NSKYC Documents the Color of the NYC Skyline

Jerome Covington

Dec 22, 2011 • 1 min read

A camera positioned at an unknown location in New York City documents the change in color of the skyline every five minutes. The average color is computed, and is represented on a grid of hex colors on a website. Presumably this installation art of sorts, accessed through the humble web browser, has been running since June 28, 2011 at 4:00 PM and will be continuous for the foreseeable future.

The code for the site is a minimal combination of HTML5, JavaScript with jQuery, and a PHP backend for getting the most recent photograph and doing the computations necessary for averaging the color and converting it to hex format.

For example, the custom JavaScript written for the site is no more than 29 lines: a few UI niceties leveraging jQuery (fading the image/color in and according to mouse events) and a request to since.php on a five minute timer.

Visit: NSKYC.

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