Image in Transition

For this class I decided to record/perform one of the types of work that I've been doing with John Mackey as both music videos and live performances.

A lot of my works seem to have been heavily influenced by the shiny colours of Johns saxophone, and the smoothness of some of his works.

The programs that I've been writing using the leap motion are very meditative when performed, i.e. I tend to zonk out and just go with it during the performances because it just feels good.

I tried different colour schemes and methods of control during the project, but I found that I wasn't really happy using some of the stronger, non-primary colours and I really liked a side effect of combining a rim-highlighting shader, an edge shader, and a bloom shader together (the glowing gold effect) on the cloth. I've also had some success with that effect and previous work done with JM using it.

During this project I wrote a 3D cloth physics simulation (for the stringy bits) that uses Verlet integration for the physics and a new method of interpolating the cloth vertices to achieve a smoother cloth for a significantly smaller cost in processing power.

The finished product without titles:

After image

For this homework/class I have created a brightly coloured flashy thing that seems to break the brain.
I really like this kind of thing and I'm now working on a set like this that can be played using a step sequencer.
Unfortunately the colours didn't come out very well in the transcode, they are meant to be primary blue and yellow.

Micro/macro image dump

This week I actually created a touchdesigner project in an attempt to simulate the "electron microscope" look using some lighting effects and material shading, but I cant really work out how to export screenshots from it so instead heres some electron microscopy.

I also did some work using an endoscope (its clean I swear) that can take really good macro-videos using cheap crappy raspberry pi lenses blu-tacked to it.

Land art/Sight,site,transformation

The project for the coming weeks is Sight Site Transformation, where I have the opportunity to do some installed land art.

Over the course of my artistic "career", I've been inspired mainly by a lot of minimalist art (like Donald Judd), and so for this I wanted to do something similar. I like the feeling of discovery through art and feel like doing something that encourages that.

I was thinking of doing some small pieces installed across the site, that are linked by a common concept. My first thought was to use some kind of invisible data, such as the ocean currents around Australia (at a projected point from a central motif), however after some thought I decided to use a metaphor for radio and cellular communication by diagramming motifs using sand.

The motifs that I would like to use are derivative of electronic circuitry symbols. They have been written into my handbook, along with some ideas for my artist statement.

I had a look around the site and took a bunch of photos:

Unfortunately sand was not a wise choice, I tested it out and it isn't as foreign/alien as I would like, not to mention its impossible to sift back out of the grass. I've investigated the local landscaping depot and found a better material for this project which is a white stone that is sufficiently different to the environment but also juxtaposes the surroundings.

Installing/packing the work up was hard. I got sunburnt and carrying that stone was difficult.

Some images:

TD stumbles

Check back in with these projects soon:

https://github.com/vjasterix/TD-Particle-Flowfields

https://github.com/vinz9/BulletCHOP

Touchdesigner

Heres a screenshot dump of my project for the touchdesigner course (more to come):

Shadow Play

So the brief for this class, (which I was not able to attend), suggested that I create some Rorschach tests. Rorschach tests were originally intended to gain some insight into the subconscious, however their accuracy for this purpose has not been substantiated to me or my partners satisfaction.

It reminded that I had actually rewritten (ported) some code that kind of generates them.

I was looking around being interested in digital painting and I thought it would be a good place to start by looking at what someone else was doing, and then do it better.

I found an OpenProcessing sketch http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/4675

That produced some satisfying results once tweaked a little bit (images at the bottom).

I rewrote it in another language, developed a GLSL shader for the threshold effect and optimised it so that it ran significantly faster on slower machines (order of magnitude increase), the extra speed made it more satisfying as I was able to keep the effect and the movement was more fluid.

I then went one step further and created multiple layers of a GLSL noise warp shader (the thing that warps everything a a bit) at different frequencies, this gives the video a kid of inkblotty effect that I really like and so I've included this in my global bank of shader combinations and fx. I've linked a video of this effect at the bottom.

The next thing that I would like to experiment with is using a harmonic relationship with the noise frequencies rather than a linear one. Currently the frequencies go from { 1 - 16 } in steps of one, and I would rather they go something like { 4 (32/8), 4.514285714... (32/7), 5.333... (32/6), 6.4 (32/5), 8 (32/4), 10.666... (32/3), 16.0 (32/2), 32 (32/1) } . My reasoning for this is that I read about (and have used before) this thing called "harmonic noise", but up until doing this project I had not considered what that actually means.

I would also like to experiment with changing the speed of the noise movement, as I think that the movement of the finer grain noise is too high (I suppose I could make it zero).