Category: LookingOutwards-12

Connor McGaffin – Looking Outwards 12

From the beginning of this course, I have been interested in exploring the intersection of the visual arts and music. Additonally, for the past five years or so I have been into vinyl records, and have reignited this passion after coming to Carnegie Mellon and joining WRCT.

I recently downloaded an app called djay2, which simulates the process of live mixing with records. It has been fun to play with, but has a slightly intimidating interface to those who have no experience with real live mixing.

interface of djay2 as formatted for tablets

The only visualizations of the music in djay2 are the scrolling bar at the above the turntable and the picture disks themselves. This limitation inspired me to search for more unique audio visualization, and in this process I stumbled upon the video for “Coast Modern” by Coast Modern.

I am particularly drawn to this project because of its graphic nature. Daiana Ruiz , a visual artist whose work  often explores the living as a person of color, created this video for Coast Modern. I feel that her visual sensibilities of this piece are aligned with my usual visual approach. I admire this video’s efforts to push two dimensional shapes to their farthest affordances.

With both of these projects side by side, djay2 provides a very literal representation of music, while Daiana Ruiz’s work is far more interpretive. I am interested in how this more interpretive style could be incorporated into a project like djay2 while still maintaining its basic functionality.

Xindi Lyu- Looking Outwards-12

For my final project I’m planning to do a jigsaw-puzzle interactive game for the players to get to know animals that had become extinct. Based on this idea I searched for art projects and artists that are related with deconstructing geometries and had some interesting results.

The first inspiration is this puzzle. The Earth Puzzle by generative design studio Nervous System has no defined borders. You put it together how you want it and you can just see where it takes you. This gave me the inspiration of making the game in the form of “puzzle” in order to provide better experiences for the players.

 

The second project I found interesting are these paper toys. The Japanese paper engineer Haruki Nakamura (previously) continues to design delightful toys using simple materials. This provided me an inspiration to deconstruct the animal shapes into simple geometries as puzzle pieces.

These two projects are both associated with animals and geometries, but the difference is that the first project is more focused on generating but the second is more focused on deconstructing an existing subject.

In the end, I decided for my final project to be a jigsaw-puzzle encyclopedia.

Joanne Lee – Looking Outward 12

For my final project, I plan to create a virtual Rube Goldberg machine geared towards children ages 5-9. Because my project is not necessarily “art”, I took inspiration from a media sample and contest design. One project that I found relevant and interesting was a media sample of a simple Rube Goldberg machine being explained on Sesame Street.

Sesame Street explaining how a simple Rube Goldberg machine works.

I was unable to find the year of this media sample however they call it the “What Happens Next Machine”. I found it to be useful to see how the machine was shown and expressed in very simple terms and helped me to better understand the type of terminology and level of difficulty I will implement in my actual experiment. Something that this media sample lacks is interactivity due to it being shown via television. I believe learning is done best through interaction and trial & error!

At the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, children are able to tinker with the Rube Goldberg exhibit to complete everyday tasks.

Another project I found was the Rube Goldberg exhibit at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. At this exhibit, children are able to activate chain reactions in order to complete every day tasks. I think this is a great exhibit because as a child, I was very fascinated by Rube Goldberg machines and still am! It is important to foster creativity in children and by using these inefficient machines to complete every day tasks, it helps to keep the creative juices flowing! I don’t think they overlooked anything large, but I would like to increase accessibility to these interactive exhibits by creating my own virtually. I hope my project turns out well.

Lan Wei-Project 12-Proposal

What I want to do for the final project is something about music but also has visual effects. I want the project to be interactive, meaning that people can create their own music (probably unconsciously). The detailed effect that I’ve imagined is that in the canvas of ‘universe’, people can create planets every time they click, and each zone of the canvas is related to a related piece of rhythm. By clicking in different areas of the canvas different sound effects are created. The visual effect of the planets needs some planning. I’m thinking that when a point is clicked, some repulsion is generated from this point and shapes are pushed away from the point, and thus a planet is generated. It would be nice if the planets can rotate from its position in a 3D mode and also oscillate with the volume of the rhythm. Other effects might be added to make the project more interactive and playful. I’m really looking forward to it.

Curran Zhang – Looking Outwards -12

For this looking outwards, I was more interested in interactive art works that uses the human and computational design to create something new. Projects that I was interested in was the Digital Type Wall by SEA Design (2012) and Vanishing Points by Rafael Lozano- Hemmer(2018). Digital Type is an animation sequence that changes the array of letters into different font types. Out of 6000 possible combinations, one is chosen at random. This allows visitors to observe the changes and various types of “language” created by the same letters. Vanishing Points is an interactive art piece that changes the vanishing point of the drawing based on the location of the closest viewer. These projects gear me towards something that is more of an artistic game or interactive program that allows the user to create amazing drawings.

