Portrait(s) in a Projected Creature
Nervous from Chloe Chia on Vimeo.
In the rush of things, I seem to have forgotten a few things. 1) The ability for art to elegantly express that which is hard to express, 2) the ability for art in catharsis, and 3) reaching out to people when in need of help.
I originally had numerous separate ideas for the assignments, but after numerous iterations and talk of being ‘poetic’, I realized that this creature that I made–originally intended to be a “live stress ball”–could have so much more meaning when placed into context. Especially if that context is my own studio in the Design school. Lately, I have been feeling very nervous in general about all of my classes, ever so precariously keeping the balance between them, outside activities, and mental states. The stress of it can be overwhelming, and leave one feeling very trapped as I do now.
But in the process of making the video, and watching my own creature almost ‘come to terms’ with his confines, I can’t help but wonder whether or not such stress and pressure that I feel is merely an artificial boundary I place upon myself. It is up to me to figure out, given the limitations upon my skills and my time, what am I capable of doing, rather than focusing just on the limits and failures.
This is definitely the same sort of thinking with which I approached these assignments, keeping it as simple as possible, and working with the code that I’m most comfortable with. On the programming end, there are still many things I would like to fix later on as I get more and more fluent in Processing. One of those things includes figuring out how to get the creature attracted to the mouse, since at the moment a mouse press only activates a different gravity vector (which, I admit, I modified throughout the process of filming). I couldn’t quite figure out how to recall each node that creates the spring skeleton of the creature…
Unfortunately Javascript mode doesn’t seem to like my sketch and refuses to run in the OpenProcessing applet… Will have to figure out how to work that kink.