For my landscape I created a hotel hallway scene where each room opens up to a completely new landscape. Most assets are rendered in Blender, and each new scene choose from two different landscape layouts (flat vs cylindrical), 2 types of trees, 2 types of creatures, 2 types of structures, and 4 or so backgrounds and 4 big structures off in the distance. Basically everything is PNGs, except for the first hundred or so frames which is a mp4. You may have to refresh the page once when initially starting it (I really don’t know why), but after that it should work.
Link to sketch: https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1486536
This is a major wip, i have other homework so i need to stop for now but this is not what I really wanted to do with it. I want it to interactive but I don’t have time right now so I am just demonstrating some of it’s characteristics. It also isn’t supposed to go beyond the canvas but too tired to fix bug. That’s that for now.
The development of this creature started from basically two ideas: an object transitioning from a soft, blobby state to a rigid one, and empathetic guilt for a simulated creature through interaction. This came from my experiences playing video games, and through the rules of the game, being required to arbitrarily hurt or kill innocent creatures and feeling upset about it.
From there I started thinking about how a lot of animals puff up when they get scared. We seem to think it’s cute, but it’s also pretty sad seeing a creature feel threatened like that. So the goal was to create a blob that would rapidly stiffen and “puff up” upon hearing a loud noise.
visual inspiration for creature
As of right now, I’m still tuning up the physics of the blob, but hopefully this sketch is at least a proof of concept! Without the “scaring” interaction, this definitely feels like a scientist/subject relationship — just watching how the blobs interact and move around.
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.
INTERACTION You can click or click-drag across the canvas to destroy the cells, they will regenerate (to a certain extent.) Y0u can also double click to spawn a new cell which will grow into a new colony.
INTRODUCTION This is a living self-portrait in a cellular automata (game of life) where each pixel in the 48*48 grid is an individual “creature” that has a 256 bit memory, the first 32 bit of which is its displayed color (RGBA.) A fixed neural network (can be thought of as a set of very complex rules, these rules are learned instead of manually selected like in Conway’s game of life) is then used to operate on the state of the creature based on a 3*3 perception field and its memory.
IDEATION This piece, especially the idea of a self-portrait, is inspired by Leibniz’s Monadology. In Leibniz’s metaphysics, he proposes that everything in the world is made of “monads” (conscious, thinking atoms) and that all objects, including us humans, are just many monads working in perfect, predetermined, harmony (established by God) without communicating with each other. The concept of cellular automata is exactly that — independent cells, each with limited perception, without any communication, reacting to the changes in their environment according to pre-established, unchanging laws (the neural network.)
TECHNOLOGY The model takes the perception field of each cell and performs a depth-wise convolution with Sobel and identity kernels before feeding it into a standard Densenet-121, where it then goes through another dense block before outputting the 32 channel new state (top 4 will be the new appearance.) There is also an alive mask where all cells with alpha below 0.1 are reset. A better explanation of the technology behind this project can be found here: https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/. This is the paper that inspired part of this work and provided almost all the implementation for the model and the tensorflow.js code that powers the real-time inference on the frontend. The model currently in use was trained on the drawing (of myself) below for 30k epochs (~1.5h.)
SKETCH This is a sketch that represents what I want to achieve visually if I had the time and skill. I decided to use different angles to highlight the fact that it is not about the image but rather the true three-dimensional self. The Warhol-like gradients add some visual interests and variety while subtlety hinting at the fading dichotomy of digital mass-production and individualism.
The interactions between the user and the creature (fire-pest) can be seen as prey and predator or leader and follower as the fly-like creatures are attracted towards the cursor. I wanted to try to create something that explores the behavior of pests and viruses invading an organism. As the creatures invade the circle, the circle grows smaller and smaller but grows again when it moves away from the creatures. I wished I added a more natural element to it, perhaps some creatures are hurt and stop moving or move in awkward directions.
The idea is to allow users to create their own “pet”. I want users to be able to control the look of their creatures and interact with them.
The species is called “DIVOC”. The size of each individual is controlled by the amount of time the user presses their key. The position of each DIVOC is the same as the position of the mouse. When created, each DIVOC can be dragged around by clicking on the particles around their body. The eyes of DIVOCs also follow the mouse.
The project is created using Matter.js. I spend most of my time learning it, and I think my project could be further improved if I am more familiar with its library.
Originally I wanted to make a worm using the joints that are shown today in class. Because the act of showing made the project less interesting, I decided to add more to it using some PID controls that I have not implemented myself before. But suddenly, the spider-like movement comes into my mind and I have long admired to reproduce this effect. So here it is. The problem is more non-trivial than I thought. It takes some hack. Rotation of the spider legs is harder to implement, so I did some tricks to fake it.
I like the organic/illustrative style of this generative work. And it’s very speculative, it makes the viewers wonder what images are being fed to the algorithm to generate this image.
Manolo Gamboa Naon
This work reminds me of the bookshelf scene in Interstellar. A very effective way of establishing a scene through loops and repetition.
Zachary Lieberman
James Turrell: Into the Light | YatzerAgenda
This works reminds me of James Turrell’s light installations.It has successfully created a sense of space, depth and flatness in an interesting/contradicting way.
I consider the hair accumulated in my shower an example of effective complexity. It’s pretty much total randomness in that you don’t really know how much hair is in there, the shape is totally random. But it has certain expected features (it’s made out of hair, is denser in the middle, has less hair on the outer part, etc).
Question 1B: Problem of Uniqueness
My problem is actually about the question itself: “Does it diminish the value of the art when unique objects can be mass-produced?” I think value really shouldn’t be at the center of the discussion with generative art. For me, value comes from exclusivity, ownership, and scarcity, and a big part of generative art is about its ability to dismantle such things in art. With generative art, we shouldn’t be looking at the value of each individual mass-produced unique object/works; the focus should be the mere realization/appreciation that mass-produced uniqueness is made possible through generative approach.
I like the organic/illustrative style of this generative work. And it’s very speculative, it makes the viewers wonder what images are being fed to the algorithm to generate this image.
