Lumar-Reading03

Question 1A. Read the first 20 pages of “Generative Art Theory” by Philip Galanter (p.146-166). In your own words, and in just a few sentences, discuss an example of something you like which exhibits effective complexity. Where does your selection sit between total order (e.g. crystal lattice) and total randomness (e.g. gas molecules, white noise, static). Include an image which illustrates your selection.

EFFECTIVE COMPLEXITY for me, I think a great example is the gif assignment actually. It was part of my decision process for how I’d choose which idea for a gif to go with. With my intial idea of making a bird made of jelly that bobbled up and down with bezier curves and offset sin motion to control end points, the computer program would’ve been a heck of a lot of work for that specific desire when it could be more easily done (and better executed) in adobe aftereffects. Entire companies’ /softwares are built on making such transformations. In this, I wanted to choose a gif design that validated the use of a computer…..otherwise, it’s needlessly complex.

Question 1B. Quickly skim the remaining 10 pages of the article, in which Galanter outlines nine different problems with generative art (The Problem of Authorship; The Problem of Intent; The Problem of Uniqueness; The Problem of Authenticity; The Problem of Dynamics; The Problem of Postmodernity; The Problem of Locality, Code, and Malleability; The Problem of Creativity; The Problem of Meaning). Select one of these problems for which you yourself feel some sort of internal conflict or personal stake. Discuss your internal conflict. Which side of the argument do you come down on?

YES. VERY MUCH AGREE BODEN! Creativity is so frustrating! Historical creativity is so darn hard to achieve – and yes, I agree that psychological creativity is valid, but it really doesn’t translate as social creativity because it’s already been thought of – that is suuuuuch a struggle!!! Half the time, it’s the impediment to ‘why bother designing something along those lines’?  When I was choosing majors, I was thinking about in what area would I be good at vs what area is there that would be any different whether or not I decided on it. I had at one time, really really wanted to be an anesthesiologist, but while I was good at Bio, and Chemistry, and was confident in my work ethic to carry me through to be relatively ok, there would make no difference whether it was me as an anesthesiologist versus any other person who had a knack for numbers and sleepless nights. There was no extra drive or burning curiousity, no fuel for potential creativity outside simply the psychological. That’s not to say there will necesarily be any HC with my current major….but…..I’d like to think there’s a chance.

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Zarard-LookingOutwards03

Videorative Portrait of Randall Okita from Sergio Albiac on Vimeo.

Sergio Albiac created a project

“Painting a Videorative portrait (a generative, narrative and interactive video portrait) starts with collecting personal videos of the person portrayed, tagged by him/her with relevant concepts and descriptions. Then, using a custom developed tool, the artist “paints with meanings” and generates a video portrait, subtitled with generative personal narratives.” -quoted from his website. What I find most inspiring about the project is it’s ability to take something standard, traditional, antiquated and turn portraiture into a living breathing medium again. As we are able to more accurately and thoroughly represent life, for the majority of people it is not enough to simply have a picture. By encompassing time and memories within his piece, he takes the timeless medium of portraiture into the fourth dimension. One critique I have on the piece is that there was only one final product made. Had he done these portraits on several people we would be able to get a sense of the real powers of the tool. Additionally if he had released the tool so that people could make their own self portraits, it would have been much more powerful. Unfortunately the algorithm behind the tools that he created isn’t really disclosed through the video (or anything else). I know it responds to whatever photos you are tagged in and how you interact with the tool. Albiac is the one who created the response the user gets from the tool. Since he created the rules, his artistic sensibilities are pervasive. The effective complexity leans more in the realm of disorder. The only structure the piece really gets order from is the ability of the viewer to identify eyes, noes, ears and mouth. Because those elements are always there then the viewer can always classify the image as a face which brings comfort and consistency.

hizlik-LookingOutwards03

Click here to check out the website!

