Author: Sneeze

Sneeze—TextSynthesis

Narrative Device

“The old woman in the store was giving out fortunes when she caught sight of me. “You’re going to be rich,” she said. “You’ll find a lot of money.” But I didn’t believe her. I only had a few dollars. “You’ll get a headache,” she said again. I was too tired to argue. So I bought a fortune cookie and went to bed.”

Narrative Device takes in two themes and generates a whole paragraph out of them. I thought that this was really easy to use since it only needed the user to come up with two subjects, but sometimes the outcome would exclude one of them. When I used headache and fortune cookie, the device would only sometimes give me a paragraph that was related to headaches. Besides that, generating text on the same themes creates remarkably different storylines, which is impressive. I think that this device creates a semi-logical plot with a much more cohesive story compared to InferKit.

InferKit Tool

“Upon opening the door, Dorthy found that she was not in her room. She had transported to the land of ice and was about to slip and fall.
Determined to walk on, she insisted that she could handle it. The Mice that were near her allowed her to use their icy paths to reach her destination. They were also helpful in avoiding new dangers of their own.”

The InferKit Tool has a different dynamic from the Narrative Device. It requires the user to give it a starting phrase or sentence or sentences to build the story. I think that this gives the user more control, which can be nice, but providing fewer words results in a random story. When I experimented with giving it a phrase, the story went to a different subject all together. Providing more words makes the story a lot more cohesive, but then that requires the user to work more.

 

Sneeze—LookingOutwards03

More information about the project

Launch Project

The project that caught my attention was Font Map by Kevin Ho. The project uses machine learning to find similarities between fonts and maps in relation to each other on a plain. This interested me because I spend a lot of time with typefaces and being able to visually see fonts that are similar would honestly be a very useful tool for designing things. This tool not only allows for you to be aware of fonts that are similar to a typeface you like but it also brings in an aspect of exploration.

Sneeze—ArtBreeder

Using ArtBreeder was quite fun! I think that at the start, I was confused on how the tool worked since there were not instructions and the UI is not intuitive. Eventually, I understood how it worked and from there I was able to play around with the parents and genes. I enjoyed how the user could alter the weight of a certain trait and also have a chaos gene which adds in a bunch of random traits to create really interesting images.

Sneeze—PixtoPix

While using this tool, I had fun trying to come up with cute or wacky designs of cats, shoes, or buildings. However, the outcomes were not as satisfying for me. This was especially apparent in the edges2cats tool because the AI was misinterpreting certain aspects of my drawings since they were not standard to cats. For instance, my super large eyes cat has some fur in his eyes, which was not ideal, and my toothy cat doesn’t have as much personality as he was intended to. Although there are limitations to these tools, its very impressive that the AI is able to detect features from drawings, but I think that there are some issues with drawings that have more animated or cartoony features.

Sneeze-Creature

Project Link

The creature I created is named Jelly. Jelly is being puppeteer by the user’s mouse and will swim following the cursor. Jelly’s tentacles can grow if the user clicks their mouse on the screen. I used a lot of bits and pieces of other people’s code to create the mechanism. The most difficult part of this was understanding code that was not mine and understanding it enough to manipulate it to the outcome that I wanted. I used a spring mechanism for the tentacles and a particle system for the moving dots.

Sneeze-landscape

Link to the project

This generative landscape is supposed to evoke a peaceful and calm feeling in the viewer. As time goes by, the landscape eases in and out of night and day. Watching the landscape change colors is meant to reenact the experience of someone watching the scenery from noon until evening. It was generated using Perlin noise for the mountains and fractal trees.

I think that I experienced the most struggle from the lag that the code causes. I am not sure where the lag is coming from, but I was scared to do any other additions incase it would crash my window. I also had difficulty with having the landscape change while keeping the trees static. Since fractal trees are recursive with random adjustments, it was sort of difficult to keep them from changing every second. I was also short on time since I have midterms coming up this week, so I decided not to mess with it more.

Sneeze-LookingOutwards02

Instagram Post

I was drawn the the gradients in this piece. Although the shapes and the concept are simple, the blur effect adds dimension and makes it more interesting to look at.

Behance Post

This piece looks geometric yet organic and simple yet complex. These conflicting attributes makes me want to look at the piece more.

Instagram Post

I was intrigued by the scientific look of this piece. Although it was digitally generated, it has the look and feel of a medical diagram and looks to have the same complexity as something carefully crafted by a medical artist.

Sneeze-Reading03

Question 1A. The spotted lake in Canada exhibits effective complexity as its appearance falls under total randomness but its creation stems from order. The lake becomes spotted when the water level is low, and the walkways are caused by high deposits of minerals like magnesium sulfate, calcium, and sodium sulfate. Each of the pools has a unique hue, which is also due to the dissolving of minerals. I would say that the spotted lake falls in between order and disorder. The science behind the spots are caused by minerals and crystals, but the patterns they create on a macro scale look random and disordered. The complexity of the system is unknown to me since I am unsure of the specifics as to why these circular patterns form. There is not much research that describes this. I assume that many complex factors cause the formations, but it could be attributed to a simple scientific phenomenon regarding mineral deposition.

Question 1B. The Problem of Uniqueness
I think that the issue with uniqueness in digital generative art and digital art in general does diminish the “aura” and uniqueness of the piece. Once exclusivity is diminished, the appeal of uniqueness and something being special because of scarcity also decreases. This is not necessarily the most important aspect to an artwork as there are many other factors that make art “good art” that don’t rely on uniqueness. Although digital generative art does create a unique and original artifact rather than copies of digital work, the amount of uniqueness of the artwork is limited. Usually some small parameters are changed, some things are moved around, and colors or movement are altered, but the basic premise is the same. The limited range of the uniqueness of digital generative art makes the original and unique generated artifacts almost the same as copies of an artwork. I think that uniqueness is indeed an issue with digital generative art, but in our increasingly digital world, it is not a large issue.

Sneeze-timepiece

 

The concept of this time piece is a galaxy clock.  The rays of dots expanding from the center of the sun indicate to the viewer the hour of the day, and there are 12 indicator dots of the hours for easier viewing and understanding. Moving on the the minutes, a planet revolves around the hour sun and the distance from the top to the planet is the number of minutes that has past. The minute planet has a moon that represents the number of seconds that has past. The planet and the moon has an orbit that indicates the time and lets the viewer grasp the orientation of the starting point to tell the time.

I wanted this to be sort of mechanical in nature, as if the clock was built in real life and conformed to the effects of gravity, so I put supporting lines in-between the planetary objects. However, I think that this concept is not clear because the graphics are vector like and not similar to things we view in real life. I was also planning on having a door open to reveal the sun, but decided to take it out since it seemed out of place, which could help in describing the concept more to the viewer.

Link to project in OpenProcessing

Sneeze-Loop

Link to OpenProcessing Project

It was actually quite difficult to create an animated gif through code because I was used to having a user’s input (like mouse, keys, etc)  be the parameters for interaction and movement. However, with an animated gif, the main driver of movement is time, which got some getting used to. I wish that I made the animation more dynamic, but I realize that this animation is not supposed to take up a lot of time. I had a lot of other things on my plate, so I kept it simple. Since there is a 3 color limit, I think I should have chosen a different subject that is a bit more abstract rather than something that requires many different colors to understand what it is.

Here is my sketch before I made the animation: