Slit Camera is a complete free-source digital slit scanner written in less than a page of Processing code. Rather than recording a conventional frame, the program repeatedly samples a narrow slice of live video and adds it to a continuously accumulated image, stretching movement across time.
Golan Levin includes the work in An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research. The catalogue identifies the original as Processing version 68 code and notes that later Processing examples for live video and QuickTime slit-scanning were revised from Jenkins’s sketch.
The original 578-byte sketch survives in the Devoid web archive. It belongs to an early period of Processing, the open creative-coding project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001.
Context and source
An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research, compiled by Golan Levin, places Slit Camera within a broad history of photographic, cinematic, analogue-video and computational slit-scan practice.
Processing is an open project for learning and making visual work with code, initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Slit Camera was written for the early version 68 environment.