VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

Time and Movement

For this project, I used the Processing program to once again work with the idea of time and change of movement that I explored in my last video piece in the series ”Time, Body and Perception”. The pace and pattern of triangles’ movements change their pace and pattern of movement as one clicks on the mouse, which signals a change in time. The “body” of triangles (like my body in my video piece) moves in different ways and in different paces through mouse clicks just as the video “Time, Body, and Perception” showed different paces and movement of my own body dancing.

I have decided to work more on my idea of self portrait being an object that is ungraspable and that causes endless reflections(like two mirrors put facing each other, the ‘observing’ self that searches for the self-identity and the ‘observed’ self that is supposed to be holding the identity keep reflecting each other until the boundary between two becomes weak and meaningless.)

I chose to concentrate on the piece Urban decay, let’s play. The essence I want to capture is constant reinvention, a fresh perspective on your urban environment and life.
The activity of freerunning which I highlighted in the stop-motion video embodies such qualities. While people commute to and fro in the city, the drudgery of everyday life dulls their mind. Urban dwellers desire for a comfortable cycle; where the same routes are tread day in and day out, until the paths are well worn and defined.
All one needs is a new outtake on life! At the click of a button, the very same routes are exciting, vibrant and full of risk that were previously undiscovered.
And there should be constant renewing! Or the person would fall back into the same old cycle, albeit in a slightly different color.

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.

For this project, I will look back upon the third video I created among the three series of videos I titled “Perception, Body, and Time.”  Moving around time and creating a certain sense of confusion by manipulating time in different ways were something successful and interesting in my piece, and I would like to work further with that concept using processing. I would like to have a central figure which will be moving in a certain way(either walking around, jumping or doing something). By clicking on the mouse or dragging it, I hope to change the pace of the movement of the figure to create the alteration of the pace of time.

liv003

Though a very rudimentary sketch, the final “Olivia Processed” will be based on shots from the short film I made focusing on her, entitled “Olivia”. I will draw from the colour scheme I employed — warm yellows and pink, and also clearly from the main focus of the short film: my sister. The animation will take place on the upper right side of the 600 by 700 frame, as pink ‘flowers’ will appear and disappear with the click of the mouse. I’m planning to juxtapose the combination of abstract shapes (parts of her hair, an eye-form, lips) and harsh, more graphic lines (ie. of the counter surface). I’m interested to hear what others’ plans are, because I’d like to add more layers of interaction on this piece, but I’m still not sure where I can go with it or what the potential for movement really is.

Forest will be a processing translation of my previous stop motion piece “Cyclical Transformation in Motion.”   It will convey the same ideas of time, cycles and transformation.  The bars act as trees whose growth is controlled by the location of the mouse.  Once the mouse passes a certain height, the bar will freeze and the mouse will begin to trail leaf-like objects.  Once the mouse is clicked, the leaves will stop trailing and will fall to the ground.  As if the fallen leaf objects are fertilizing the bars, the click will return the mouse to controlling the height of a bar, new growth.  This cycle will continue, each time adding a bar, until their is a “forest” of bars. I will execute this concept using if/then statements and nested loops.