xinhui – 15104 & 60212 • COMPUTATION for CREATIVE PRACTICES

Final Project: London Bridge

In exploring ways to glitch images and sounds, I got the idea to tie them all together using the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down”. I experimented with different ways of glitching the background image, such as color and pixel shifting and filters, and settled on an implementation that only affects some parts of the image and not too radically and that does not use up too much memory.

Process Work

I also made towers that disintegrated over time, and that the player is supposed to prevent from disintegrating by going towards the falling towers to slow down their disintegration.

I used the interactivity of the user to activate sound glitches that I made using stop(), play() and setVolume(). The program also receives microphone input, affecting the transparency of the bridge as well as the frame rate of the whole program (and hence the rate of disintegration).

Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I am thinking of creating an interactive “game” where the background glitches according to audio input and the buildings disintegrate over time. By sidescrolling, the player tries to repair the buildings or prevent their disintegration, but the landscape will ultimately deform and disintegrate in noisy environments (and maybe re-form in quiet environments). Perhaps, I might also process the audio input to audio output in addition to visual output. Through this project, I will explore the possibilities of glitch computational art, audio processing, as well as the idea of interaction between objects that are user-controlled versus acted on by invisible forces.

Looking Outwards for Final Project

One project that I found interesting and relevant was ‘Computer Music Studies’ by _blank and Mikel R. Nieto. The same set of data or code is used to generate both the audio and visual outputs of the final product. I find it interesting that they managed to link audio and visual in such a technical manner.

Another project that I was looking at was Subliminal Glitch by Amnon Owed. Using Processing functions like get(), set(), filter(), blend(), tint() and bitshifting, as well as objects, he created an animation where colored particles collide and create a glitching effect. I like how the glitches are not formed randomly but based on some other underlying code.

Project 10

sketch

In this project, I tried to create a creature that whose movement can be manipulated using springs. The goal that I wanted my creature to reach was the sides of the canvas – which will result in darkening of the canvas (just as an octopus sprays ink).

I first made the legs, then connected the points near the middle to make the body and head. I wonder if there’s a way to make the body shape less random or distorted.

Looking Outwards: Rachel Wingfield

Digital Dawn is an art installation by Rachel Wingfield that uses printed electroluminescent technology and light-dependent sensors to essentially simulate nature, but that also serves a more functional purpose by acting as a solar cell battery and night lamp. I like how she manages to use the idea of nature throughout the project to serve multiple purposes; the idea of using technology to simulate nature is also interesting because many people associate technology with disruption of the natural environment — she shows that it is possible to achieve organic forms with technology and electronics.

Rachel Wingfield is one of the founders of Loop.pH. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London and uses her knowledge of nature’s systems to create responsive environments. Together with Mathais Gmachi, this London-based studio has come up with many intriguing and beautiful installations and design ideas that blur the line between art and the sciences.

Digital Dawn

Project 9: Turtle Graphics Composition

sketch

I wanted to try to make fractals with turtle graphics. In this project, my fractals represent snowflakes that fall when the mouse is pressed and fades out as it falls. The snow on the ground also accumulates over time although you can clear it by pressing keys, which also causes the snowflakes to shake.

Project 8

sketch

I tried to overlay both the abstract and real to reveal my self-portrait – portions of the image are obtained and tinted based on mouse position, while the true color of the image is revealed slowly through a line that walks in random directions. In the example image below, I positioned my mouse on the right side of the canvas while allowing the true color to reveal itself, afterwhich I hovered over the right side of the image to get a half-tinted, half-untouched image. I also tried to allow for interactivity using mouse clicks; if the randomly walking line is not in the desired position, one can click on the canvas to reset the position of the walking line.

Looking Outwards: Ekisto

Ashley’s blog post on the interactive visualization of online communities named Ekisto by Alex Dragulescu intrigued me – I have always wondered about the relationship between the digital/virtual and physical world and its impact on how we think about the world around us. I think this project reminds me of Google Earth but with more abstraction, in a new dimension that seems to draw parallels between building and content creation.

I agree with Ashley that this program not only affects how we understand social media, but also has potential to inspire designs of cities and websites — by visually representing the most active users in forums and their impact on the community, users could perhaps visually wade through the large number of forum threads and users to search for a specific question or topic (as opposed to just typing in the search terms to return a list of links). In fact, I think this project has the potential to be expanded to more content creation websites, such as reddit and YouTube, or maybe from a slightly different perspective that categorizes different websites by content type.

http://ekisto.sq.ro/

Project 7: Landscape

sketch

In this project, I explored the sharing of variables between objects to generate multiple types of objects at the same point. Boats, birds and lighthouses are generated randomly over the oceanscape, which are generated with the noise function.

Looking Outwards – Nicky Case

Nicky Case is a young video game developer. In this video, he talks about how his personal life and experiences with coming out influenced how he approached game making. He incorporates a system of “broadening” rather than “branching” or “linear” to tell a story, engaging the user as they make choices that accumulate. Using the idea of system stories, he wants to make games that influence people positively. I agree with him that people tend to be able to grasp social nuances and complex logics more easily than abstract logics, and that making something like neurons and thought processes tangible can really change the way we think about how we communicate and interact with other people. His choice of graphics and user interface in his games is also expressive and intuitive. In terms of presentation, I found his informal mannerism and use of hand-drawn cartoons to accompany his presentation engaging.