Category Archives: LO-4

ypag

11 Mar 2015

Whale Hunt
Whale Hunt by Jonathen Harris is sequence of photographs. The sequence is matched to his hearbeat when he was watching the incident. What interests me in this project: 1. Jonathan Harris created an interactive interface different modes where the viewer can pick a photograph and then watch the incident with help of a timeline, a pinwheel mode and Mosaic mode where all photographs shown in chronological order. 2. The data is overlaid with his perception of the event(heartbeat) 3. Data visualisation is to relieve a moment in time lived by the creator.

Screen Shot 2015-03-12 at 12.31.14 AM

Reference: http://www.number27.org/whalehunt

Skin Deep
Skin deep uses 3d portraits of body as canvas. Viewers participate in the art piece to paint the portrait in collaborative manner. I find this project interesting because it’s like taking a 3D selfie which is layered by perception of other people have for you. The project makes me think of a “collaborative selfie” or an image of self which is built by a collective perception of society for you

Skin Deep – Collaborative Self Portraits from Animishmish on Vimeo.

Reference:
http://www.skindeep.cc/

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.

 

 

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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…

Yeliz Karadayi

05 Feb 2015

“Generative Portraits” by Diana Lange. 2014

lookingout4

This project shows a visualization using delaunay meshing on a 3-dimensional scan of people’s faces. There isn’t much explanation beyond that, as the artist wants the viewer to have their own interpretations of the situation. The work is simple but paints a picture that is tells specific details about a person’s features that I found intriguing.

More

pedro

05 Feb 2015

For the post of this week, I started with a vague memory of 3 years ago when I was studying processing. There was an old project of a collaborative learning environment that used a physics engine to build living creatures based on topology in Reas and Fry’s book (Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, pp. 263-265). This project is called Sodaplay and the Java based engine is called Soda constructor (2000). With the constructor, the user can create creatures / structures that react to the environmental forces – such as Theo Jansen’s creatures. In particular, you can design a creature in the constructor and then use it to compete in a Sodarace.

On one hand, as the project is old for media art standards and physical simulation became so widespread, it may not be so appealing for contemporary eyes. On the other hand, it has this incredible mixture of physics and design interaction that makes each creation very meaningful.

(Besides, there is a current interested to rebuild it)

Going back to architecture, I found an interesting project that generates spatial and mesh structures…. It is called SIM 2011. Enrique Ramos combined physical simulation with evolutionary algorithms to create this environment where the user can customize a structure and see the physical feedback. It is much more sophisticated than Soda constructor and there is a more restricted group of possible users (architects, engineer and designers). However, it is a smaller project and does not have a community providing new inventions (as Soda did). Actually, I believe this project could be much more provocative if it could also understand each structure as a creature and use the simulated environment as a game in which many creations could compete, providing a broader understanding of the consequences of each design decision.

LValley

05 Feb 2015

Frax is an interactive fractal program that displays multiple moving fractal patterns. I find this project interesting because of the variety and complexity of the patterns. Each element looks to be considered thoroughly, and the options for fractal customization included seem to be done for the overall quality of the piece and not just to increase number of different features.

 

 

Matter – (excerpt) from Quayola on Vimeo.

 

Matter by Quayola is a generative pattern that expands and grows as time progresses. The element of movement within this piece was what originally caught my attention. Many generative patterns I have seen in the past have been finished products, so seeing the process of generation was fascinating to me.

Something I also found enjoyable was how the piece didn’t only include abstract forms, but every once in a while an organic shape would appear.