This project, Aurulia by Tom Beddard, and the technology he uses, is amazing! Like I mentioned in my LookingOutwards02 assignment, I love large-scale, 3d cityscapes and renderings, so when I saw a thumbnail that look looked like a city, I immediately clicked on it but was blown away once I started reading into it. Tom interprets Mandalay’s fractal formula in this cityscape way, somehow creating these scenes that don’t quite look repetitive like fractal algorithms generally look like. I absolutely love the detail in it, the realism yet abstraction of this impossible cityscape, and the fact that it was algorithmically generated. I am quite speechless really. The flowing streets and interesting outcropping of buildings, odd round “holes” or “dents” in the mass of flat buildings that almost create a “floor” like Coruscant from Star Wars… it’s all mesmerizing.

I do not know much about Mandalay’s fractal formula, but I do know what fractals are and how they’ve been used for 2D artworks and designs. I have never seen them in 3D before, and this video included in the site also blew me away with how easy it is to create them! It’s almost like cheating, like i could use any screenshot as an artwork but it looks like it actually had very minimal effort to create it. This project has a nice balance between order and disorder- it looks, feels and acts like a real city, but it’s actually created using the randomnes, disorderness yet orderliness of a fractal formula. Like I mentioned above, he managed to break away from the orderly repetitiveness of a fractal formula to create this somewhat organic and varying landscape.

Zarard-Reading03

Portrait of Cara Walker by Chuck Close Portrait of Cara Walker by Chuck Close

Effective Complexity

I like Chuck Close paintings. These exhibit effective complexity because the shapes and orientation of the grid is random. The colors are semi-random and rotate between skin tones and pure saturated hues. But the subject and content is always portraiture which is what gives his work order. If i had to choose his work does lie more towards having order, but the fact that you can’t identify a pattern to the color choices is what helps his work flourish in chromatic chaos.

The Problem of Meaning

Should generative art be about more than generative systems? This issue in the chapter takes a very strong “what art should be” approach. I personally think that art should always go beyond just being about the process, function, and properties of art. In my practice, art is a statement. If you aren’t saying something then what are you really contributing? This applies more so in the case of generative systems because the code and the autonomy are just a means to an end. The real fascination lies in what the code and autonomy is able to speak, and if it’s something that people couldn’t speak for themselves.

hizlik-AnimatedLoop

bw

I am not too proud of this project- I’m not sure why but there are some tasks that I just have no imagination for- I was mesmerized by all the great things I saw but had zero ideas for anything good. So I just coded two different types of loops out of experimentation and the first looked better (the second was based on squares). I guess I do better with more conceptual or themed projects. I also made a second version with different colors:

green

Here are some notes on the project:

img_7472

You can view the code on github, or see it below:

float x;
float y;
int count = 0;

void setup() {
  size(480, 480);
  background(0);
  noStroke();
  fill(255);
  ellipse(width/2, height/2, min(width, height), min(width, height));
  fill(255,0,0);
  
  float ballR = min(width, height)/2;
  float pathR = min(width, height)/2 - ballR/2;
  float mDiv = 1000.0;
  float t = millis()/mDiv;
  float x = width/2+pathR*cos(t);
  float y = height/2+pathR*sin(t);
  ellipse(x,y,ballR,ballR);
  
  for(int i=0; i<5; i++) {
    fill(200-(i*50), 0,0);
    mDiv /= 2;
    t = millis()/mDiv;
    ballR /= 2;
    pathR = pathR/2;
    x = x+pathR*cos(t);
    y = y+pathR*sin(t);
    ellipse(x,y,ballR,ballR);
  }
}

void draw() {
  count++;
  background(255);
  
  fill(0);
  ellipse(width/2, height/2, min(width, height), min(width, height));
  fill(255);
  float ballR = min(width, height)/2;
  float pathR = min(width, height)/2 - ballR/2;
  float mDiv = 1000.0;
  float t = millis()/mDiv;
  float x = width/2+pathR*cos(t);
  float y = height/2+pathR*sin(t);
  ellipse(x,y,ballR,ballR);
 
  boolean fillB = true;
  
  for(int i=0; i<5; i++) {
    noStroke();
    if(fillB) fill(0);
    else fill(255);
    fillB = !fillB;
    //fill(200-(i*50), 0,0);
    mDiv /= 2;
    t = millis()/mDiv;
    ballR /= 2;
    pathR = pathR/2;
    x = x+pathR*cos(t);
    y = y+pathR*sin(t);
    ellipse(x,y,ballR,ballR);
  }
  saveFrame();
}

