Author: sweetcorn

sweetcorn-Reading02

If I’m using Naimark’s framework, I guess I do often find myself thinking in terms of first word art. I admire the art I admire usually because it pushes into some new territory. I would say that isn’t by my own volition. At an institution which poses itself as cutting edge and groundbreaking or whatever words the Carnegie Mellon marketing team adopts, the narratives will always center these kinds of groundbreaking works. It’s no surprise that the school of art does the same.

Of course new territory isn’t homogeneous. In the past year, I’ve been focusing on art that pushes conceptually and pushes away from performance as this thing that goes on in some amount of time. I’m not sure why I haven’t focused as much on new technological territory—perhaps I subconsciously feel that’s a BCSA major’s place and not mine. I think to some extent “nostalgia” has been imposed on my work because I’ve refused to engage with even the current non-first-word state of technology in any real way. These are points to reflect on for me and things I see necessary to change for myself.

sweetcorn-LivingWallpaper

Zoom Background for Lovely Friendships

I miss building lovely friendships with lovely people in classes as I did last year. Accordingly, I wanted to make a background that invited friendship over zoom classes. I’ve been watching a little bit of Blue’s Clues recently and really enjoy its graphics.

I wanted to recreate the playful and goofy and welcoming aspects seen in children’s shows like this (excuse my poor documentation), using the circular in out easing function from p5.func as well as a simple linear function for the curly frame.

I would have liked to include elements that were customizable by the user, perhaps a list of current friends that cycles on the screen or a phone number where they may be reached to build these friendships. I experimented with this a bit early on, but it was going poorly :~(. Here’s a screenshot from that stage, showing the name of my best friend and partner ;~).

The curls were hard to get right using curveTightness() alone, as I had originally planned. You can see above one of the many experiments I had in making these curves before settling on manually creating a loop with curveVertex() and repeating it across the screen. The sideways motion I ended up with was easier to create with this method as well. Once I had that figured out, the main difficulty I had was not knowing how much space someone is going to take up in the frame and having to arrange visual elements accordingly. More technically, my heart shapes (lifted from previous projects) seem to be anchored at their left side and scale oddly because of that. Some of my technical notes are evident below ;~) (Excuse the unrelated notes + drawings)

If you would like to build lovely friendships by using this as your Zoom background, please be my guest :~) Zoom only accepts videos as backgrounds so you’ll have to download below.

Download video here <3

xoxoxo

~sweetcorn

sweetcorn-reading01

Compton’s 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem describes a big difficulty for artists dealing with generators. That is, it is all too easy to generate artifacts that, though distinct from one another, don’t vary in any significant ways from one another. In other words, the audience doesn’t care that each one is different if the audience cannot tell that they are unique in any interesting ways.

This doesn’t exactly matter when artists are dealing with things that don’t have to necessarily seem all too different from one another. If things are presented physically apart from one another, their similarity isn’t immediately clear or even important to a viewer.

When things are presented as a collection of artifacts, close to one another either physically or temporally, this becomes more of an issue.

Dealing with order might be an interesting way to overcome some minor instances where this occurs—figuring out which artifacts are interesting near other artifacts and modifying the generator to emphasize that. With each generation, some quality could be gradually changed. The result would be a gradation of objects that, when viewed as a whole, are interesting.

sweetcorn-Map

Map to Happy Time with Friends Again :~)

gif of generated maps

It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—isn’t it better to have searched for paradise and failed than never to have searched at all? I miss my friends & their friends & having fun with all of them :~(

The destination is placed randomly and the rocks and bushes and trees and whatnot are generated around it with bezier curves. The path then curves from some random direction at the edge of the map to where all of your friends are, with some variability along the way so you can enjoy your journey <3. The land’s features are vague enough to correspond to some actual place, if you look hard enough ;~)

xoxoxoxo

~Sweet Corn

 

sweetcorn-lookingoutwards01

Screenshot of default filename tv

Partially because it was a useful tool for finding videos I needed for projects but mostly because it is very entertaining, I often found myself watching Everest Pipkin’s default filename tv last semester. In the words of the artist, it “finds and plays youtube videos that were uploaded from the camera without edits to the filename.” Because of its generativity, it may not have as strict of a cohesion as other video compilations like The Clock by Christian Marclay, but there is a certain sincerity, humor, and homeliness found throughout the videos. This is especially apparent when comparing these videos to the content normally on YouTube, usually designed strictly for that platform and often exaggerate experiences in hopes of more views and interactions. This work points to generative art as a method of creating collections without the inherent bias of a person selecting the videos, images, objects, or whatever else.

GIF of multiple videos found on the site