60-212: Interactivity and Computation for Creative Practice
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Fall 2020 • Prof. Golan Levin
What drew me to this piece by Manolo Ide was the quietness created by the cold white in contrast with the bright city like buildings. I really like the way the buildings curve around the screen resembling how a real city scape would look like as well as the numerous little squares that represent building and makes me want to figure out how this piece was made.
Fluid Leaves – Reinoud van Laar
Fluid Leaves is a project made by Reinoud van Laar for tea boutique, ‘Tee & Cupp’ in Xian. This project generates prints of non overlapping leaves in a fluid pattern similar to that of tea leaves floating in water onto paper cups.
The elegance of each print initially drew me into the project such as the delicate shapes and simplistic color palette. I also found the application of generating patterns that are not each perceptually unique while also having perceptual difference as a great means of branding for the tea shop since the shop could maintain a uniform look while ensuring each customer has a drink that is special in its own way.
This project uses programs such as Geomerative, ControlP5,
Toxiclibs, and Mesh and applies topics such as Perlin noise, displacement maps, and fluid dynamics to create the water like movements. Each leaf is made in Processing by randomly varying certain characteristics of each leaf such as the traits of each vein and stem to create unique leaf shapes. Additionally, the liquid feel of the pattern is created by fluid dynamics mapped to vector paths.
Road Maps to Nowhere
For this project, I created a road map that leads to nowhere and that the user could never reach. I wanted these maps to feel as if it the user was had opened up Google Maps while on a road trip.
These maps were created by creating jagged lines that mimic roads and rivers by drawing short line segments that varied in size and direction that began where the previous line segment began. As each segment is drawn there is chance that a white marker is placed as well a chance a completely new branch would be drawn from the current point creating a split in the current jagged line being drawn. I increased the probability that rivers would branch in order to better mimic how rivers move. Additionally, I also randomly varied the thickness of each river tributary to to make the rivers more river like.
10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal Problem
The 10,000 bowls of Oatmeal problem examines a feature of generative art, the perceptual uniqueness – the amount of distinction between artifacts and perceptual differentiation – the ability to perceive two artifacts as different.
The lack of perceptual uniqueness does not necessarily hurt a project since depending upon the context a lack of perceptual uniqueness among a collection of artifacts can benefit or hurt the collection. For example, a game focused upon collecting an infinite number of creatures would be harmed by a lack of perceptual uniqueness since the game’s main draw is the infinite number of unique creatures. While the promised variety theoretically exists, but since the user can’t quickly distinguish said variety, it doesn’t really exist. On the other hand, procedurally generated crowd that wanders the background would benefit from a lack of perceptual uniqueness and merely having perceptual differentiation. The slight variation between each character would provide subtly uniqueness to each background character without causing them to stand out.
In order to increase perceptual uniqueness, the author recommends we generate objects that each have emphasized characteristics humans can easily distinguish.