ngdon-LookingOutwards03

Work: Tom Beddard’s Aurullia

links: http://sub.blue/aurullia, http://sub.blue/fractal-lab

I admire the stunning beauty of the visuals and the incredible amount of details in Tom Beddard’s Aurullia. It cleverly make use of maths and fractals, yet it feels fine tuned and distinguish itself from many other fractal art that looks like math demos. This way of concealing the technology in the piece is what I always liked. It also make me wonder about the details of its implementation.

The algorithm is based on fractals, using a type of Mandelbox called Mandalay. The use of subtle colors and how the parameters are tweaked to have the effect reveal the artist’s aesthetics.

The work has effective complexity on multiple levels: the terrain is random, yet the architecture on it seems to be constructed by intelligent lifeforms. Much of the architecture is orderly, yet there are small variations between them. The artist can control the general look, but much is generative.

ngdon-Reading03

Question 1A

I think a bottle of water and a sack of bricks are two perfect examples of effective complexity. The bottle is mass manufactured, looking the same as any other bottle of the same brand, yet the water in it is flows around in chaotic behavior; And the reverse is true with a sack of bricks.

Question 1B
I think the problem of authorship is a very interesting conflict. I’m always thinking about whether I or my computer is the artist, and even worse, what if I write a program that writes programs to make generative art, then which of us is the artist? I think one way of arguing is that the artist not the one who made the piece, but the one who found it, the first person/machine/thing to say “This is art.”

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kadoin-Interruptions

kadoininterruptions

  1. The canvas is square
  2. The lines are all the same length
  3. the lines seem to be evenly spaces and rotated around the midpoint
  4. the lines angles are random, but for the most part, are generally vertical or horizontal
  5. There are areas where there are gaps in the regular pattern of rotated lines. They seem organized in a semi-random way, but I can’t pinpoint what the method of organization is.

I used randomGaussian a lot for this assignment to rotate the lines, and to organize my gaps. I’m a fan of vertical lines as opposed to horizontal lines, so I made the lines mostly semi-vertical. I also figured if this were printed, like the original, all I would have to do is rotate the paper to make them seem horizontal.

The gaps were the tricky part to imitate. I ended up removing randomly sized sections of lines from an area using randomGaussian before the lines were drawn. It has generally the same effect, but it’s not 100% and I just can’t quite put my finger on it.

Xastol – LookingOutwards03

A generative piece that I really enjoyed is Aether by Thomas Sanches and Gilberto Castro. The piece is, “A series of studies in geometric symmetry, dynamic particles and interactivity on a large multitouch screen.”

I really admire the interactivity and how the artists allow for users to explore different ways of altering the geometric structures. Interactivity is something I’ve always been interested in, and I believe that giving the user the power to control the outcome of pieces is really important for developing a more personal relationship with the consumer.

The algorithm that generated the work had to involve a lot of geometry, physics, and had to know how certain points react to one another and how they also react to the entire geometric system.

The artwork’s effective complexity is the geometric shape that the user interacts with. For anyone looking at it, it’s obvious that it’s just a random shape. However, the system becomes complex when the user alters it: each user will manipulate the piece in a different way, therefore allowing for more complexity and a different outcome. The idea of order and disorder is balanced by allowing the system to return to its original state (similar state) even after it was altered.

Aether Website – http://codigogenerativo.com/works/aether/

Xastol – Reading03

1) As a young boy growing up in a desert wasteland, clouds always caught my attention. I believe they’re a good example of effective complexity because they’re easy to depict; everyone can tell a cloud by it’s random shape. At the same time, clouds are very complex in their formations and volume of gasses (each cloud is unique).

Here are some clouds formed in the Arizona deserts:

clouds_1

clouds_2

clouds_3

2) The problem I have the most internal conflict with is “The Problem of Creativity”. I often question how my work is unique to that of other’s (i.e – how my aesthetics/purpose differs while creating art in a systematic medium). In terms of this problem, my goal is to create work to counter it; I want my work to be undoubtedly me.

