October 2020 – Page 3 – [OLD FALL 2020] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

LO-09: Learning from Peers’ Blogs

Emoji-inspired Artworks for Facebook, by Kyuha Shim

LO 1 – My Inspiration

For Looking Outwards this week, I chose to review a blog from the one of the initial weeks of the course. Having joined this class late, I missed out on the first two weeks of work and that’s why I chose to use this week to review LO essays from those weeks written by peers.

I reviewed a post by Mark, where he talks about one of the artists who inspires him: Kyuha Shim. I chose this post to review because Shim, is not only a CMU professor, but also someone I had the chance to learn from, last year as I am a part of the Department of Design. Kyuha’s body of work is hugely inspired by what he calls computational design thinking.

While designers have several visual tools and software at their disposal to create and design interactions, experiences and interfaces, Kyuha’s work focuses on bringing computation into that design process and looking at computation as material. Kyuha was an artist-in-Residence at Facebook and he used computational methods to iterate graphic design compositions using deconstructed emojis.

In the process of iteration, he uses computation as material to create artworks/compositions at the frequency of “thousands of compositions in seconds” which expands the boundaries of thinking.

As a designer, this way of approaching code is inspiring. Rather than going in with an entire plan, going in with the right computational tools, can give rise to many visual design posibilities, which is true about p5.js as well as Processing

This is also a great example of an artist building up a particular practice or approach and using that approach for a versatile set of projects.

https://www.facebook.com/analoglab/videos/2163738493935595/?extid=GzpKGxeoSpyRbp7Q

Looking Outwards 09

I looked through my friend Lucas Bittig’s Looking Outwards posts and the one that I found interesting and different was his week 4 post. This post was on music and art, he talked about a certain art work that sometimes appears like a physical painting and others as a computer generated art work. I agree with my peers assessment of the project, I like how interesting the painting can turn out as some of them can be very realistic looking. I also like the combination of the two art forms into one, “painting” and music. Like Lucas said this art can tend to be beautiful as is incorporates so many mediums and techniques to form a final product. The creator of the arts name is Kynd in collaboration with Yu Miyashita in 2020.

LO 04 – Music and Art

Expressions – Paint and pixel matière at micro-scale

LO 9

This week I am going to look at my good pal Jubbies’ blog post on Chris Harrison’s “Clusterball”. This data visualization uses the connections between different Wikipedia pages through a common denominator to create an almost woven ball of links. I too played many rounds of “Wikiracing” as a kid, so I can easily connect to Jubbies’ outlook on this project. I enjoy seeing the ways in which these structures of interconnections have been made and where these lines are drawn. While taking part in “Wikiracing” I never truly paused to think about what connects various words and articles (as my only care at that time was winning the game). I agree with Jubbies’ statement on how amazing it is to see how every word does its part to add to this organic system. I would be interested to see this directly applied to “wikiracing” and be able to give two wikipedia pages as inputs and see how you could navigate from one page to the other.

https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/ClusterBall

LookingOutwards-09

For today’s looking outwards, I’ve selected tian’s LO 4, Sound Art. It was a new approach for me to see how technology can collaborate and create musical interactions with people. As it allows people to interact with musical notes with their bodies, it was interesting, as a person who’s interested in music, to watch a video of creating a musical composition on the spot. Just like tian said, I also think it is such a great project(LINES) that people with no musical experiences can also participate and “bring novelty and inspiration” to the new world of music(using a very engaging method). By exploring this project, I also realized that people can find/learn new forms of musical interactions and expand the exploration of new artistic expressions.

LO 09 – on Looking Outwards

Bone Chair (2006)

Joris Laarman

For this looking outwards post, I took a look at Jubbies’ post on Generative Art regarding Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair. In reading her response to Laarman’s work, I agree with what she said – As a design student myself, I find meaning and great appreciation for beautiful things, but something that embodies both form and function. As stated in her post, Laarman uses algorithms to mimic the natural growth of bones and trees to create a chair that has the most minimal structure to support the human body. I found this very intriguing because this piece represents the patterns of nature through a physical object that we interact with on a daily basis, yet still considering the form and function of the said object. From afar, this piece may seem like a “cool” surface level chair but the process of discovery and learning is required thus appreciating the chair even more.

