Soooo what to do.
lots of grand ideas, but little time and still so many skills to learn techniques to hone, things to experiment with.
So what is it that excites me ?
Large scale projections lights, interactivity, e-media that’s detached from computers.
seems like a fair starting point.
The group process was quite enjoyable, the group dynamic was great with everybody participating. Each person had ideas to contribute and were enthusiastic and supportive of others. Everyone was keen to be involved in all aspects of the project. The Main difficulty wad trying to organise time when we could all get together, made patricularly difficult as we were split across 3 campases these problems were made worse by the fact that when we did get together equipment and rooms were not always available.
We all worked well together which was fortunate considering the limited time we allmanaged to get together.
Everyone seemed to have a similar mental image of how the instilation would work. Having said that it did require a bit of disipline when something didn’t match that internal picture not to automatically say it was wrong but to rather just pause take it in and reflect on whether it was wrong different or better. This was also one of the more freeing and enjoyable aspects of group work. Another was the need to let go and not overwork everything it wouldn’t be fair to put my own fears, insecurities and pefectionism on other members of the group so if people seemed happy then it was ok, just because it could be honed didn’t mean it needed to be. It forced a big picture aproach rather than getting bogged down in detail.
This is something that I need to try to bring into my normal practice rather than only stopping once there is either no time or energy left.
Overal a very rewarding project, that the whole group contributed to and was pretty pleased with the outcome.
Projection – computers – logs and found objects
these very bad pics show the end result.
A table with bread and jam and wine, looking out the window to a vibrant blue sky, in the background we are surrounded by grainy images of people eating jam, large obscene amounts of Jam, quite a haunting / disturbing soundtrack is playing and the room is filled with the sickly sweet smell of wine and jam.
The projection reflected of the glass to make a double image with nice silhouettes of the items on the table. All in all it was quite an interesting space to be in. (The dodgy pics from my mobile don’t do it justice)
Thought about previous and current uses for the space, a strange space buried in the bowels of the building. Looked like a place to hide be alone and daydream / think. We also like to chalange the physical location of the space, you travel deep in to the building to find a place to look out onto the world. A solitary space but is infused whith the souls of the dreamers and skivers of he past. Strong ties to jam and video editing. Window represents the dreams and desires of those finding solitude in the bowels of the factory.
A group project.
Yes normally that would instil fear and pain, but its great when you work with a group who are interested, not just along for the ride.
My previous experience of group work at Uni was all bad, well mostly non existent, I ended up doing the whole of the groups work, apart from the documentation, which I only fleshed out and did the imagery for (Not the final layout, which I am grateful for as I hate documentation). But that was computing and this was e-media, I was ready to see how it would go.
I’m generally pretty bad at choosing people to work with not sure why exactly, I guess I’m not a fan of anal perfectionists, but it turns out I have those tendencies (when it comes to assignments) So I tend to go for the casual relaxed amiable sort of person I would like to be, only to find they are so relaxed they don’t really give a shit, and a pass is fine, and if some fool looks like they will do all the work and they don’t need to bother then all the better.
Yes I am that fool, well maybe not fool, my view is I am studying for self growth, not for a piece of paper. If I only pass then I am only learning/growing half as much as I could.
Way off topic now. Turns out the groups were chose for us, and my group turned out great.
Phew.
Google Wave test, if you dont have a wave account you probably wont see anything.
[wave id="googlewave.com!w+Kf5im4tkB" bgcolor=#ffffff color=#000000 ]
Ambient Animation – Interactive Art – Intelligent Art
A couple of thoughts spawned directly from this project
An inspiration portal – ideas concepts /phrases bubble in to existence different colours shapes sizes etc waft on by, you can catch them open them up and explore them or just enjoy their patterns as they waft past. Could be connected to rss feeds, twitter social network sites etc or even just image/ video searches of key words.
Aware paintings, paintings that react to environemt , choose palates based on surroundings content changes as a result of motion detection and or ambient noise. Face detection allowing a picture to know when its being looked at react to the presence of people, build up some sort of relation ship with the viewer.
Memory pool, people show images to painting (also email your picture content of interest), it captures them adding aspects of them to future images. weaving scenes out of a collage of images form both recent and distant past.
While working on this project I toyed with things from motion, detection face detection, animation from audio wave forms to mention a few mostly experimening with other peoples experiments. Here is one where I modified a script that created a colour palette from an image.
Its uses a generated palette to change the colours in the sky, add a path to an image or use a web cam (click to grab the image), the sky will slowly morph to the new colours, (If it a big image it will take a while to load), no loading bars gui etc.
** please don’t use Safari if it runs anything like it does on my machine you will see very little.
*** Load image feature only works offline due to Adobes cross domain policy (@#&^*!) At least the camera capture still works.
Tree with palette from Rothko http://www.its.caltech.edu/~suvir/favourites/images/paintings/rothko.pink-yellow.jpg
Just recapping the concept (inspired by David Lynch) is that ideas float around waiting for some one to land on, This is my Sky of ideas. the tree is me reaching up embracing / worshiping the sky thriving on al the ideas it has to offer. the tree was chosen from a cast of thousands as it looks most like me.
I had a few false starts with adding ideas is single discreet entities, a few goes of trying to cram in extra ideas but this is it.
Click for full version
** Requires flash and runs badly in Safari – and will use up heaps of processor
After my success with the trees, I was excited about taking on the sky. I started by drawing (digitally) various possible skies, I had a few experiments with clouds of various degrees of realism, but eventually decided I wanted something less realistic and clouds abstract or not could wait for another project. The sky I finally settled on was inspired by the ebb and flow of Lava lamp sunsets and Munch’s The Screams sky.
I loved the the swirls of the painting and started trying to replicate this motion. I used some wave script to create undulating lines that felt like they some weight to them. I was happy with the movement but not the resultant texture. After much experimentation I ended blurring the colours substantially which gave nice gradual colour changes but kept the underlying motion creating a sense of flow and currents in the motion.
Click for Animated Sky
Previous experiments with growing trees, involved drawing shapes directly to the screen, this meant starting with a thick trunk and gradually shrinking down the bush size the longer the branch ran for. This time I was determent to grow a tree through bezier points, this could allow for the tree starting as a thin vine and gradually getting thicker as it went, it would also mean at the end of the growth, each point in the tree would be a know so the tree could then been animated, later with full control.
Initial test worked well, with branches growing smoothly with reasonable performance, The was some issues with the Bezier curves overlapping them selves, (creating holes in the branches) but I found a custom set of path classes, the greatly reduced this.
A large tree required a lot of processing to grow, and slowed the computer to a crawl. Also the length of each branch grew simultaneously giving the tree an expanding feel rather than a sense of growing. To aver come both these issues, I delayed the branches growing, this meant there were less branches growing at the same time (Good for processor), but more importantly it gave a more natural feel to the growth.
I was fairly pleased with the final Bezier trees, there was plenty of room for growing different looking trees by tweaking parameters, And I now had the ability to grow a practically infinite number of different trees. This is what I love about computer graphics, I couldn’t draw a tree this interesting but I can grow one.
Click for Tree builder
