March 20th, 2008
Beardo
I've been experimental so I'm still trying to read into this as a study. This is because I am focusing a lot on an animation, the game project, and being newly exposed to physical computing. With my animation project, I have been agonizing over how the work cannot grow organically. With this project I am merely the middle man that sets the ground for the art to create itself.
The formal element is a constantly morphing 3D image. The animated image is relatively jagged and unpredicatable. It has it's own randomness/order, and much like procedural animation, can give authorship to the audience, but mainly what the camera is percieving. Again, similar to procedural animation the randomness of the image has a limiter. It's filter being a 3D matrix which results in fractal geometry.
I am thinking about how planned 3D modeling and animation is and trying to break that mold.
I am really trying to make a different kind of procedural animation.
Here is an example of the 3d data and the infomation being captured and visualized together. As you can see it grows stronger with whiter things. The Demo stamp is because I haven't figured out how to record opengl to quicktime yet and had to use a trial version video capture program. Ironically I was not trying to make an object that looked like my beard. Oh well.
February 28st, 2008
Gooseflesh and Febrile Dreams
People and artists are obsessed with potraying reality. Video potrays reality using colors displayed on a screen and the 3D attempts to potray th illusion of dimension and form. Abstract painters attemped to potray nonobjective art. Such paintings were often claimed to capture something of the depicted objects' immutable intrinsic qualities rather than its external appearance. Digital abstraction attempts to represent the world through maths and matrices. Analog can be translated to digital, but can any of the immutable intrisic qualities be coaxed out of cross translating the digital against the digital? Will this syncing up of data bring us further from any kind of form all together? I will be experimenting with this by pulling video matrices and converting the raw data to create geometric representations on the fly. I will be translating video color data into geometry, texture and shading.
February 21st, 2008
Go Go Gadget Binoculars
Haven't found anything worth writing on this page. I've arrived at the point where I made my wacom tablet sing. It alternates music styles based on the pressure of my wacom pen, but alas nothing more. I made a few visual sisters to accompany the sound dynamically but I ended up hating all of them. Each one that I had made seemed too vulgar and acid trip inducing. I could rig a giant robot sling to flail LCD at the audience during a performance... then they would take it seriously. "I feel like", the instrument as stand alone is as interesting as a drum solo. """"""Wow this is so cool!@ Look at that drummer go!""""" ---- 15 minutes later ---- " THis got really annoying fast. When will he stop." There is a happy medium waiting for me somewhere and when I find it, I'll take the coach to funky town.
February 1st, 2008
White Cluster and Silent Water
The February groove is in and an appropiate month for what I am about to propose. With it's advent, February makes some of us think about what bonds us to our loved ones. To others it strikes discord, as a reminder of solitude. Somewhere in between we have silence which brings us back to origin and balance where these social matters have no value. The disassociative power of silence can sometimes be healing and other times humbling. It's primordial value as room 101 and our own year zero, is what recharges us for what is to come. Project proposal UNO: I will be using a wacom tablet to generate music. I will have glissando and portamento alternating capabilities which will be translated visually. Currently I am picturing a series of adjacent lines undualting in a broken formation. As I play notes in glissando, I would like the excitment of the notes to cause the formation to scatter. As I play in portamento style, the lines will come together and move in a more fluid fashion. And finally, the presence of silence will gradually bring the lines back in order.
January 25th, 2008
Instantament
Hung out with Steve in the lab and he gave me a good run down on Max/MSP. With his help, I already started making a wacom tablet respond to my actions with sound. I've been thinking about how we play instruments and the physical challenges of producing sound with them. One impossibility of all instruments is the ability to play glissando as well as portamento. Glissando is what Little Richard does during tootie fruity or something. Basically you run your finger across a range of solid notes. Portamento is acheived on a frettless instrument like violin by sliding your finger on the string. It is impossible to do both, physically and technically, with traditional instruments. Visually I think a portamento can sound like growth or movement and evolving while glissando is more mechanical, rigid and precise or even like shattering. Perhaps I can apply visuals at some point.
January 18th, 2008
Physical Computing: not Idiot Proof
This week I've been thinking about toys to use in for Project 1. I was just hanging out in the lab with the other grads in the lab when big John Orentlicher comes in. He asks us if we have any spare junk that we need to get rid of and we showed him two scanners and an old Pentium II computer. I didn't even think of it until John popped in, but those peices of trash are ripe for harvest. I got my screwdriver and pliers to tear apart the scanners. Lots of stuff to make a scanner and it's interesting how it all works. I wasn't sure what I could use but I wanted to see if I could get the lamp to work as a stand alone light. I looked at some tutorials and soldered the scanne lamp to a power inverterand then to a notebook power supply. Fucking Awesome! It worked and to my blinded delight, the lamp was alive. This was short lived though. Something blew up... It kind of looked like a battery on the power inverter. Well anyway, lesson learned, don't use more voltage then you need unless you like explosions.