 

 

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/vanishing_points.php

http://marcinignac.com/projects/digital-type-wall/

Alice Fang – Looking Outwards – 12

Andrea Gysin’s website is an inspiration for my and Jaclyn’s proposed project. Her website is full of examples of interactive type, which flow across the screen and shift with the position of the mouse. Other than the changes with mouseX and mouseY in the background, the body of text left aligned on the page flickers through and ‘rotates’ when the mouse hovers, creating a really cool loading characters effect. Andrea Gysin’s other work beyond just the construction of her website also include a program created for graphic designers to build simple, animated alphabets, and other tools to create visuals and installations. A lot her work is inspiring and along the lines of typographic interaction that Jaclyn and I are trying to build.


A project along similar but slightly different lines is Amnon Owed’s CAN Generative Typography. Using processing, he created an alphabet of generated letters, with different graphic characteristics. While it does not deal with bodies of text, as Andrea Gysin’s website does, the generative part of this video is what I find interesting; it would be really cool if we could apply a generative aspect to how the lines or stanzas of the poem for our project appear onto the canvas. Owed’s alphabet is not interactive, but a hybrid with the interactions seen in Gysin’s website could produce results that we want.

CAN Generative Typography from Amnon Owed on Vimeo.

A demo video of his generative typography

Looking outwards 12: Parallaxing

I’ve always been interested in Javascript features on websites so I’m going to try to create a parallax effect type of papercut artwork.

I bring up this example because parallaxing creates an illusion of depth that I think very much enhances the digital experience. (click 0.25x to get the full effect)

As seen here, the artwork is directly interactive with the user’s mouse. I like this because it is a subtle interaction that changes the feeling of the entire webpage.

See the Pen Papercut effect – mouse parallax by Julien Barreira (@JulienBarreira) on CodePen.

Both of these examples were developed with a mixture of html,css, and js. I’d love to see if I can compute this in pure Javascript.

Sophia Kim – Looking Outwards 12 – Sec C



“BAD SIGNALS” and “FUZZY BLOB” were both created in the beginning of 2018. Both projects are created by Avseoul. While both projects use webgl, “BAD SIGNALS” uses the webcam as a part of their visuals, and “FUZZY BLOB” uses the microphone to make audio. I noticed the use of vibrant colors throughout both projects. I admire how the sound transitions are shown visually through change of colors, because they are bold and noticeable. For “BAD SIGNALS,” I noticed how the glitches are responsive to sound. I admire how the glitches are not subtle, but rather exaggerative to show change. “FUZZY BLOB” allows the user to interact with the webgl not only with realtime audio, but also with mouse movement (can make affects and indents on the ‘fuzzy blob’). Similar to “FUZZY BLOB,” “BAD SIGNALS” utilizes realtime audio to make glitches on the visuals, which is from the web camera. I admire both projects, because they get the user to interact with the visuals and audio. Also, these projects depend on the user’s interaction (ie the sounds made by the user/their environment, their mouse movement).

Mimi Jiao – Looking Outwards 12 – Section E

Glitched image generated by pixel relocation via sound

I stumbled upon user avseoul on Vimeo while looking for the final project inspiration. Many of their works are create using Unity 3D and/or creative code to combine real time audio or video to alter the existing visuals on the screen. Avseoul uses a lot of organic shapes that mimics cells, mountains, and water droplets. Added with interesting textures and colors, they create really interesting graphics by integrating sound and visuals. I am really intrigued their glitched image by sound  and Audio Reactive Slit Photo-Scan Test where an image is taken and constantly reprocessed and altered based on a song that is playing. As the song continues to play, the image becomes more and more distorted and it’s an interesting way of visualizing the changes throughout the song. These alterations are almost a way of visualizing audio and it almost crosses into the domain of data visualization. I find this a really interesting starting point for one to explore deeper into ways information can be visualized. One thing I would like to see from this piece is how it translates into a three-dimensional space. I think it would be really cool if these changes were incorporated on the Z axis. These works provide a really interesting starting point for Sophia and me and we hope to branch off of these ideas and explore further into WEBGL.

Dani Delgado – Looking Outwards 12

The two projects I looked at this week focus on combining sound with visuals and generative work. The first project is called “Ichographs I”. This project, created by Yiannis Kranidiotis, is an audio visual computation that explores the relationship between these two components by transforming colors into sound frequencies. They took they colors from classical paintings and transformed them into visual audio, which I think is a super interesting concept. Website .

Screencap of the code generating audio waves from the painting’s colors

The second project I looked at is a generative work for the rock group NAFF Chusma. This piece, created by Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, uses real time graphics and the sound to create visually stunning animations. Website

A screencap of the animation

Both projects were coded (at least in part) using C++ and created visual artwork by using sound frequencies. I’m very interested in this intersection of audio and visual, not only because I find the ability to make the invisible soundwaves somehow tangible fascinating, but also because code allows us to this in such seamless and vibrant ways. These projects have both visual and intellectual intrigue, which is something that I think would be nice to reflect within my final project as well.

^ Yiannis Kranidiotis’ work

^ Thomas Sanchez Lengeling’s work