Author: aman

tentacle playground

A tentacle playground.
The sliders control the tentacle’s base, midsection and tip, with the final one controlling the “wetness” of the tentacle “brush” — allowing the user to draw with the tentacle.
Pressing “S” saves this drawing to your computer.

Please be gentle with your tentacle.
If it gets tangled up, press ⌘-R or ctrl-R to get a new tentacle. Don’t worry, the old one will be rushed to tentacle hospital where your abuse will be fixed and the tentacle rehabilitated.

mimi son — looking outwards 10

The engagement, and the instant gratification provided to the audience by that engagement, is possibly the most valuable thing about this piece and what I find the most inspiring. This form of work, at the intersection of physical, material interaction and the life-giving to the immaterial latent memories within by the blocks via projections is something I’m extremely eager to explore in my work.

The conceptual creation and exploration of an experience of a place by the action and choice of the audience is also something I’m eager to explore. In this piece, the simple yet elegant slides work together extremely well with the projections, creating wonder and surprise and in general making the piece easy to interact with (as seen by the number of children engaging with the piece in the video above).

 

A Journey, SEOUL was created by Kimchi and Chips, a duo consisting of Mimi Son and Elliot Woods. Mimi Son is a Seoul based new media installation artist, focusing on the use of experimental digital/analogue canvases, at the intersection of the new flesh and the old. Elliot Woods is a new media projective art artist, originally from the UK, intent on exploring the future/present interactions between humans and computers, primarily visually.

 

turtle composition

This is a very unfinished project.

I extended turtles to (isometric) 3D using a simple isometric projection. I implemented this using vectors, making interacting with turtles far more sane and making it far easier to implement flocking (and in the future, other physics simulation iterative algorithms).

temporary

looking outwards 08 – RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST, LOST

, a looking outwards in response to http://cmuems.com/2015c/kramser/09/17/kramser-looking-outwards-03/

i find this work to be just as techno-fetishistic as the others mentioned by Kevin Ramser in the aforementioned article. the inclusion of the memory-card, for example, a flourish surely to be rendered essentially unreadable in any context which the artifact may be actually performing its function of preserving the memory of the time/space/sculpture/feeling it is intended to is the little wireframe cherry on the cake.

however,
i still appreciate the piece hugely. even the souvenir aspect of the pieces seems to be demonstrating the evolution of a single, collective memory locked to a time and space (i.e, a sculpture-artifact) into a displaced, collective experience replicable anywhere — making the memory itself invincible, untouchable by malicious forces due to its inhabiting of a collective of minds and machines.

this reinterpretation of the concept of a singular from the past into a multiple tied to the present (& the future, barring perhaps the memory-card) in response to the loss of the original singular form could only have occurred in the age of a collective memory strong enough to reconstruct the singular from just what was remembered of it, by mind or machine, is an amazing description of our world as it is now.

computational portrait, by aman tiwari

a portrait I made of

erin

i preprocessed the image of her in MATLAB, to extract out edge information & to compute the luminance gradients across the image.
the javascript portion of the program takes an luminance gradient image and an edge image and draws a portrait, using those to permute lines and squares.

next time, i may use the Retinex algorithm to separate the illuminant from the reflectance component of the image, so that i could draw the “true” shading of the underlying image using one set of lines and forms and the illumination using another.

/* Aman Tiwari
   atiwari1@andrew.cmu.edu
   60-212 A
   Assignment-08-Project */

'use strict'
var edge_img;
var theta = 0;
var dir_img;

function preload() {
  // images representing edges of image & gradients in image (canny, sobel methods used resp.)
  edge_img = loadImage('http://i.imgur.com/VRDUpue.png');
  dir_img = loadImage('http://i.imgur.com/RSpZkPy.png');
}

function setup() {
  createCanvas(edge_img.width, edge_img.height);
  translate(width/2,height/2);
  edge_img.loadPixels();
  dir_img.loadPixels();
  colorMode(HSB);
  strokeWeight(0.2);
}

function draw() {
  theta = (theta + 0.01) % PI;
  push();
  translate(-100,0);
  for(var r = -width/2 + 100; r < width/2 + 100; r = r + 10) { 
        var x = floor(r * cos(theta)); // polar to cartesian conversion var y = floor(r * sin(theta)); var col = dir_img.get(x,y)[0] + 50 //strength of gradient if(col[0] > 100) {
        stroke(col) // line stroke based on gradient strength
    } else {
      // nice blue-green colours
        stroke(noise(theta + frameCount/100 + 20) * 255, noise(frameCount/1000) * 255, noise(frameCount/100 + 50) * 255);
    }
    // if an edge is present in the image, draw a rectangle
    // & rotate the gradient line by 90 degrees
     if(edge_img.get(x+width/2- 50,y+width/2 - 150)[0] === 255) {
        rect(x,y,4,4);
        var lineOff = HALF_PI;
     } else {
        var lineOff = 0;
     }
     stroke('black');
     // draws line, with slope perpendicular to image gradient at sample point
     var line_r = dir_img.get(x + width/2 - 50,y + height/2 - 50)[0]; // from -180 to 180 deg
     line_r = radians(map(line_r, 0, 255, 0, 360)) + HALF_PI +lineOff;
     push();
     translate(x,y);
     line(0, 0, 10 * cos(line_r), 10 * sin(line_r));
     pop();
  }
}

looking outwards 07 – Jake Barton

Jake Barton’s self description as a storyteller memory-engineer is incredibly inspiring for me as I intend to live forever through my work and its impact on the world.
His (& Local Projects, his NY based studio) focus on their self-created/self-creating apparatus for creating things which create almost anything — i.e. the process of working — is very informed and thoughtful, and I find this sort of self-reflection upon the process of storytelling and the process of the process of self-reflection to be inspiring in its depth and impact on their work.

In terms of his work, I highly admire their work applying quantified self principes to museum visitors, building up emotive maps of the space and using this knowledge to inform the exhibits contained within, I firmly believe these sorts of insights into the self and its interaction with the world will be the basis of the next paradigm shift in the way our self/our world exists.

website : http://localprojects.net/type/collaborative-storytelling/

 

Neuro-Vis Looking Outwards

NeuroVis is a visualisation tool for neural networks. I admire the attempt to make such an obscure and obtuse concept accessible to lay person. I feel it accurately explains the concept without patronising, with pleasing graphics increasing engagement and involvement within the learning environment. Special mention must go to the quality of the programming behind this, as it runs extremely smooth and allows the graphics to take an abstract qualia.

http://neurovis.mitchcrowe.com/