Category Archives: Uncategorized

chen

10 Feb 2015

I’m going to visualize data about rating on different albums based on different music magazines and websites. The object is to tell the listener which media are the most proper with his/her own taste in music selection.

I was inspired by this graph, which intend to tell people which is Radiohead’s best album in 21 century.屏幕快照 2015-02-09 下午11.25.04

So the idea occurred to me, that we should find new music basing on the media that share the closest taste with. And analyzing rating data on different albums might be a good solution.

oie_1074649QFrdPMVm

The first scratch is based on an album’s rating, the area of the medium corresponding to its normalized rating. The second shows a certain medium’s taste, categorized by decades, listed 50-100 highest rated albums.

If the design come true, I would definitely use it to find new albums.( • ̀ω•́ )

dantasse

09 Feb 2015

CheeseHoods: a block of Swiss cheese as dense as your neighborhood. By @dantasse.

CheeseHoods are blocks that look like Pittsburgh neighborhoods. They have holes in them like Swiss cheese. The denser the neighborhood is, in terms of dwellings per acre, the fewer holes it has.

Why neighborhood blocks? I thought it’d be fun to have a jigsaw puzzle of Pittsburgh, really. Plus, just as playing with world maps helps kids learn country names, playing with your city might help you learn more about it.

Why the holes? Density is important. Jane Jacobs wrote about it as one of the four most important characteristics in creating vibrant neighborhoods. Dwelling density, in particular, is quite important; human density can just indicate overcrowding, but dwelling density indicates vitality. I was interested to explore what density looks and feels like in 3D. Putting holes through a neighborhood seemed like an easy way to do so. Plus, it gives the least dense neighborhoods a rather icky pock-marked feel, while thriving denser ones are pleasantly solid, so this gives a really visceral feel to “density is good”.

Pictures

bloomfield

just Bloomfield, above.

Below, all of Pittsburgh.

pittsburgh

central oakland

Central Oakland is a shining example of density, but you can see right through Greenfield (below).

greenfield

Code’s on github. Not embedding it here because there’s a lot. I used some tools from another repo (get_dwelling_densities.py) plus some census data to calculate dwelling density for each neighborhood, then computed a json file of all the borders of each neighborhood and random hole locations (nghd_to_shape.py), then finally slurped those into a last script that created objects in Rhino (rhino_script.py).

Play with ’em:

Bloomfield by dantasse on Sketchfab

Pittsburgh by dantasse on Sketchfab

 

Sketches

IMG_20150209_212039

Lenticular Animation_Priya

I looked at various artists online, found most of them on tumblr. I have collected all my inspirations on pinterest, here.

I was inspired the most by artist Dave Whyte and his tumblr Bug and Bees . I appreciate his aesthetic taste. He has used simple geometric forms to create gifs. Out of his creations,  I found squares and circles to be most appealing. This piece creates optical illusion of motion by using squares and circles.

I decided to create a something simple as Dave, which should use only two geometric forms. I wanted to create an illusion of a double wave using arrangement of squares and circles and using motion of rotation.

lenticular

export

Program is here:

import gifAnimation.*;

GifMaker gifExport;
int frames = 0;
int totalFrames = 90;
float turn = 0;

void setup() {
size(400, 400);
background(120);
smooth();
noStroke();
// rectMode(CENTER);
gifExport = new GifMaker(this, "export.gif", 100);
gifExport.setRepeat(0);
}
void draw_rotating_circle(float x, float y, float diameter, float r) {
translate(x, y);
rotate(r);
//fill(0);
ellipse(0, 0, diameter, diameter);
resetMatrix();
}

void draw_rotating_rectangle(float x, float y, float rect_size, float r) {
translate(x, y);
rotate(r);

rect(0, 0, rect_size, rect_size);
resetMatrix();
}

void draw() {
background(255);

float rows = 0;
while (rows < 8) {
float column = 0;
while (column < 8) {

fill(0);
draw_rotating_circle( 42+ rows * 40, 42+ column * 40, 35, turn+rows+column);
fill(255);
draw_rotating_rectangle( 50+ rows * 40, 50+ column * 40, 27, turn+rows+column);
fill(0);
draw_rotating_rectangle( 54+ rows * 40, 64+ column * 40, 12, turn+rows+column);
column = column + 1;
}
rows = rows+ 1;
}
turn = turn + (0.07);
export();
}

void export() {
if(frames < totalFrames) {
gifExport.setDelay(20);
gifExport.addFrame();
frames++;
} else {
gifExport.finish();
frames++;
println("gif saved");
exit();
}
}

I also looked at tessellation and transformations by Escher. I was especially inspired by his square to butterfly tessellation.

escher08

I attempted to create a gif out this tessellation but it isn’t working the way I want to. I found this assignment particularly interesting.  I am planning to create tessellation gifs.

 

dantasse

06 Feb 2015

Smile at your webcam, and it will draw you a tree. The longer you smile, the fuller your tree will be.

Screen Shot 2015-02-06 at 6.17.03 PM

Why? It’s a simple hack to put a couple of ofx addons together, and I think it’s kind of interesting to control your computer with facial expressions. Okay, there’s the dystopian-future-world where you have to smile all the time, sure, terrible. But also, what if, instead of shifting modes in Vim with goofy keystrokes, what if I could just smile instead? What if it were like a piano pedal, giving you extra ways to input stuff?

Plus, programmatically generated trees are cool.

Video of it in action:

Code: on github. Uses ofxCv and ofxProcTree.

jackkoo

05 Feb 2015

Earth, A Primer. A generative simulation that works as an interactive textbook showing how terrains are formed.

I’ve always been interested in generative terrain, mostly in the context of video games. There have been many examples of terraforming in games. Early on in the Simcity 2000, you were able to change the terrain in which you build your city. That involved height adjustments and ways to paint on foliage. There have been more games released since then that do a much more sophisticated job and have their core mechanics focused on terraforming. From Dust introduced more interactions between different types of terrain, such as water and lava creating soil. Then there are examples such as the siggraph demo with the kinect sandbox -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1M3ZtXV7_k

The special part about Earth, A Primer, is its focus on making accurate depictions of terrain interactions. I’ve always thought a lot about the sketches that we are required to draw. I’m used to coding generative forms, then finding interesting aspects of it to emphasize. It was rather strange to require sketching for generative forms since you don’t always know what they look like. The terraforming involved in SimCity 2000, From Dust, and Kinect Sandbox are not really the most realistic depections of terrain. Earth, A primer makes me feel that there is a value to sticking to specific plan rather than finding opportunities in generative form.

 

 

2 1

Here’s a generative art piece in which the artist did no coding. This guy took images of maps and applied them as a sort of bump map inside a software called World Machine. World Machine has been used by game companies such Microsoft Games, and graphics companies such as Nvidia. Its quite an amazing software but produces rather ugly results without using any post processing. He does some sort of blending with the maps and the terrain generator to create these bleeding map images.

There’s a bit of conflicting thought to my attitude towards this piece. My initial response was, wow that fractal really reminds me of civilization and thats really awesome. However, I found out that they were not fractals at all. Instead, they are just maps mixed with a terrain generator.

I’m still uncertain whether I care more about the process or the result. When I first began making procerdural work, I thought thought it was important to make everything out of code. However, as I work more in practical environments, I realize that making procedural objects in games often take more time than modelling the objects themselves. I started shifting towards modelling objects and focusing my code to enhance the material and rendering. I got more of a “the result is more important” attitude.

The excitement of seeing this piece then the disappointment of knowing that it is not fractal based makes me question result vs process once again…