Nonwoven:(adj.) A fabric-like material made of interlocked fibers, held together by chemical, mechanical or thermal means.
Nonwoven is a mobile painting application for iOS devices. When the user touches the screen, invisible “pins” are placed on the drawing area. Then, patterns are formed by connecting these pins within the user defined range with transparent threads, thus creating weblike forms. The pins can be generated from a given photograph for generation, as well as being placed by the classical “painting” gesture.
The output image can be shared and exported in number of ways, including pdf vector format. So, you might not only print your artwork at a resolution enough for a poster or an entire building façade, but also you can use your work in many other forms, such as importing it to a 3D modeling application and animating every single thread.
The color, transparency, threading range, blending mode, radial symmetry, thickness and many other options are available for manipulation to create a wide range of effects that can be used for generative painting, finger painting, calligraphic effect or photo manipulation. The generation algorithm is prototyped on Processing and ported to iOS. In other words, the system is portable and it will be available on other platforms, hopefully with alternative modes of interaction, other than a mouse and a keyboard.
Please visit http://csc.im/nonwoven for the full documentation of the application.