Ben Fry is an American genius in data visualization. When I looked at his projects, I could not pick one as they were all interesting to talk about. Ben Fry developed the well-known open-source programming environment, Processing, which is mainly used for teaching computational design today. I will actually be talking about a different project, Mario Soup. This project was very intriguing at first as it caught my eye and made me ask myself how these images were produced. A Nintendo game cartridge was examined and the images for each of the on-screen elements was decoded as a four-color image. This created an amazing “soup” of elements that make up the screen of that Nintendo game, in this case, Mario.
Ben Fry, “Mario Soup”, 2003
Reading the cartridge memory and translating an ‘on’ bit into a black pixel and an ‘off’ bit into a white pixel created a black and white, one bit, image. Each pair of those images were merged to form a two-bit, four color, image. I love pixelated art pieces as I am very interested in NFTs, and pixelated art pieces were a recent trend in the NFT space. The beauty is in the randomness of the elements.
https://benfry.com/mariosoup/