Author: bookooBread

bookooBread – LookingOutwards 7

I’m gonna be real honest… I don’t think there was one project that I found I really liked. Personally, I don’t connect with this pixelated style and I found that most of these games lacked depth or were trying too hard to be deep and ended up coming across as cheesy. Most of the time these games couldn’t hold my attention for more than a few minutes. One that I did decently like, however, was Space Rat. It wasn’t trying to do anything deep and was just pretty endearing and fun to play.

I also somewhat enjoyed The Continental Drift because the nature imagery was well done, but I think I mainly liked it just because they played this night has opened my eyes as the background music…

Overall, I think these games are just not really my style, but that’s okay! I am still intrigued and excited to try out how I can make it something I’d consider “my style” or something I can connect with.

bookooBread-NFTReading

I think there is something to say about sort of playing the system here… If there is a way for marginalized groups, and people that actually want to make a difference, to leverage this current exploitive system in their favor to gain the upper hand in one of the only possible ways they can, they should maybe take that opportunity. In our current society, money is power. Artists and marginalized groups do not have either. We have protests, social media movements, and activism from grassroots orgs/”the people” but it feels like we’re just shouting back at ourselves right now. Like we are screaming and demanding all these things but no one is listening except the people that believe in the same shit. It’s because all the people making the decisions and with the power/money have their own agendas and do not want to dismantle the system because it works in their favor. It is only until the marginalized hold these positions of power that real change will be made – but in our current methods – that does not seem to be happening anytime soon. If this is one of the only ways to even the playing field and monetarily gain that upper hand in a short-term way… maybe it will be worth it in the longterm. I think it is naive to think that we can “beat” these oppressors with representation and speaking out… unfortunately our current society requires far, far more than that to actually make any real change. There are definitely caveats to this though, how do we know these people who are “good” now will stay good if they become powerful? Will this just create the same system we are trying to fight? By the time this power shift happens, will it be too late for our environment? These are all questions I do not have the answer to. I simply do not know what to think of NFT’s right now. I think it is still too new to me and I want to reframe from participating in a reactionary way – so I would like to wait and see how things develop more before I make any decisions. I don’t usually make decisions when I’m not sure about something… so I’m holding off for now.

I also do not know if this NFT world will be a long-term thing. I feel like technology develops and shifts so fast that there will be much better ways of making a more equitable digital art world/marketplace in the future. So why start investing in this thing that is really harmful and is definitely not the best that we can do? 

bookooBread-NFTImmersion

(In order of most captivating to least captivating)

https://foundation.app/PussyRiot/panic-attack-1-terrestrial-paradise-6824

Title: PANIC ATTACK 1. TERRESTRIAL PARADISE

Artist: Pussy Riot

I did a lot of digging into this group after seeing Golan scroll over one of their pieces in class and while I don’t think the artwork is necessarily my style – I feel like if NFT’s are to be used in some way right now – it should be for something like this –> the actual art should be inherently intertwined with new technology and digital forms of generating art that cannot be done physically, must be for a specific cause such as this group’s, artists are in some marginalized group(s) and are using NFT’s to gain power/voice. I feel like so far this is the only art I have found on Foundation that is really doing something. Also if you read their story, I feel like that is the truly captivating part.

https://foundation.app/ViktoriaModesta/spike-dance-5549

Title: Spike Dance

Artist: Viktoria Modesta (I’ve been following her work for a while and saw her post on Instagram about selling this project as her first NFT… there was some explanation about her justification but I’m just not sure how I feel about it)

https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/balancing-act-12792

Title: Balancing act

Artist: Jon Noorlander (I just really like some of this guy’s work visually speaking)

Title: Hope
Artist: Joanie Lemercier

https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/10443

Luckily this one is not being sold for much and is not on a (more) wasteful NFT platform… because if it was I’d be really sad. Needless to say, I really do not like this type of art – and unfortunately, a lot of the art I’ve seen on these platforms falls within this category. To me, this artwork is very similar to those shirts that people get that say like “nerd” or some stupid live laugh love sh** like that. It’s just like, what is the point of this art?? It just makes absolutely no impact whatsoever. But like I said, this is a lot better because at least something this stupid is being sold with little consequences – but stuff like this being sold with Ether or Bitcoin? Such. A damn. Waste. Your art better be revolutionary if you are going to be selling it with those kinds of consequences (obviously not at all would be best).

Overall, I’m finding it very hard to find any NFT that I like. What goes through my mind when I look at all these pieces is: is it worth it? As in, is this piece so revolutionary that it is worth having such a great cost on the environment/the other negative impacts? The answer is almost always no. There just has to be another way to do this. I feel like we as a human race can be a lot smarter than this… but I’m also not sure about that because historically we have been very very unintelligent in more ways than not.