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kander – Reading03

1a: I think a honeycomb displays effective complexity. It’s on the more ordered side of the spectrum, as the tessellation of hexagons is fairly noticeable, but from far away, the  actual shape of the honeycomb itself (the larger shape that the little hexagons form) can seem random, rather than generated by an algorithm of tiny hexagons.

1b: I read the section titled The Problem of Authorship.  I think that it’s rather nitpicky to complain about an artist not personally making the brushstrokes/lines/whatever medium himself. After all, artists have had assistants to carry out their artistic vision forever. It takes the same sort of visualization and insight – if not more – to give a machine instructions to make art as it does to do it yourself.

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kander – LookingOutwards03

Pixtil is a French textile design company that creates generative textile design patterns. Each time their program, called Génératif, is run, a unique textile design is generated, which can either be printed with ink or weaved (with each pixel representing the crossing of a warp and weft thread). The patterns are generated in Processing, and then converted to a binary file so it can be printed. There are some limitations on each series – for example, they might be different configurations of the same components, or they might have the same color scheme, or they might be symmetrical. From what I can tell, color is generated from within a specified range, and shapes are randomly generated, but have an algorithm that places them. For the symmetrical designs, perhaps 1/4 of the design is generated and it is then rotated accordingly to fill the other 3 quadrants?

The patterns (and the cloths that carry them) are often very lighthearted and carefree, and the artists’ understanding of textile patterns clearly makes its way into the art, as many of the patterns feel like they belong on fabric. The randomness is definitely implied – the algorithm doesn’t generate a completely repetitive pattern, but there is repetition in the shapes that are used. Each shape that the algorithm generates “matches” the others of that pattern. I applaud the artists for using code-generated art in a non-digital format – I’d imagine that it’s not that difficult to transfer the pattern to the loom once it’s generated, but it’s still an interesting application of generative art. More complicated algorithms is probably the next step for Pixtil – right now, the patterns feel very digital. But still a cool project!

Company Page

Creative Applications Article about their 2015 table napkin series

One of their table napkins One of their table napkins

Below is a video detailing an earlier design from 2013, and giving an overview of their project

Lumar-AnimatedLoop

lumar-loop2

Process:

scan-4

I had initially really wanted to try and make a bird made of jelly  – I thought it would be really fun to mess around with the physics and bouncy bird head-drag- motion as well as the jellied/jittered (every decreasing amplitude/increasing frequency of a sin wave) contours of the animal to suggest a type of material composition. That being said, that was the ideal, but design is all about how to address a need within constraints in material, skill and time. Hence….I went with the top option that I knew for sure I could complete in time executed with enough sensitivity to be pleasant visually as opposed to my initial ideal. Somewhere below I will elaborate on this design in regards to effective complexity.

scan-11scan-9  scan-12

Some inspiration:

screen-shot-2016-09-21-at-1-19-47-am hard-to-analyze

Really hard to analyze how to do this twirling animation in flat shapes:

This is my attempt at figuring out rotation:

scan-10

ughanotherideagone

Sin motion! Offset sin motion great for chicken head drag – don’t get it? Check out the youtube video of chicken head drag:

chickenhead

With my intial idea of making a bird made of jelly that bobbled up and down with bezier curves and offset sin motion to control end points, the computer program would’ve been a heck of a lot of work for that specific desire when it could be more easily done (and better executed) in adobe aftereffects. Entire companies’ /softwares are built on making such transformations. In this, I wanted to choose a gif design that validated the use of a computer…..otherwise, it’s needlessly complex.

