML document which, in turn, is linked to the horizontally divided document and so forth.

I started to wonder what could be done with these mitotic cells. They really had no practical use since the cells just got smaller and smaller. I noticed the patterns were somewhat reminiscent of Piet Mondrian's works. It's like a build-your-own Mondrian machine - hey, the Mondrian Machine! But what am I going to do with this? There really was no corporate use since the cells divide into smaller and smaller units - too small to advertise any product. I figured UD is where it should go since the zine is the favorite daredevil client we here at Agency.com have when it comes to experimentation on the web. I showed my idea to Geoff, our Art Director. He suggested we incorporate it into UD as a contest - let people create their own Mondrian works, take a screen shot, and email the entries into Urban Desires. The winner could get an Urban Desires T-shirt and have their creation featured in the next issue of UD.

BRILLIANT, but now I have to add color to the machine. Here's where Perl comes into the picture. UD palette

In each frame, I placed a rather large transparent gif to act as the link to the next frame document. This time, the frame documents load documents generated by a CGI script which chooses a random background color. I have also written a CGI script to randomize the division of the cell, horizontally or vertically, and give the user a choice of the Mondrian palette (black, white, red, blue, yellow) or the UD palette (256 colors).

Upon testing my creation, I bombed two machines. Before engaging with the machine...
BE SURE TO INCREASE NETSCAPE'S MEMORY PARTITION
(8 MB to 10 MB should be sufficient if you can afford it).
So here's you're chance to be an early twentieth century artist. If you're satisfied with your results, take a screen shot (Mac users: shift-command-3; PC users: obtain Snapshot v1.7 or Snappy95 from Shareware.Com).

CONTEST CLOSED

(Thanks for playing!)

Wednesday night, 12:15 AM - it was one of those midweek days where you just put in a full day doing a million things at the same time. People constantly calling you...
This has to be done... That has to be done... B u t t h i s h a s t o b e d o n e N O W !
	Dragging my ass home from the trenches of web design, I slopped together some sort of dinner and headed off to bed. Of course, after a day such as this, a million and a half things go through your head. While dozing off, I began to think about frames in Netscape (I have no idea why I focused on this passing thought). Anyway, I began thinking about recursively dividing frames in two. Netscape has prevented this infinite recursion. However, if you stutter the recursion by adding a link to divide the frame in two, you can work around this roadblock. At the same time, you've gained audience participation!
	The next day, I HTMLed my idea. I created two frames documents, one with a horizontal partition and one with a vertical partition. The horizontally partitioned document places the same HTML document in both frames. This HTML document is linked to the vertically divided frames document. In each frame of the vertical frame document is an HTML document which, in turn, is linked to the horizontally divided document and so forth.
I started to wonder what could be done with these mitotic cells. They really had no practical use since the cells just got smaller and smaller. I noticed the patterns were somewhat reminiscent of Piet Mondrian's works. It's like a build-your-own Mondrian machine - hey, the Mondrian Machine!	But what am I going to do with this? There really was no corporate use since the cells divide into smaller and smaller units - too small to advertise any product. I figured UD is where it should go since the zine is the favorite daredevil client we here at Agency.com have when it comes to experimentation on the web.	I showed my idea to Geoff, our Art Director. He suggested we incorporate it into UD as a contest - let people create their own Mondrian works, take a screen shot, and email the entries into Urban Desires. The winner could get an Urban Desires T-shirt and have their creation featured in the next issue of UD.
BRILLIANT, but now I have to add color to the machine. Here's where Perl comes into the picture.
In each frame, I placed a rather large transparent gif to act as the link to the next frame document. This time, the frame documents load documents generated by a CGI script which chooses a random background color. I have also written a CGI script to randomize the division of the cell, horizontally or vertically, and give the user a choice of the Mondrian palette (black, white, red, blue, yellow) or the UD palette (256 colors).
Upon testing my creation, I bombed two machines. Before engaging with the machine... BE SURE TO INCREASE NETSCAPE'S MEMORY PARTITION (8 MB to 10 MB should be sufficient if you can afford it).	So here's you're chance to be an early twentieth century artist. If you're satisfied with your results, take a screen shot (Mac users: shift-command-3; PC users: obtain Snapshot v1.7 or Snappy95 from Shareware.Com).
CONTEST CLOSED (Thanks for playing!)