VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

                                                     (Click for a larger image)

After playing with the g-speak I thought people might find this interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxVS5nYFnkA

For my experiment I printed out 100s of the slips of paper shown below and distributed them throughout Manning chapel.

I put a few in various significant places throughout the chapel. Most of them were hidden in some way or another.

I then placed one in every single hymn book in the chapel.

I placed one on the organ high above everything and highly visible to anyone who looks up.

It was my plan to go to a Catholic mass the day after I placed these all over the chapel and attempt to document people’s reactions, but due to my own scheduling mistakes I missed the mass. I don’t think I would have been able to see much of a reaction anyway due to the nature of the way I carried out the experiment and the difficulties of catching someone’s reaction or even noticing that they were reacting to my experiment, but it would have been very useful to see this nonetheless. In this sense my experiment was something of a failure. I returned to the chapel later to see which of the slips remained, which did provide me with some useful information about placement of work and it’s pertinence to permanence. Some of the slips were placed in such a way that they will likely not be found for a very long time, possibly even a few years.

also: the blog turns all my vertical pictures sideways, i have no idea why, and i can’t seem to fix it.

For my experiment I planned to find a way to collect narratives or myths about the site that I had chosen. The experiment was a failure in the sense that I had a hard time getting anyone to participate and those who did gave me stories that were not particularly helpful in visualizing a narrative of the tone that I felt the space conveyed. In a second attempt, I manipulated my original photos of the site in order to both remove background details and to give a sense of the tone that I felt the site delivered on its own:

Despite my efforts, I learned that the responses that I got would not be too helpful. By asking people for this narrative, I was asking them to already do what I want my piece to make them do on their own: view the site as containing some sort of narrative. I realized that I wasn’t going to do that by placing a strong referential narrative in the space, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that by outsourcing the task of consciously developing that narrative to others.

So my task is now to make the viewer appreciate the situation of possible narrative embodied by the space without laying out specific fantasies beforehand. I will accomplish this by placing a small scale model of the space itself in a box on the swing. The differences between the model and the space itself will create a sort of dissonance, especially since the viewer will only be able to view one at a time (he/she will have to put his/her head in the box to view the model). By recreating the model on a smaller scale, I can call attention to it as a site of contemplation and fantasy without attributing a limiting specific narrative to it.

giggle

Working with & attempting to reinterpret the imagery found in my billow video, I developed the processing form of “giggle & go on”, a saying used in dispiriting circumstances.

My final project for assignment 7 – On My Own Time 3.0 is a program which allows the user to use “magnetic poetry” to rearrange the last two stanza’s of one of my favorite poems, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Originally, the words I chose had no personal meaning, but in this final product, the user can take this already written poem and translate for themselves the words into a new poem. This poem relates to the concept of “On My Own Time,” which is my stop-motion animation, which this project was based on. The poem is about choosing one’s own path, which is a concept I feel strongly about, and I hope this program will allow the viewers to be able to create their own poem, and ultimately create their own path, and follow it on their own time.

For my new processing project I plan to revist the environment I created in my collage and my stop motion animation.  The main conceptual restriction taken by these projects will be a use only black and white coloring and an animated interactive applet that functions though a loop.  The project will represent the “gap” in my animation–the point where the characters enter into the cave.  I seek to create a series of cave images either as imports or as processing rendered images.  At this point it seems that importing a serious of images using the PImage function is the most effective because I can use the images in two interesting ways.  The first way would be to use the images as a texture by the texture() command which can map an image onto a given created polygon shape.  My initial hope was that I could do this using a circle but the texture function only works with straight line polygons.  The base of the image would be a black background on top of which the textured polygon would be drawn.  The polygons coordinates would be based around a translation of (mouseX, mouseY), and as the mouse is moved the image would appear to be revealed.  This gives the impression of searching in the dark cave.  In the cave images I would use my orgininal stock photos from the animation toadd in the charcters and some of the textures.  My hope is to also use a mousePressed function in order to change which image the texture corresponds to.  I am not sure as to the limitations of this and may have to work this out in another way.  In this way clicking would imply moving foward through the cave yet eventually the cave will reset back to the first image.  This would create a looped structure.

If I could achieve this, I would like to expand on my cave by making small cave creatures thats would be little more than simple curves with heavy stroke weight whose coordinates change based on mouseMoved with a limit, meaning they would “squirm” as the mouse is moved.  If these creaures are in the script after the textured polygon I believe that the project will be possible.

I chose to rework or rethink my clouds/pipe video. It was one project that I felt fit well with some of my knowledge from processing. Using a simple “if” command, my plans are for the viewer to be able to go back and forth between scenes. By reading my notes on the picture one can get the details of what I would like to accomplish in terms of color, movement, interaction, ect.

I plan on creating an interactive artwork using Processing that re-interprets the concept from my previous piece “On My Own Time.” I plan on focusing in the idea of learning how to read. I want to use similar imagery, such as letters, but this time using complete words. Inspired by magnetic poetry, I want to create in interactive piece which allows the viewer to move words (contained in small rectangles) to create sentences out of them. I am not exactly sure how I will execute this project, as I still am learning the basics of Processing. I am going to experiment with the different techniques we’ve learned and try to figure out some new ones.

In this assignment I plan to create a background image of a child that eventually becomes overwhelmed and obscured by religious imagery. I plan to do this by  using some sort of random number system, which I’m not entirely sure is how to do in processing (from what i’ve looked at it is either very simple, or very very complicated, i don’t fully understand it quite yet). A mouse press would elicit a random number corresponding to an image to be generated. I need to look into ways to do this further. I could also potentially utilize a loop. Each number would be assigned to an image so that the background would eventually become overwhelmed by these various religious symbols. Another thing I considered was constricting the symbols to appearing inside the child’s head, but, again, I am not certain how/if this can be done