Student Area

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Mirages & miracles is an augmented reality exhibition created by Adrien M & Claire B, and was first displayed in 2017. It is meant as “a tribute to us humans as we cling to seemingly lifeless, motionless, inorganic things”.

Mirages & miracles – trailer

What fascinated me the most the first time I saw the project was how the AR technology was seamlessly integrated with the physical display. AR technology had used in many occasion, but too often do they feel detached from the physical world, and often somewhat unnecessary. This was the one project I saw and remembered where the technology was one with the art, and as we mentioned in the first class, it brings an emotional impact instead of merely leaving me to wonder how they did it. There were also VR and projection parts of the display, but it was the AR part that was most memorable to me.

To my knowledge the this project is done with a team of around 30 people (throughout the whole process, from concept to final set up). And I cannot find information on what it was created with.

shoez-Map

 

Cirlrea 

Cirlrea is a uniquely shaped world where important landmarks are marked by filled in circles and the surrounding circles represent the elevation. Unlike Earth, Cirlrea was once a planet covered in moss-green water. The landmarks are all manmade and they house what is thought to be the last pockets of humanity. 

Initially, I wanted to create a map that could mimic the look of train maps typically seen in brochures and underground train stations. However, I quickly realized I had to add a lot of constraints so the look of the train lines would be aesthetically pleasing. The final product was inspired by contour maps. I liked the look of rings around a filled center and while I tried with other shapes, I ended up liking the look of circles the best. I didn’t want the map to represent earth, but I did want the overlapping contours to create the feeling of land masses. I used a nested for loop to determine how many circles I wanted and another to determine how many rings would be around the respective circle. The rest was just choosing colors and numbers to increase the diversity of circles. 

Link


sticks-Map

Generative Map

Territory:

I tried to represent an abstraction of motion and forces as the territory of my map. I wanted to explore how motion and forces could be depicted through the overlapping and overlaying of circles. I found that overlaying and creating circles within circles could generate a ripple effect, seen in how earthquake magnitudes are represented on maps and diagrams. My focus was on generating ripples, where ripples could be generated in a way that will still read as a map of motion and.

Technical Process:

One of my inspirations for creating the large circular discs were earthquake maps, where multiple circles are used as ripples to simulate the earthquake magnitude. Using circles, I created a map where the overlaying of vibrant circles creates an abstract sense of motion through ripples, along with a sense of sound due to the composition of the ripples.

code

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Compton gives good advice to making generators: specific and concrete “artifacts”. Get expertise from someone who makes or knows those artifacts to form a list of characteristics to generate. Create a structure of rules that govern the limits of the generator’s variability and creation guidelines. The usage of Perlin noise and other randomness can be used to introduce parametric change with user input.

It is hard to answer Compton’s question of how to “debug” a generator which isn’t producing the creatures as predicted . To me, it requires technical knowledge of coding and a well made architecture so that it is easy to locate sources of variation in the generator. However, perceptual uniqueness is even harder to identify. This isn’t computer defined and is purely determined by the artist eyeballing the work to see if a human can feel interested in the different productions. For me, a periodic break so I can come back and look at the generated work with a fresh set of eyes helps me determine the perceptual differences in the artifacts produced.

 

 

tale-Map

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About the Territory

People living and traveling across the outer space might not just a fictional story. If traveling to space becomes just as easy and fast as traveling to another country around the Earth now, what would the map of the universe look like? There would be more things to keep track of to locate oneself, potentially much more than our current 3 dimensional location and time.

Technical Process

From selecting colors, location, and shapes to selecting names for each planets, I used randomization to almost every element in this project. I had three different for loops generating planets of different sizes to create well-spread depth of 3 dimensional space, yet one thing I wish I could do was creating the planets closer to the window(i.e. bigger) to be 3D, not flat like in the current state of the project. Perhaps the mixture of 2D and 3D looking planets could have contribute more to creating an experience of looking at an unknown, abnormal map of an unfamiliar space. In terms of time dimension, I came up with a fake time counting system All Universe Time (AUT) and randomized a number, as well as the +/- symbol, to mimic our current time counting system(GMT+/-, UTF+/-,etc.).

miniverse-Map

Generator Gif

Generator Screen shots

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Territory description

This is a nebula generator.  It generates a random number for the nebula name and the celestial bodies populating it: planets in the foreground, stars in the background.

Creation Process

To make this generator I looked through the p5.js documentation pretty carefully.

First I made the background of stars:

then I added some random colors for the stars:

then I added the planets as ellipses and the rings

then I added the color randomization  for the planets, and converted them to spheres.

finally, I added the randomization of the rotation, converted the ellipses to spheres, and added the text.

 

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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