The sin squirming worm utilized a quick sin function to determine x position and was easier and more accurately done through a written program

ughanotherideagoneagain

 

lumar_loop

Drewch – Interruptions

Interruptions:

  1. The lines are the same length
  2. The lines are kind of arranged in a square grid system
  3. More lines than random are either horizontal or vertical (varies per generated piece but consistent within each)
  4. Line angles are random, except for ones stated in #2
  5. Interruptions occur in patches, random in size

 

This annoyed me so much that I can’t work on it anymore, so here’s the not-really-done-but-its-done Interruptions. I quickly realized that making rows and cols of lines wasn’t going to work very well for creating interruptions inside a nested for loop. A possible solution would be to have a function that makes a map of where the interruptions will be beforehand but I’m still confused about 2D arrays in p5.js and it’s driving me nuts (I’m going to use Processing until I understand how Javascript does 2D arrays. Maybe not even then.). For the sake of my AnimatedLoop, I choose to put this down. Looking forward to seeing Golan’s solution(s).

sketch

Nice, and it’s not embedding. Here’s a gif instead.

goddamn

Xastol-Interruptions

1) There are small random lines.
2) The lines all have the same size.
3) The lines are all black
4) The background is white (tint of gray).
5) For the most part, the lines seem to be evenly spaced.
6) The lines are generated at different angles than the ones around them.
7) There are some interruptions (spaces without lines).
8) The lines follow one general direction (may be vertical or horizontal).

xastol-p5-interruptionsrecode

Looking at the piece, I noticed that there would be a few difficulties I would have to deal with, the obvious one being how do I get lines to show up across the board relatively evenly. My first attempt started with making an entirely new line class that would give random angles to each line. However, this became difficult when applying in a list and trying to display (the display function was being buggy). Instead, I decided to go a more direct way and created a double-for loop. This ended up being a lot more time-efficient and easier to manage when looking at. The problem I still struggle with is getting larger random white-space to occur. In my code, I applied randomGaussian() to the randomness of the y-values for each line. This creates some disruption in the general pattern, but is still not big enough.

I really appreciate how such a simple-looking piece is actually pretty complex when applying to code. I really admire Molnar’s ability to make the computer produce human-like patterns (it seems as though a person drew out the work instead of programmed it).

Github Code: https://github.com/xapostol/60-212/tree/master/Deliverables%203%20-%20xastol/Interruptions_p5

Drewch – Reading03

Bound - Plastic Studios Bound – Plastic Studios

Question 1A: I think Bound rests neatly near the center of the effective complexity curve. Although a lot of elements in the environment seem disorganized and random, they slowly reassemble as the protagonist approaches. The ground ripples and the cubic waves crest and fall, but everything disorderly has some algorithmic reason for it.

Question 1B: The Problem of Meaning – Let’s be real, this is a debate everywhere there is art, no matter what it is or how it was made. Meaning can exist, or it might not. Meaning could be in the eye of the beholder, or it could be in the mind of the creator. Maybe that meaning is expressed well, and both parties understand it. Maybe it isn’t, or it’s ambiguous enough to have many interpretations. Suzie Silver would say “It’s not critical”, but in turn, I would say “I don’t care”.

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Drewch – LookingOutwards03

6948432508_10c0bb44ae_b

My real favorite generative work so far is Forms by Quayola and Memo Akten, but since we looked at that in class, I’ll talk about another artist that I was impressed by instead: Markos Kay. I really like his work Insect Traps (2010), where he supposedly pits an insect and a bunch of microscopic things in mortal combat…? Regardless of what’s actually happening, the work generates really beautiful prints and raises odd questions. The geometric composition (mostly) controls the bounds of where the shapes can fall and bounce, and the insect is trapped inside while it tries to escape the onslaught. That’s as much as I can say about how his code might work, I’m really left guessing about how he handled lighting and colors and irregular physics and what-not (how do I do gaussian blur??).

Markos Kay is still able to show his artistic personality in his algorithms, however. He often creates these kinetic animations that have weird, organic motion, usually trying to emulate microscopic organisms. The chaos in this piece is from the microbial debris that is falling all over the place, sometimes even tumbling out of the box they’re contained in, but otherwise, the microbes are bound by this box, along with the insect. The box provides a reliable geometric composition that contrasts interestingly with the chaos going on inside. The effective complexity of this piece comes from this balance.

