Month: November 2017

jwchou-Project-Proposal v2

Note: This is my new proposal.

My new proposal is to create an interactive game is controlled by the arrow keys on the keyboard.

I want to create an airplane landing game, sort of inspired by the game/app Flight Control which used to be quite popular. I wanted to do this to continue my series of airplane-themed projects.

I’m imagining that the game will progress either through different levels, or just naturally increase in hardness (ie the planes fly faster, are harder to control, etc). I might try to make it with more than one plane in the frame at a time, but if I can’t execute that, I might just stick with one plane at a time to keep things simple.

The styling will probably be simple and contemporary, and I might explore sound feedback as well, if possible.

I plan to work on this by myself.

 

Looking Outwards 11

I saw Ryoji Ikeda perform Supercodex Last year, and it was an intense experience. Although his piece was a performance, it was not a musical composition. He used data sets to inform the music and visuals that created the piece. The sound aspect was created entirely by clicks, and each click was distinguishable at the beginning of the piece. As the piece progressed, the click-frequency increased, and became keyed (and un-keyed) tones. Ikeda does not reveal much of his process, but it was clear he was manipulating and abstracting the input data to control and sway the crowd. One part that was neat was to hear the transformation from single clicks into “continuous” square waves. It was beneficial to hear that transformation because it was a good primer for talking about a computer’s process for breaking songs down into samples. Ryoji Ikeda is intense and loud.

Looking Outwards 10

Eva Mattes is an artist living in New York. One project on her website that caught my eye is titled Life Sharing. For the project, she opened the contents of her personal computer to a public internet server. This project is interesting because she places trust in the public to find interest in her personal life. With the piece she comments on privacy, saying that it’s stupid; she blurs the line of visibility of peoples lives. The piece originally is from 2001, just after the turn of the century, but well into the digital age. Mattes is an artist originally from Italy.

http://0100101110101101.org/

Looking Outwards 8

Jessica Rosenkrantz is a lecturer at MIT’s school of architecture. Her talk from 2011 (and her work) is about computationally grown visual forms, based on plant growth structures. I have followed her Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/nervous_jessica/) for a while, and was so excited to see her name on the list. One thing I find most interesting about her work is that she wants to design products that intrigue or reveal a little bit about how it was made. She likes to use the generated forms to create material designs in the real world, as opposed to keeping them in digital space. Another concept that she’s working toward is designing material reactions that have extremely precise properties, so the materials can naturally grow into the form, rather than being 3D printed from a grown model. One product I specifically find interesting is a puzzle that has no edge. She designed a puzzle that can be put together in a very large number of combinations!

Nervous System – Eyeo Festival 2011 from Eyeo Festival // INSTINT on Vimeo.

mjanco – Project Proposal 12 – Section B

For my project I want to create a generative landscape, playing with perspective and depth of field. I am attracted to the image of a pond of lily pads. I like that it would involve fairly simple geometric shapes but would create a calming image. I like the idea of potentially doing a generative landscape from above, as if the viewer is flying over the surface of the pond. I also like the idea of changing the opacity to create the illusion of fish beneath the surface of the water.

My other option is a standard horizontally moving landscape, in which case I’d like to play with the idea of reflection – showing trees or grass reflecting in the pond.

I want this to have a very calm, organic feel to it. I think by playing with opacity and color schemes this can be accomplished.

dayoungl Looking Outwards 12

 

For the final project, we took our concept from “Pac Man” and an online game called “agar.io”. Because everyone knows how Pac Man goes, I will discuss more on agar.io. My first encounter with agar.io was when I was back in high school. Everyone in my grade used to play this game and how this game works is that you simply log-in to the team server and you can play with your friends that way. This game was developed by  a 19 ear old Matheus Valadares. The concept of the game is to “bulk up” by eating other cells in the game; more specifically, The objective of Agar.io is to grow a cell on a petri dish by swallowing both randomly generated pellets (agar), which slightly increases a cell’s mass, and smaller cells, without being swallowed by larger cells. This game was coded using C++ and javascript.

Here is a link to the game.

 

aerubin-LookingOutwards-12-Section-C

Steve Reich – “Clapping Music”

Steve Reich is a contemporary composer that works with generative music. Generative music is music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system. One of Steve Reich’s most famous pieces is “Clapping Music,” (linked above) where he created a rhythm and overlays the same rhythms on top, but one or more eighth notes apart from the original version. The interest and music is created from how the same rhythms interact with each other depending on how much time is spaced in between the two rhythms. The video above shows the rhythm which can be counted as “one two three, one two, one, one two” in which the commas are counted as rests. When shift is called, the rhythm is shifted one eighth note apart from the original and the distance increases until they are both in unison by the end of the clip.

Francis Dhomont – “Citadel Interieure”

Francis Dhomont is a composer in the late 1900’s that focused on composing music that drew from natural sounds. This technique is called Musique concrète which is music created by everyday sounds such as people talking or drawers closing and any sound that we would not normally associate with music production. Utilizing this technique for composition sometimes leads to the final piece to lack melody, harmony, rhythm, and meter. However, this music can tell stories that cannot be told with typical instruments.
His piece “Citadel Interieure,” (linked above) tells a story of a denied reality in a Subterranean Labyrinth, which would be difficult to create the same effect with standard instruments, even with a full orchestra. His innovative compositions evoke new specific emotions that opened new boundaries in the field of music.

Click here to learn more about Generative Music
Click here to learn more about Musique Concrète

jwchou-Project-12-Proposal

I want to create a project that makes politics more visible.

Often, stories break out about President Trump and his policies, but how they may affect people is often unclear. This can be seen in his Muslim Ban, his tweets, or his executive orders, or his diplomatic actions.

I want to create an interactive quiz/poll that shows how Trump might be doing something that directly affects you. For example… qualifiers could be

-being transgender

-being undocumented

-having a specific country of origin

-etc

In addition to being informative to a specific audience, I also want the project to be informative to a more general audience so they can find out how Trump is affecting others.

I’m imagining this project to be a sort of interactive javascript application, where users can click and interact with the different information being presented. I’m a bit hesitant about pursuing this project, because I’m not sure the text formatting tools in P5.Js are powerful enough in order to design a good interface.

Here is an EXTREMELY rough diagram of what it could look like (I promise I have better skills than this). Imagine each box to be a different qualifier, and which one clicks on the box, more information comes up about Trump and his actions.

jwchou-LookingOutwards-12

I think I want to base my project around something political, because I think art/design can be very political.

Here are two simple projects that help make politics most digestable and visible, and I think that is in the vein of what I want to do.

Trump Tracker by Viren Mohindra


This simple website tracks Trump’s promises and highlights them using a color code, depending on if he broke or kept his promise.

Tracking Trump’s Agenda, Step by Step
This is yet another web-based infographic by the New York Times. It shows a chronological timeline of the president’s actions and how they affect people of different populations. Each piece in the timeline links to an article about the specific event.

 

Both of these are simple web-apps with very primitive interactions. I appreciate how direct they are and how they make following politics more visual and more accessible. However, I think in order for them to be truly effective, they need to be more personalized to the person accessing them. I plan to move in this direction for my project.

 

 

Jdbrown – Looking Outwards 12

In moving forward with sound installation as a genre, I’ve been looking at several installations. The two which come to mind are Sound Forest, by the Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University, and Rainforest, by David Tudor. Both of these pieces deal with capacitance and physical objects which resonate and become a part of the space, and that’s a quality of installation work that interests me. I’m wondering how I might be able to incorporate interaction with my installation, and perhaps by working on my final project, I may be able to get a sense of how that might be done.