Student Area

Solar-TextSynthesis

Blobfish, Diner: For the last few weeks, the blobfish have been congregating at the diner. They sit in a circle around the fryer, cooking their food. Some of them stare at the fryer with envy, while others watch them with skepticism. But everyone seems to be contentedly slurping their food.

There was a parasite in the rainforest, that looked like it was made out of a bunch of humans. The forest had believed that the parasites were killing the trees, but it turned out that the trees had been going crazy, having some strange dreams. Their dreams were filled with skulls and bones and other things that shouldn’t exist. That was probably why the forest had sent the giant trees to find these humans.

Reflection: It was very humorous to experiment with random words and themes. The stories that are generated often go against my expectations and play around with different texts to create imaginative and surprising stories.

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.

 Solar-LookingOutwards03

Refik Anadol Machine hallucinations

https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/

Refik Anadol explores the mind of machines through representing memories of New York City in his work Machine Hallucinations. The work is a 30-minute experimental cinema that showcases the memories of New York through processing hundreds of millions of images. I found the idea of a machine hallucinating incredibly interesting because the visuals reflect on how we consciously and unconsciously perceive the city we live in. I am enchanted by Anadol’s manipulation of traditional storytelling cinematic techniques to showcase the memories of New York through a machine that has the “capacity” to dream. It awes me how data could produce such stunning visuals and immersive experiences and also the ability of machine learning to use existing information to “dream” about possible futures. I like how suggestive the visuals are, seemingly familiar yet distant as it represents no real place and hence its ability to portray something nostalgic like in one’s memory.

CrispySalmon-Creature

Shy Garden Eel

Rörålar.jpg

My creature is inspired by garden eel. I want to make a creature that takes a similar form to a garden eel and shared the same kind of shyness and unexpectedness of its behavior(check out this video on garden eel to see how it moves in the sea, it’s super cute).

The user interacts with the creature with mouse press. Whenever the mouse is pressed for a certain random amount of time(to add a bit of shock factor to the interaction), the creature will come out and follow the user’s mouse position. And when the mouse is released, the creature quickly retreats back to its place. Through the interaction, I want the user and the creature to both be a curious observer of each other.

I think the form of the creature can use more work. Maybe it can have more complicated patterns, instead of just gradient circles.

Still pictures

merlerker-landscape

OpenProcessing

My concept started from an idea to make data-driven tree rings that represent precipitation/drought data in California, and are explorable at multiple scales. I had the idea to use branching as the natural way to explore scale, where larger scales (state, basin) could be larger rings that branch into the smaller rings (grid cell), so switching scales meant you were slicing the tree at different points. I had the code to draw the rings in this wobbly way, but plugging in the data as an input and getting a neat ring that starts and ends in the same place proved to be challenging, and my DeepNote started crashing repeatedly 🙁 I pivoted (for now) to make a landscape from the tree rings that can shift from a top-down view (slice) to a perspective view (branch).

I use the random function to place multiple tree rings on the canvas, mapping their y position to the number of rings, so lower “trunks” are thicker. I draw rings with some wobble using Perlin noise to offset the radius as we go around the circle (learning the trick to get the noise values to start and end in the same place: use sin/cos functions as xoff,yoff inputs to noise, so your domain for the noise space is also a circle), then add stippling with a random angle stagger, so the stipples are not all lined up.

merlerker-Creature

Common Rumpus

I developed my creature by sketching ideas of how to make a creature-like thing out of 3 rectangles, with some vague ideas for interaction/motion, and then jumping into implementing it. Upon reflection, I think this approach defeated the purpose of the 3-rectangles constraint: I spent a long time thinking about how to make something interesting (statically) with 3 rectangles, when I could have benefitted from thinking of the interaction/animation first, rather than making those interaction decisions on the fly. Interestingly, I wasn’t thinking of it as an interactive animation, but I’m realizing how challenging that is – I have experience making animations, controlling paths, keyframes, and easing, but when that’s all interactive it feels like a very different challenge, because it can happen anywhere on the screen, in any direction.

The interaction I have established creates a relationship that is sort of curious and odd wild creature/observer. The creature is friendly and approaches the mouse with its goofy little bounce, but when you try to “move” toward it, the creature doesn’t let you get too close and starts backing away.

Wormtilda-Creature

In form, my creatures are basically just three lines connected to a point, but I gave them a lot of behaviors that hopefully give them a lot of personality and character. They avoid the cursor, running away from it when it’s close by and hopping away when it’s a but further away. Sometimes they trip, and sometimes the leap really high. I didn’t use any physics libraries or anything like that so the code is super janky, but hopefully that jankiness adds to the character of the creatures and their unpredictability instead of distracting from it. I also added a feature when if you press “s” on the keyboard, the all hop in unison.

 

 

Link to the sketch: https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1491759