In this project I once again went back to the creature idea (Sorry Golan, I know you said it would be tough but I was really enthusiastic about this idea when I thought of it. Making characters is tons of fun!). Surprisingly, this project has a lot of elements from Dave’s creature although we didn’t know it ourselves. In my project, a bird has built a nest on top of an eraser on a blackboard. The nest is small so the eggs (made from box2d) keep toppling out and the bird frantically collects them. The bird is eventually able to put them all in the nest, however I purposely designed the nest so that the eggs cannot all fit at the same time. Needless to say, the eggs continue to drop and the bird collects frantically with small, humming bird – like movements.

UPDATE:
The collecting bird strikes back! This time her nest is in a location that is hopefully more considered ^^;

Video:

Some of the things I need to go into and rework would definitely be adding an avoidance variable to the bird. I didn’t realize how weird it would be for the bird to pass through the eraser until I was actually projecting. However, I do like the small ‘world’ or ‘environment’ that I have created around that eraser. You can’t help but feel bad for the bird as you see it’s progress; it fumbles around and knocks over its own eggs in an effort to save them all; it’s hard to not only marvel at it but also hard to not pity it.

(Note: as the audio is live, there is a little bit of background noise in the video that I was unable to edit out)

‘Musical Stairs’ is a project that examines the role of music in our mundane lives. It was partly inspired by ‘Casse’ by Andreas Gysin and Sidi Vanetti, which effectively employs sound to add appeal to their simple projection.

An old habit of mine is tapping my fingers on a desk or flat surface in a manner that imitates playing the piano. It is a habit I thought I had grown out of, but only recently resurfaced due to my frustration with not having easy access to a piano. Clearly, I am not the only one who enjoys using this ‘musical instrument surrogacy’ in the event of having idle hands – I have seen enough people drumming on chairs and playing table keyboards to know this for certain. My projection attempts to manifest this concept of using an everyday object as a surrogate for a specific musical instrument. In addition, it redefines the image of a staircase by recontextualizing it into a musical situation. The way the program works is simple: when the user clicks on an point on the screen a white ball is spawned, which changes color and plays a note pertaining to the step it makes contact with.

A potential extension of this would be to project on a variety of small areas and attributing different objects to different instruments. It would be interesting to use this notion to create an ‘interesting symphony of boring objects’.

I fortunately did not run into many problems during this assignment. Initially, my program could not play more than 7 notes before going completely mute. I had no idea what the problem was until Dave pointed out that I was creating a new AudioPlayer object each time I needed to play a sound; it was then that I realized I was doing a really really bad thing. A non-programming-related issue that I ran into involved particularly rude CS majors on the 9th floor who seemed to make a effort to disrupt my recording (even though I explicitly told them that I was working on a project).

Also thanks to Swetha and Jun for helping me with the awkward projector handling!

Improvements to be made:
– attribute a special event to colliding notes
– make notes more visually interesting

Caves weigh heavily on human spirituality. The first art—the first human response to nature—began in cave painting and scultpure. Thus in my experience, caves are the incubators of the creative impulse; they are wombs of humanity. This projection is a personal cave. It fits at my desk, where my creative work occurs. Though not visible in the projection, there are dark background cave formations that help to extend the space. The work is a reminder of the origin, purpose, and function of the creator in the world. In addition, this work is meant to accentuate the space. My desk is under a lofted bed, so I work in a sort of figurative,shallow, forced cave. Though I find the space confining and lonely, painting it as a cave gives it the significance it can’t generate by its self. There is also a sense of weight in the piece, as the sitter must be perfectly still to accurately bear the weight of the cave formation as time passes. In subtext, I wanted to add an element of burden, eternity, and waiting to the cave.

This project gave taught me the value of Keystone. The tool was invaluable for positioning the image, as I had a technical difficulty with the frame displaying a white border. Box2d was an interesting experience, if a little difficult to transition into. Visually I want to deepen this project with a visible background and add cave paintings to reinforce content. I want to make it dynamically sense the sitter, so that the water drops can react to a person in motion.

For this project I went through Daniel Schiffman’s tutorial and found the section on toxiclibs really interesting. I stuck to the springs and soft body square section and decided to do a clotheshanger. The toxiclibs springs have a very interesting texture to them compared to the meshes in processing or PBox2D, and fiddling around with constants in meshes are very fun.

Anywho, the point of my projection was to have the arrow keys control the wind direction so, as people walk by, they can experience the illusion of blowing cloth. I wanted to make clothes-shaped meshes, but I had enough trouble with the soft body squares, so that didn’t happen… I also found a beautiful example of coloring meshes by shading places darker according to distance between springs, but I didn’t know how to fill in the spaces between springs individually, so that didn’t happen either… Also, this projection was on a smaller scale, so Rachel and I just pretended to blow puffs of wind or blow a hairdryer at the cloth. I did struggle with the physics quite a bit, and there are still glitches within my toxiclibs code, but overall this assignment was much more fun. This might be because of the hands-on aspect of the project or because I had fun partnering up with Rachel. I also really like working with the pico projector and arm. I want them so badly now.

Here are some extremely rough sketches: