60-212: Interactivity and Computation for Creative Practice
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Fall 2020 • Prof. Golan Levin
This project is beautifully striking. It was interesting to see how its beginning was derived from a single line manipulated by vectors. I was also surprised that the river was made to not overlap by looking for collisions. Such sensitive adjustments make this piece so intricate and real.
The way Hodgin created natural land plots stood out to me since each land plot had an organic shape while simultaenous being connected. Meader introduced me to the Voronoi fracture was really interesting to me and would like to learn how to use it in future work.
A smaller thing that stood out to me was how Hodgin created a sense of place via naming. For example, Hodgin establishes the believability of his map by simply taking the names of known locations and altering them to create a simultaneous sense of familiarity and unfamiliarity demonstrating a simple solution to creating believability.
From Johanna Drucker’s text, I enjoyed how she identified the different interpretations of time from two schools of thought. Empirically, time is considered as a continuous cycle, whereas in records of human events, time is discrete, variable, and relative. It was interesting that the “humanist approach,” where the concept of time is flexible, is quite similar to Einstein’s revelation that time is relative (as briefly described in the 6-minute YouTube video on the history of timekeeping devices).
(But also, I don’t fully understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, so I’m not sure what the implications I can draw from this finding.)
8:24
This was an experience for me to make, as I went through hundreds of testimonies of victims (or their families) who suffered from the violence from the Colombian military, to the ELN, to the different paramilitary groups, to the FARC and female victims of assault through the different periods of armed conflict. I have done a lot of projects recently on the idea of constructing archives and stories, and something that has been on my mind a lot recently is the lived experiences of victims and the numerical definitions of massacre and collective trauma. So in this project, I created a clock that through the period of ten minutes, displays a unique version of these stories. To be able to view this clock, the left-most side displays the current minute represented by the number of words, the middle column represents the ten’s place digit of the seconds (thus it changes every 10 seconds) and the rightmost column represents the one’s digit.
The hardest part of this piece was trying to find a way of approaching this sensitive topic in a proper and respectful way, I translated a lot of the anecdotes at first quite literally, but many of the stories were violent and incredibly difficult to digest. There is also often a difficulty in trying to describe the violence that exists in Latin America without make it the defining quality of these nations. It often feels like as a Colombian, so many of our conversations are focused on avoiding the armed conflict as a topic, it felt uncomfortable to make this piece but I still made it because it is a very real struggle for many, and for those who live it every day through memories.
4:10-419
10:00
here is an earlier revision! CW: More explicit mentions of sexual assault and violence.
NOTES:
(CW: Mentions of violence)
EDIT: 9/17/2020
I edited the text to be slightly bigger, and added more variation to the statements so that it doesn’t feel as repetitive!
In reading Robert Hodgin’s writeup on “Meander,” I found a lovely lesson in the importance of documentation. Robert’s documentation not only illustrates his thought process, but also serves as a wonderful statement itself, effectively introducing concepts central to his work and speaking to the choice of medium.
I learned that our current calendar draws a lot of inspiration from the roman calendars. Romulus, the first king of Rome, had an affinity to the number 10 (probably because people have 10 fingers), so he split the year into 10 months and left 61 days nameless. This attempt at combining the lunar system with the solar system was by no means perfect, but it shows just how much people wanted to standardize time. Amongst the timekeeping devices, I learned that candle clocks took advantage of candles that burned at a constant rate. While this method would not have worked to keep constant time, it’s a clever way to know how much time as passed.
I’m surprised Meander was more than just river generation. Hodgin had to code realistic roads, land plots, and random landmark names. I found the algorithm for roads to be simple, but the result looked amazing. I learned that generating organic rivers requires a set of vectors and a couple restraints and the intensity can be changed by scaling the blend of vectors.
Day time:
16:42:48
12:43:57
Night time:
22:43:08
06:42:16
Process:
Coming up with an idea was definitely the hardest part of this project. Because I have never thought of depicting time in other formats other than digital or analog clocks, I spent a large portion of time pondering what would and could be an abstract clock. Pondering for a while made me conclude that any “clocks” could be laid in a line, where one end of the line being well-functioning useful (the clocks we can commonly find), while the other end being very abstruse (too abstract that some people might not consider it a clock). Because I do believe that all clocks do serve the function of representing time (as in how much of a day has past/left), I wanted to create a clock that could be read, yet still is an unconventional way of showing the time.
After going through numerous idea sketches, I settled with an abacus clock. Just like the timekeeping history, abacus has been around since the ancient period as a calculator. I remember learning how to use abacus when I was just beginning to learn simple math like addition and subtraction, and the impression I had of an abacus is that it looks funky yet organized. I had a hard time using abacus, but other people, especially those in the abacus competition, seem to easily take advantage of abacus. In fact, people who have been using abacus to calculate do the majority of the mental arithmetic by using the imaginary abacus inside their mind. I find that quite amusing, because to me, abacus was just an object that had little pebble-like pieces that I could fidget with and perhaps be a tiny little help in doing addition and subtraction.
Sketch:
I enjoyed creating this clock because I had an opportunity to create one that’s to my taste and preference. For example, I set the background color to be black if it’s not between 8AM and 5PM because I don’t like looking at a bright screen when it’s dark outside. Another instance would be the rotating color-changing cubes; I love watching things move around, especially in 3D, when I’m spacing out. Since those who would be looking at this clock on the LED screen (if it’s presented) would have already made a decision to spend some portion of their time looking at the clock, I wanted the clock to be more engaging and interesting to them(i.e. have some movements that people can stare at).
How to use:
Each pair of columns from left to right respectively represents hour, minute, and second. Anyone is invited to use this clock as a clock by reading the abacus, or just as a time passing object by looking at the cubes rotate and change colors.
Something that struck me about the readings was that you can represent terms like after, before, starts, meets, etc. as a relation between times i and j. It’s not that surprising, but the diagram in the Drucker pdf puts it very cleanly. I also thought it was interesting how being able to precisely measure time allowed ancient civilizations to accurately measure the size of the Earth.
A lot of this piece was made with math that was over my head. The “Voronoi Fracture” plugin to houdini to generate the background is highly technical and I don’t think I can integrate without more background knowledge.
The tips I’ll keep:
The longer the line for a randomly road, the thicker the line (good tip for the more important main roads)
The usage of vectors to model the uni directional push of the river was an interesting mathematical representation of the natural river deposition. I will try to do apply linear algebra in these flexible ways in the future.