I learned about planning a project, and the process of learning about the resources and skills you will need for it. I also thought the artist put a huge amount of thought and research into the concept.
Author: OodBird
OodBird – LookingOutwards01
I absolutely love the interactive piece “What Will Football Look Like in The Future” by Jon Bois. It completely changed the way I think about interactive story telling and you can communicate ideas with your audience. The story itself is too long and complicated for me to explain entirely, but its basically a discussion of future earth by a bunch of sentient space probes. One of my favorite parts of this piece in right at the beginning, where the viewers frame of reference for time is completely changed by the Bois, who presents the passage of decades through seemingly never ending completely blank calendar that the viewer has to scroll through in order for the story to progress. 
To the best of my knowledge I think this piece was made by the author on their own, though the work is hosted on sbnnation.com. Jon Bois is a sports writer and video producer, but has made seemingly no other work that is comparable to this one in term of medium.
OodBird-Reading01
Cate Kompton describes a problem surrounding the uniqueness of generative works and how uniqueness can be seen by an audience. A computer does not understand what we think makes something unique as from an algorithmic point of view, everything it makes is unique (she uses the example of 10,00 bowls of oatmeal that are all the same to a viewer but algorithmically different and unique to the computer). She explains that there are two main to resolve this issue, or at least help alleviate the problems it might cause. The first way is by use of perceptual differentiation, where we notice the uniqueness of something simply because it is imposed us as viewers and is large enough that it can not be ignored (like a forest). The other method is known as perceptual uniqueness, where someone will notice something not because it is imposing but because it looks slightly different than everything but not in a remarkable or alarming way. By giving your work strong personality and original features you can help prevent this problem.
OodBird – Exercise: Embedded Iteration + Randomness
OodBird – Map
I’ve always the appearance of Metro and subway maps, and feel that they are an amazing way to try and represent a environment. They somehow manage to balance the extremely chaotic and disorganized feeling of city travel with a clinical minimalism that I’ve always found fascinating. Not the mention the fantastic colors they all tend to have. You can learn so much about the inner workings of city from looking at their public transport.
To create this map, I made a series of randomly generated lines which I then added restriction to (in the form of conditionals) to make them appear more like subway lines. These restrictions include certain directions which only certain lines could go in, and a set length that each line had to have. Other restrictions allowed me to make sure no lines that went off the map or were too jagged would appear on the map. The River was generated the same way, but only had one direction option, and the words and randomly selected from an array.