I created this piece entirely in Processing with minimal post production. The algorithm processes a specified set of characters in a number of specified fonts to extract the perceived “brightness” of a character on a blank background. This information is then used to plug the best matching characters into a matrix of sample points on a given image. The algorithm is a bit messy since I did not intend to publish it publicly, but if you know the language and want to experiment, email me and I can shoot it your way; I’m all about sharing.

The whole piece.

A zoom of the characters comprising the piece.

Ghost in the Machine by Luis Gil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.