View original LO here

View portfolio here

Project 09: Computational Portrait

For my computation project, I took a photo my friend took of me throwing an apple in the air. I eventually settled on using points to display my photo, but I used randomGaussian() to make the points condense at the apple and spread out from there. That way, there’s more points around the apple and less around the edges.

Project 9 – Computational Portrait

For this project, I wanted to create Van Gogh’s self portrait with the text “Van Gogh.” By using custom pixels, I was able to make words appear on the canvas in relation to the pixel color of the original image. Wait a little bit to view the full portrait!

sketch

let img;

function preload() {
  //preloading the van gogh image
  img = loadImage("https://i.imgur.com/wUgkJwF.jpg");
}


function setup() {
  createCanvas(300, 400);
  imageMode(CENTER);
  background(0);
  img.loadPixels();

}

function draw() {
  //coverage of the words on the canvas
  let randomWords = random(0, 400);
  let randomWordstwo = random(0, 300);
  //placement of words in relation to the image width and height
  let x = floor(random(img.width));
  let y = floor(random(img.height));
  //pixel and text relationship
  let pixel = img.get(x, y);
  fill(pixel, 800);
  textSize(5);
  text('van gogh', x, y, randomWords, randomWordstwo);
 
}

Image Source: https://i.imgur.com/wUgkJwF.jpg

Looking Outwards 09: On Looking Outwards

For this week’s Looking Outwards, I looked at Shaun’s (I worked with him in lab) LO for week 7 on Information Visualization. Shaun talked about Stefanie Posavec’s collaboration project with Greg McInerny titled, “(En)tangled Word Bank.” I agree with Shaun that this project is a very cool way to portray evolution, and I think that the six different editions of the project show how Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” One thing I would add is that Posavec is very interested in wearable art/art that can be interacted with and utilized in common settings, so it makes sense that she’s interested in evolution and the study of biological life.

(En)tangled Word Bank
Greg McInerny (British, born 1977) of Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK, est. 1997) Stefanie Posavec (American, born 1981)
2009

LO-09 (on looking outwards)

For this LO, I am looking at Bennett’s entry for the sound art LO-04. I agree with him in the sense that one of the more interesting parts of this project is the sound that is created, a smooth earthy tone that changes mildly or drastically depending on the external environments. However, I don’t quite agree with the amount of creator input that Bennett implies in this LO. The creator passes through the micro-voltage fluctuations into a oscillator that reads the frequency of the waves thus creating the sounds generated, so I personally think that the sounds generated reflect the “true tones” of the plant. Perhaps the creator intended this to be a single item project, I wonder what the tones created from various types of plants could differ from one another.

Bennett’s post: https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/15-104/f2020/2020/09/28/looking-outwards-04-4/

“Plant sounds”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvWPT4VhKTk&ab_channel=TomuTomu

Project-09-Portrait

I used lines that are randomly horizontal and vertical, and stroke width and lengths that progressively get smaller as the frames approach 10000, increasing the resolution of the portrait. At the end, the text ‘fin’ is displayed to conclude the drawing of the portrait.

sketch

Start

let picture;
function preload() {
  picture = loadImage('https://i.imgur.com/3hKjmTL.jpg');
}

function setup() {
  createCanvas(480, 480);
  imageMode(CENTER);
  textAlign(CENTER);
  noStroke();
  background(0);
  picture.loadPixels();
  frameRate(60);
}

function draw() {
  //chooses random pixel coordinates
  let x = floor(random(picture.width));
  let y = floor(random(picture.height));
  //gets the pixel color
  let pixelcolor = picture.get(x,y);
  //sets whether the line is randomly vertical or horizontal
  let verticality=[true,false];
  let horiz=random(verticality);
  stroke(pixelcolor);
  //sets the stroke weight in relation to the frame count
  strokeWeight(map(10000-frameCount,10000,0,20,0));
  //horizontal lines
  if(horiz){
      line(random(x-((10000-frameCount)/200),x),y,random(x,x+((10000-frameCount)/200)),y);
  }
  //vertical lines
  else{
      line(x,random(y-((10000-frameCount)/200),y),x,random(y,y+((10000-frameCount)/200)));
  }
  //ends the program at 10000 frames with a 'fin' message
  if(frameCount>10000){
     fill(255);
      background(0);
      textSize(100);
      textFont('Georgia');
      textStyle(ITALIC);
      text('fin', 240, 240);
      noLoop();
  }
}