I feel like so much of the art I’m seeing just does not spark any sort of critical thinking whatsoever. It is mostly just, like we discussed in class, eye candy. However, I’m also struggling to determine if I should even be making these types of judgments. Who am I to say what is art and what isn’t? Who am I to say if art has to be deep or not? Isn’t this just feeding right back into the issue of high art/low art/valuing some art over others/gatekeeping in the art world? I don’t have any type of qualification to justify that and I don’t think anyone should be able to, (even though I’m basically doing this right now oops) because if I can, the same wealthy/greedy art collectors already doing this can too. I guess it is just hard to justify selling what I consider eye candy at the price of an entire country’s worth of carbon production…

bookooBread – Creature

Species: Deep Sea Fourier

The idea for this creature began while doing some serious research on FFT’s after Golan told me it would be interesting if I could find a way to apply that to my spring creature. I was trying to think of all the ways I could use the frequency bins as a way to change some variable in my creature, so I coded up a quick sketch of a simple FFT using lines. When I saw what this looked like, the idea immediately came to me of this sort of deep-sea skeleton, gelatinous fish creature thing. I thought that the mic input could be used as a force to make the springs move in and out, sort of like a jellyfish-type movement. I drew up this sketch and the ideas just started flowing with all the different ways I could change its movement and look. I decided to use the look of the anchor/bob points on the spring as actual parts of the creature – so the anchor points were larger and stacked closer together to make a spine and the bobs on the end represented the sort of node things you find on a sea cucumber. I also wanted to make it have a sort of wriggle/slither effect so the movement in the water looked natural while it followed the mouse which is where that sinusoidal displacement comes from. When I first made the mouse-following functionality, the creature did not turn in the direction of the mouse because I was just using translate(). It totally took me out of the environment because it looked so unnatural, so I researched how to make something turn as it followed the mouse. I found a function that calculates the linear interpolation of an angle, and with Connie’s help because it was super last-minute, applied it onto my creature. The glowing, inspired by angler fish, was made by creating these donut shapes in a for-loop that decreased the alpha value with each iteration. The particles in the background were created using seamless noise loops and two arrays. The background was made with lerpColor() and lines mapped to the size of the canvas within a for-loop.

https://editor.p5js.org/bookooBread/sketches/l6dKqBEty

Things I didn’t have time for:

-Initially, I wanted to connect the bobs on the ends to each other going down, but I had to nix that idea for now.

-I also couldn’t figure out in time how to apply the second wiggle functionality that Golan and I did during office hours which was sad 🙁 it was so cool.

-I was going to put more sea creatures/sea plants in the water to make a more immersive environment

-Make the sound responsiveness more significant so it would read better

bookooBread – Loop

Hi I whipped this up super last minute I know it’s super bad and I didn’t follow the assignment with only using rects… but I didn’t have time to do anything as Golan already knows :(((( I still wanted to do a little something though :(((

BookooBread-LoopReading

I was really intrigued by the portion of the presentation about semantic satiation. I’ve always been so interested in why that happens, but I never really thought about the idea that is simply shifting our attention away from the meaning of the word to the sound of the word. When she said that repetition opens up new ways of hearing sound, it made me think about how music does exactly this. However, music does basically the opposite of semantic satiation. Rather than diluting the meaning like with the repetition of words, repetition in music only seems to amplify the experience or meaning we place on it. Whether it is playing a song on repeat, or within the actual music – repetition is an extremely important tool in music that allows the listener to participate.

BookooBread-LoopResearch

This loop almost reminds me of one of those Rube Goldberg machines with how each thing feeds into one other. I think the movement is really successful in this loop, the bounciness really adds to the cuteness factor.

 

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A post shared by Dave Whyte (@davebeesbombs)

I was really interested in this piece because of how well Dave Whyte used the negative space. I have done a bit of this but seeing his work was really inspiring for how I can use it in the future.

I was so drawn to the oddly satisfying series because anything that involves satisfying textures is my thing. These slices remind me a bit of what slices of a human body look like, it’s so cool and looks like a real-life video. Andreas’s work is by far my favorite!

bookooBread – Wallpaper

Final version (high res didn’t upload for first one):

I like this darker color palette better, for some reason when it exported the colors changed and I love it

Version 2: Experimenting with color variation and circle packing (left has ellipse grid, right does not)

Version 1: Primary colors and size gradient

This design actually was inspired by what I made for the repeated motif exercise. I coded these radial lines on the circles and thought it looked super cool. I took that basic premise and turned it into something completely different. After all of the circles were created, I wanted another layer to add depth to the pattern. With another double for-loop, I created randomly sized ellipses to cover the entire image… I really liked how it looked together.

I did not actually start from a sketch with this wallpaper, though I did plan a bit after I had my idea. After that, there was a lot of experimenting and pleasant surprises. Originally I like the idea of the size gradient in the first version, but I personally didn’t love how crowded it felt. So I wanted to try out a circle packing design. With Connie’s help, we wrote the circle packing algorithm and then I merged my code with the new code. I shifted the color randomness around until it became what it is in the last version, and fixed a bug with the radial lines on the circles. I really like how it came out! It kind of reminds me of a Persian rug in my living room at home. If I had more time I would’ve loved to take up Golan’s challenge to make all of the circles irregular. Sadly, I could not do this by today but I will try it in the future!

bookooBread-Readings03

After reading Tyler Hobbs’s Color in Generative Art, I was super inspired to try out some of the things he talks about. I took the idea of a gradient but applied it a bit differently. Instead of doing a color gradient, I did a size gradient. I think above all however, I was the most inspired by all the other blog posts on the side of the site. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and read about a third of all of his posts… After really loving all of the sketches from the flow fields blog post I decided to look into it myself to see if I could use that for my wallpaper and went down an even deeper rabbit hole and watched the entire perlin noise series on The Coding Train youtube. I talked with Golan and decided not to go down this route for my wallpaper, but I am still super happy I learned about all of these things and I’m very excited to experiment with them in the future (especially flow fields – I feel like I always resonate with flowy, more abstract visuals).