 

hizlik- LookingOutwards02

[Sorry for being late]

ovalwalker

I’ve always been inspired by large-scale projects and artworks, especially in the realm of video games/3D models. For example, I am fascinated by sprawling Minecraft creations and super-detailed, vast landscapes and cityscapes created for games like Grand Theft Auto. In movies like Star Wars, detailed 3D renderings of cities that go as far as the eye can see (like Coruscant) have also inspired me (which just resulted in using them as computer wallpapers). I’ve also in the past dabbled in Google Earth model-ripping software that allowed you to export real-world 3D cities into 3DS Max to work with.

The latest in the world of large-scale projects is perhaps the largest of them all, No Mans Sky. It is a space exploration game where you can visit planets, starships, and space stations by flying around in a ship, collecting minerals and materials to trade and craft with. What makes this game so unique is the complex mathematical algorithms and logic used to randomly generate planets, creatures, plant life, atmosphere, and “properties” (gravity, toxicity, etc). The team developed this in-house, with the help of a team of mathematicians and a graphic designer. Although randomly generated biology existed before, applying them to such a variety of 3D model applications on such a large-scale, and public, project has never been done before.

Details about the game’s creation, the methods used and about the team are available in this interview on Kotaku.

Guodu-LookingOutwards02

Senior Year of High School Inspiration

The first time I learned about computational art was my senior year of high school in my first graphic design class, I sat next to a buddy of mine who was a “hacker”. At the time, I didn’t understand what this latter word meant or what programming really was but he showed me some abstract “art” that “he told the computer to do.” At first I thought, why would you do this when you can just make it in illustrator, but then he outputted like 20 different compositions in a few seconds and I thought, “woah”.

One Field Trip in 2014

The second time that computational and interactive art left a deep impression on me, which inspired me to  to take 15-110 and attempt 15-112 sophomore year, was when I went on a design field trip my first year at CMU. We toured a a few places but the two that I still remember to this day are two NYC design agencies with an appreciation for coding (I mean one of them literally has the word code in their name): Code and Theory and Breakfast. These two places made me realize that designers can program and programmers can design, that these two fields are not mutually exclusive.

__________

Code and Theory

10295434_10152465507893716_2280347349063362912_o Code and Theory presentation (2014)

Code and Theory showed us their website upon entering their studio, check it out below or optimally at their website:

code-and-theory

code-and-theory_1

So as flashy and visual candy as this is, for me, this was the first time I linked together design and programming as a way to visually communicate. Code and Theory could have easily decided not to include supplementary animations and interactions to go with their descriptions, but they didn’t and I’m glad.

At the time I didn’t ask how and who created these animations for their website, but now I understand that these were definitely coded, mayhaps in Javascript.

__________

Breakfast

10550174_10152465509323716_4255258074782758469_o visiting Breakfast with some of my peers (2014)

Breakfast blew my mind with this project: The Electromagnetic Dot Screen 

And here’s more of the Dot Display in action:

Breakfast was commissioned by TNT to create this interactive Billboard advertising a new crime-solving show Perception. The protagonist can apparently see anagrams among large blocks of text so Breakfast “revived a sign technology of yesteryear to create an anagram-finding experience on the streets of New York”. Zolty, Breakfast’s creative director and founder, explained that they had to write their own software in order to have the dots flip from black to white 15 times faster than it was originally designed to, so when anyone walked by, the interaction was in real-time.

In some ways this project reminds me of Text Rain by Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback (1999). Both are an interactive installation that tracks body movement, allowing the audience to play with letters and words. Breakfast’s installation and execution are definitely more complex in its medium, code, and technology, but I find that both concepts to have people’s movements tracked to interact with a screen (digital / physical) are simple and similar.

While I don’t imagine myself ever being the programmer on a team, I think Breakfast demonstrates what I believe can happen when a small team that has a diverse range of experiences and skill sets unifies. I really admire Breakfast’s ambition and philosophy of improving “how connected devices can look and act in the real world”. “Technology doesn’t need to stand out and look like technology. It can blend in and hide the complexity behind great design.”

