Category: 11-FinalWIP

The concept of my project was decided after deciding the medium. Making a smooth 3D object in Tiltbrush (like one possibly made in a 3D rendering software) I think is theoretically possible but very hard to do, so the physical form of my object is a result of me working with Tiltbrush instead of against it.

Initially, I messed around with blue/red 3D stereoscopy by plotting different angles of one object on top of each other. I thought it was funny that I went from 3D (TiltBrush) -> 3D (Blender) -> 2D (plotting the SVG) -> “3D” (stereoscopy). Even though this experimentation was not enough to be a final piece, it was useful to do because I realized I liked the layering of color. I may or may not go further into the use of contrasting colors in my final.

Finally, I have decided to create a sort of hellscape. It is also an experimentation with different mediums and a really funky workflow. Below is the SVG of a draft version. From here, I want to fill the background with more scenes by adding more 3D objects in Blender as well as drawing on top of the plot by hand. I also would like the use the big Axidraw to be able to add more detail. This scene is currently being plotted.

Prior draft of the scene:

Newer draft:

However, this looks more like an up close view of a traditional hellscape. While I like the perspective, I am also intrigued by art that ignores perspective such as seen in The Hellscape Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch:

3 dimensionality exists within each object and their surroundings, but it is overall flat-looking. I think using the giant Axidraw to create this type of scene would be interesting.

Party-Planning Floor Mat

I’m interested in creating objects which plan parties. (‘Party’ is used as a catch-all term for some community-expressive event).

The ideal party-planning object to me is (1) unique (i.e., no two instances of it are identical), (2) low-effort to set up, (3) widely usable, and (4) interactive (both in terms of interacting with the object and each party-goer interacting with the other party-goers).

As best I could, I created party-planning floor mats under these constraints. In terms of (1) uniqueness, each floor mat is entirely generated. The size is arbitrary, able to scale from the area of one pair of shoes to the surface area of the globe, given appropriate material. Each area is filled with shoes according to a poisson-disc distribution. Each shoe is parametric, with variables relating to height, width, and concavity (magnitude and location). Party objects are placed on appropriate vertices of the shoes’ voronoi diagram. Each party object is a random choice from a natural-language-processing-generated list of 18,336 things that are wanted or desired in some way. Shoes face the nearest party object and party objects face the general direction of all shoes facing them. A closed path from shoe to shoe is determined from a decent enough traveling-salesman solution. Below is a gif of the debug-mode, which shows the cuts and the voronoi diagram, next to the full generated floor mat.

These elements are divided into 25-inch-wide strips of arbitrary length, which can be plotted on a large enough plotter, such as the studio’s MH871. Each color must be plotted as a separate layer, which, in combination with the difficulty aligning the paper over such a long length, does not exactly meet (2) the criterion of low-effort. I likely spent upwards of 3 hours simply plotting this 7-sheet-wide, 17-foot-long floor mat. Machines capable of plotting on this scale are also not commonplace, meaning these party-planning files, at least, are not (3) widely usable. The sheets themselves, though, may meet these two criteria. A better method of securing the sheets to the floor and to each other would greatly simplify things. I wonder about the product-ness of these mats and party-planning objects in general.

Part of me wants to either abstract or remove the words altogether. I’m just not sure how well they work in terms of augmenting the interactions between party-goers. I’m also not sure about their influence on the mood of the piece; they likely read as more foreboding or poetic than a “party object.” Of course, parties as I’ve defined them don’t need to be cheerful, but Iworry it makes the work read more as “art object” than “party-planning object.”

(4) I did see many people afraid to step on it. Given permission, however, people seemed to be having fun with the mat and one another. Some of the paths are quite long and a good number of people nearly fell trying to jump from shoe to shoe. People also ended up standing much closer to one another than they might normally. Maybe they needed an excuse?

– xoxo
sweetcorn

For my final project, I decided to make a tribute to the typology of drawing that focuses on the movement of living things. This typology explores motion, form, and time. One such example is Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse photographs.

The photographs became import as a series rather than individually, and in turn offer insight into the locomotion of a horse. Another example of this typology is the work of Harold Edgerton, which become more formal due to the stark contrast in the photographs.

In dialogue with these works, I took advantage of the image segmentation library Detectron2, which allowed me to generate outlines of people from an image.

Using these outlines, I began sampling videos to create long exposure outlines.

I found walk cycles particularly compelling, partially due to the uniqueness of an individual’s gait.

With the focus of a walk cycle, I began recording my classmates’s walks.

Through the capture, the personality of a walk can be seen.

Finally, to emphasize the temporality of the walk, I began experimenting with a dashed representation, fading out the edges of the moment.