VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

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.)

As promised, here is the sample code, including the class Spot, that we worked up in class today. It will help you figure out how to create your own classes of objects for your pieces.

DUE APRIL 8
Assignment #7 Translate it is due next week AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS. (Sorry for the change, but I realized that we will need the ENTIRE session to review your work.)

Plan to spend at least 8-10 hours in this assignment prior to next Wednesday.

Be prepared to hand me a flash drive with your exported applet and the corresponding folder and files at 3pm SHARP. Also, be prepared to give a title and a couple of sentences to describe the work.

I will be available in the MML from 1-3pm in case you have any last minute bugs. If you would like help during that time, let me know and I will schedule appointments in 15 minute slots until all slots are filled. Be aware that 15 minutes is a very small amount of time, so be sure that your sketches are practically done before you see me.

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.

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.

 Dispersion

For my self-portrait piece using Processing, I started working with my name. My Korean name(Jin-Ah) in Chinese 振我 means “spreading myself” or “throwing myself”, etc (can be interpreted in different ways).  I referred to some of the monsters on http://www.processing.org/ and worked with the program to create this piece.

Inside out contrast