“The future is not a touch-screen on a wall”

Some more pictures below from this memorable visit:

10694464_10152465509448716_8674539806132835402_o We experienced it up close! 10687884_10152465509698716_6186259141845030745_o 40,000 flip dots 10699821_10152465509358716_4486998966672864596_o Meeting Andrew Zolty, the creative genius, director, and founder of Breakfast 10549111_10152465509888716_8006350318872927708_o Checking out another project, Points, a robotic sign system

cambu-clock

clock [github]
cambu-clock

My clock was originally inspired by an animated GIF I quite enjoy that shows a series of squares entering and leaving the frame. To begin my process, I did some sketching on ‘grided’ and ‘cubular’ shapes. Then, I began drawing in Sketch to work out more of the visual fidelity. The units in my clock combine both traditional and non-standard ideas. I’m a big fan of AM/PM clocks, which I integrate using blue gradient colours for PM and yellow for AM. But, I also wanted to explore the notion of a non-standard sub-hour time units, to achieve this, the ‘hour squares’ fill in at a rate that’s not quite a second, but far from a minute. As far as the actual building was concerned, the experience was consistently frustrating. A lot of the features and tweaks I expected to be easy to build were actually quite tricky 😉

screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-5-18-29-am

screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-5-15-59-am

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Lumar-LookingOutwards03

GO TO 2 min 15 secs into the video!

Ἁρμονία【巡音ルカ・初音ミク】[Processing Minim Video] from 4Y4 on Vimeo.

I love the delicate, incredibly sensitive motion of the little ‘line spider’ that reacts almost magnetically to the position of other lines – the process of drawing the lines becomes faster and faster the more lines there are already – the spider grows more ‘legs’ to make the connections – the seemingly erratic yet controlled movement is mesmerizing and the path left behind looks like delicately spun silk with a beautifully controlled yet free pattern. There is a cultivated randomness with beautiful visual rhythm that seems to reflect the music of the video.

The color’s are controlled by what areas the spider is magnetically drawn to. I love it. Code wise…..man – that’s tough. Perlin noise used to determine how far the moving spider point needs to be from another existing vertex to connect – if the vertex is close enough at a certain point in time according to a noise funciton – a line is made and the creation of that line contributes to the vector that determines the spider’s direction? It’s definitely more complicated. But it was hard to find more about this piece in a language I understand. (as in…..english)

That being said, here’s another piece that I absolutely loved by Chris Riebschlager – http://the816.com/

To play with his program in the browser:

http://fun.the816.com/neobrush/

 

neobrush-1

neobrush-0

One of my all time favorite artists ever is american impressionist John Singer Sargent. His effortlessly beautiful brush work is to DIIIIIIEEEE for. I love it – there’s a suggestion of movement and form that leaves the mind’s eye filling in the gaps as the eye is drawn across the piece endlessly. I feel some of that in Chris’s brush work above.

The rest of his aesthetic does tend toward computational generated textured brush like strokes/patterns and movement. Another of his projects was a program that took user inputted strokes and made them look like monet’s multicolored paint clumps. An instant ‘paint like monet’ moment.

How’d he do it? I’m guessing he ran an existing image through the program which picked up random select colors from where the brush is, and then with some measure of controlled randomness (gaussian?) created colors for the indibidual swirling lines that are bezier controlled by values based on the mouse direction/speed.

Lumar-Interruptions

PLEASE HAVE FUN CLICKING:

sketch

You’ll have to refresh to a new ‘movie’ to get new and different interruptions from the audience.

I had a lot of fun with this assignment! And…yes, it’s not exactly a recreation, but the code make the recreation would just be taking out the frameCount element in the perlin noise part of the draw function/just take a screen shot of the program when it first starts.

screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-8-31-50-pm screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-8-32-55-pm screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-8-33-04-pm screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-9-02-13-pm

Essentially, I am making an array that holds all the object lines of a row, and then putting that series of row arrays into my giant lines array, which is now arranged by lines[i][j] = a line in row i and column j. Easy! Kind of like a 2d array. Ish. The perlin noise function is used to determine whether a line should draw or not. Essentially by making the increment by which the x and y of the lines reaaaaally small to zoom into an area of the perlin wave – given that, the closer a line is to another, the closer the noise output value – since noise is only generated between 0 and 1, that given value can determine whether it is drawn or not depending on a specific ratio of how empty you want the canvas. (MUCH THANKS TO PERLIN! And Kaleb was kind enough to have explained the concept behind it as well!)

