The end product isn’t at all what I was planning. Wrapping my head around inheritance and polymorphism is tougher than I expected. I guess I’ll stick to the rivers and the lakes that I’m used to.
Assignment: Create a system of multiple bobs and spring connections. How would you have a Bob connected to a Bob with no fixed anchor?
I created an interactive wire puppet out of spring objects, inspired by Alexander Calder’s Aztec Josephine Baker (1929), which the Calder Foundation recently requested to withdraw from the Smithsonian as an act of protest against censorship. Code and video after the jump.
Methods of Motion Assignment 1: Stop-Motion Frame by Frame Animation
Hana Caraka
Synopsis: The Javanese alphabet, also known as the Hanacaraka, is a holoalphabetic poem which translates to:
Hana caraka There (were) two messengers data sawala (They) had animosity (among each other) padha jayanya (They were) equally powerful (in fight) maga bathanga Here are the corpses.
I plan to depict the Javanese script and the Latin alphabet as the two messengers in conflict. Throughout the animation, the story will be written out on screen in both Javanese and Western script. The first stanza of letters will transform into two silhouette puppets from their appropriate font: a Javanese shadow puppet (Wayang Kulit) and an 18th century European Silhouette portrait. The setting is also created in this manner. For instance, the Javanese letters may turn into palm trees and the Roman letters may turn into a tea cup. Most of the animation will be done in the style of Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette stop-motion films. But the climactic fight scene will be shot in the style of a Wayang Kulit battle, by attaching rods to move the puppets and their limbs in real-time.
This semester I’m taking Daniel Shiffman’s Nature of Code, a course on translating mathematical properties of our physical world into a digital world.
Our first assignment is to find an example of real-world “natural” motion and develop a set of rules for simulating that behavior. Avoid using randomness, or at least consider the use of random carefully and justify it. Consider the challenge of usual minimal visual design, i.e. only grayscale primitive shapes.
I spent much of Sunday morning staring out the window and watching icicles form outside my window. I tried to replicate the experience in processing here, sped up for a more fulfilling sensation. Shiffman pointed out that this is not a science course, and that sometimes we have to alter and fake the rules of nature to make it more aesthetically pleasing in the digital realm. I avoided researching too deeply the formulae that governs the formation of icicles in the physical world, and instead experimented until I thought the screen best reflected my experience looking out the window.
The ice at the top of the screen and the snowbanks at the bottom were generated using Perlin Noise. I did rely on random() several times - creating between 4-7 icicles, establishing their initial height, and setting the melting rate.
I’ve had close encounters with reality show stars before, but never quite like this. Two people I know and speak to on a regular basis were on The Millionaire Matchmaker, a show I’ve never seen since I don’t own a TV and try my best to avoid the time-suck of Hulu.
I will be joining Art21’s Open Enrollment column, blogging about my graduate school experience over the next semester and possibly beyond.
Open Enrollment chronicles the experience of graduate school via the perspective of current students. As MA and MFA degrees become ever more the norm for the professional training of artists, educators, and administrators alike, Open Enrollment functions as a time-sensitive journal, offering readers a birds-eye-view of the challenges, rewards, puzzles, and ontological questioning that a graduate education engenders.
Each semester, a selective and diverse group of students from accredited graduate programs, as well as students studying at non-traditional institutions (temporary schools, artist’s educational projects, intensive residency programs, etc.), will take up residence on the blog.
I’m pretty thrilled to be selected, and can’t wait to chronicle the daily conversations overheard in the Tisch stairwell about broken hearts, lost roles and dead cats.
Now that the insanity of presenting for Red’s class is over, I can finally catch up with the last of the mandatory labs for PComp and figure out what I want to do for a final.
Antenna Design’s Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger presented their body of work to Red Burns’s Applications class on November 2, 2010. I was grouped together with Geetha, Eric, Doug and Ara to present our reactions to Antenna’s presentation. Keeping with the Applications course protocol, we were given only a week to prepare and 25 minutes to present.
We all agreed that part of Antenna’s credo is that industrial design is an intervention of public and psychologic space. But what we were most impressed by was their ability to make things better with less.
An overdue write up of my group’s media controller project.
ASSIGNMENT:
Make a physical device that controls a medium in real-time, so that the user can change her actions and see changes as they affect the medium. Media can be video, audio, sound, physical media like paint or ink, and others. This is a group assignment.
i COOL STICKS2010 !
Introducing the Cool Sticks Duemiladieci, the fantastically amazing device that will revolutionize your world of noodle soup eating. The Cool Sticks will fan your hot food as you eat, controlling temperature with the speed of a servo. Just imagine. No more burnt tongues. It doesn’t slice, it doesn’t slice, but it sure as hell blows! Comes with one cloud altar and processing sketch.
This week’s lab helped me figure out how to parse multiple serial values from Arduino to Processing by splitting them up with punctuation. It’s proving real helpful to finish the Processing and Arduino sketches for my group’s media controller project.
This week, Anh, Guang and I began working on our Media Controller project, which was originally to create a glove with FSRs and with flex sensors sewn in that can send serial signals to a PC and play sound samples. So I tweaked this week’s lab assignment to graph the degree that a flex sensor is bent.
I decided to observe the Big Piano at FAO Schwartz as a piece of public interactive technology used by multiple people.
The walking piano was invented in 1976, but got its fame from the 1988 film Big. The Zoltar Machine was actually my favorite interactive tech in the movie, but I have yet to find a real fortune telling machine that can turn me big. So I spent an afternoon with my friends’ kids jumping up and down on the keys of the toy store’s giant piano instead.
