Student Area

I have a somewhat meager offering for this week. I came up with another algorithm that combined circles with circular arcs by matching the slopes of the tangents, but I had difficulty implementing it. I was trying to mimic the forms of water bubbles, and it was going to look something like this:

I ended up pivoting to something simpler, an implementation of the algorithm that Golan mentioned in class, which mapped 2-d space Perlin noise to radial alteration of circles. I played a little bit with using the blobs to fill a space at different densities. Some of the different iterations looked like this:

 

I liked the poetry with which Laura Kim spoke about blobs, and how they saw blob-making as a form of alternative communication, a strange and novel language.

 

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I created my blobs by bashing various Python libraries together. I used sklearn's SVM to get a 2D Voronoi classifier. Using that classifier I sorted random points into buckets and used scipy.spatial's ConvexHull algorithm to get a shapely LineString so that I could clip the hatching for later. I drew the actual curves using a modified version of Wikipedia's Catmull-Rom curve. To add the randomness to the edges I used a Perlin noise library to implement some approximation of p5.scribble. My inspiration was to create little potato creatures that were all holding hands (above). Due to time constraints I was only able to get the potato bodies. One thing I found interesting from the readings was the Town and Country salt and pepper shakers. I really vibed with the idea that blobs can be personified.

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One of the first things that came into my mind when we were assigned to create “blobs” for me was “what can a blob resemble”. After seeing a couple of blobs from the lecture, especially ones that illustrate a  “melting” kind of effect, I thought of Salvador Dali’s La Persistencia de la Memoria and the melting clocks within the painting. I didn’t realize how blobby those clocks actually were, but their form and shape were beautiful and were great representations of real objects turned “blobby”. My initial goal was to replicate the work, but realizing how difficult it was to get the details right, I decided to make a similar interpretation of the painting that alters that keeps the clock motif, and certain defining shapes in the painting, but simplifying a lot of the complicated forms. 

When converting to SVG mode in p5.js, I discovered that my code had a bug that existed and took me FOREVER to find. I ended up creating a more abstract version of the initial product, one that is more chaotic and I think diverges more from Salvador Dali’s painting. 

Sketches

Another SVG

Another SVG

Original Non-SVG version

Blob Reading Notes: 

In Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s A Blobafesto, I found the following line to be a great definition of how I see blobs: 

My initial idea of defining a blob was defining it by what it could not be, which was that it cannot have sharp edges, as it interferes with how we understand language and characterize words based on it’s pronunciation and syntax (I think this still somewhat stands true for me).

I really enjoyed the reading's introduction, where she mentions the term blobosphere and how it “transforms and transcends expectations from all shapes and forms”. I think this is also a phenomenal definition that I agree with, where the potentiality of blobs as a form seems to be endless, and that's the beauty of it. 

• I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a blob with just my previous knowledge, but every attempt resulted in a very sharp-edged polygon that wouldn’t even come near the definition of a blob. I then decided to watch Dan Shiffman’s video on Perlin Noise loops; with that and the help of some smoothing done with averaging and noiseDetail() with Golan, I was able to create my blob family. The fill is not even in each blob, which resulted in a bendy look. I actually quite like how it looks because I think it adds some movement to the image.
• One thing that stuck out to me from Entering the Blobosphere reading was the de-categorization of the blob from the physical shape that it is so commonly associated with. In defining it as a conceptualization of progress and/or potential, its scope becomes much broader, and offers much more to contemplate.
• Here are some screenshots of my blobs:

Here is the SVG of my final blob family:

Here is the final plot:

I read Blobjects: Beyond the New Fluidity in Design. The reading briefly mentioned how historically there was a move towards organic shapes in car design and that made me recall the amount of attention the cyber truck got. The reading also heavily implied that blobs are inherently friendly and welcoming, which prompted me to think about if it is even possible to make a blob seem harmful or dangerous.

I traced the contours of 2D metaballs (which is based off of this sketch by Dan Shiffman). I altered the code by removing velocity and changing how initial positions were instantiated, since my goal was just to produce svgs not animations.  I generated the position of the metaballs using a variation of the Thomas cluster point process in order to produce clusters that looked more blob-like (in my opinion). However it is conceptually different from this point process because I only use a Poisson Distribution on the parent points and not on the daughter points. The code I used to generate the distribution for the cluster centers can be found here. I trace six layers worth of isolines using this library which uses the marching squares algorithm at varying thresholds. I simultaneously generate bit masks for each of the six isometric layers, rasterize hatch patterns over top of these masks and trace the lines from the masked result. The hatch patterns consist of noise fields of varying stroke weight + circles but when the masked hatch is traced only the outline remains, which give the blobs a texture similar to muscle cells. Additionally I chose the little circle hatch because little circles contained in bigger circles seem very cell-like to me.