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From Monday:

screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-2-09-30-am

Simple for loop/grid structure generating lines with somewhat non-uniform random rotation. I’m going to continue playing with limits and Gaussian randomness. And then maybe throw in some Perlin noise to achieve the interruptions – or make it interactive; I’ve been itching to throw in some physics or something like pseudo particle trails that eat up the lines to achieve the random empty spaces.

If anyone else would like to look into this – here’s a link to a lecture on types of randomness!

October 14

 

Jaqaur – Interruptions

Click to generate a new interruptions.

jaqaur_interruptions

Here is a link to my code on Github.

The easy part of this assignment was drawing the lines. I counted that Molnar’s “Interruptions” were about fifty lines by fifty lines, so I did the same. Using nested for loops, I drew lines at randomly generated angles, with their centers all the same distance apart.

The hard part was making the interruptions (the “holes” in the picture) look like Molnar’s. At first, I had every line decide based on a random number whether to exist or not (with odds of about 9/10 of existence). That distribution was too even, though, and didn’t make the big holes I wanted. That led me to create my more complicated “interrupt” method, which creates a random number of “interruptions,” each of a random size. An “interruption,” in this method, is a clump of lines that collectively decide not to exist. An interruption starts at a random spot (indexed from 1-2500), turns that line’s angle to 100 (rather than something between -PI and PI), and then moves left(-49), right(+49), up (-1), or down (+1) and continues this until it runs out of size. If a line has an angle greater than 10 (eg 100), it will not be drawn later.

This creates irregularly shaped clumps. When I first tried this, I had a few big clumps that looked like Molnar’s, but I didn’t have enough little ones throughout the image. So, I upped the number of clumps, and reduced the clump size. Most of the time, this leads to a few big “clumps” (actually made out of smaller clumps) and then some smaller ones. I think there’s a strong resemblance between mine and the original, although it’s a little hard to judge from only five examples.

ngdon-animatedloop

trippytorus

https://github.com/LingDong-/60-212/tree/master/animatedloop

ngdon-animatedloop

The vision come to me suddenly; I didn’t know why a torus, why flying tapes, why in these psychedelic colors, but I just knew I want to make it.

As a 3D animation with thousands of moving parts is quite complicated, I tried to first break down the problem into small parts before solving it. A torus is a circle of circles, and a tape is mainly defined by a series of coordinates. So first I made a series of points orbit around a common center, which is easy. Than I generated a bunch of these orbiting points around a circle, and render tapes based on the coordinates of all the points.

The result looks very similar to what I envisioned. I believe I used the transformation matrix effectively so that I achieved the effect in relatively concise code. However some parts of the image has anti-alias while other parts don’t, which is a bit weird if looked at carefully.

I thought about how I can go further: Perhaps I can create a series of animation, in each of them colorful flying tapes form into a different shape: a sphere, a cylinder, a person, etc and form a style.

photo-on-9-22-16-at-6-06-pm

Claker-Clock

Calder Clock

For my clock, I wanted to emulate the movement of a mobile. I wanted the elements of this mobile to come from Calder’s animal drawings and wire sculptures, as I have always liked those and wished that he put them on his mobiles. To do this, I made a little application that loaded in an image and stored my mouse clicks. I traced Calder’s images and printed out the necessary coordinates to recreate them. I then brought the coordinates over to my clock program. I played around a lot with how the pieces could move in a way that looks  somewhat natural but also represents time. In the end, there are 12 animals, and the number of animals that appear on the screen represents the current hour. ˇThe animals rotate around in a circle once per minute.

An early attempts at trying to figure out how the animals should move. I felt like this was too messy to be read as a clock An early attempt at trying to figure out how the animals should move. I felt like this was too messy to be read as a clock the program I made that allowed me to trace and store the drawing's coordinates The program I made that allowed me to trace and store the drawing’s coordinates Planning! Planning!
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