Video Art Presentation
For our Redefinition of Art class our main project is a research paper on a subject that we are to also present to the class. For my topic I studied Video Art from the 70's to understand the history of the movement and vision of the medium's proponents. There was a lot for me to learn here and I am glad I picked this topic. I learned a lot about our cultural history and the art world while linking everything together to provide a deeper understanding of both.
My presentation The History and Vision of the 70’s Video Art Movement is available online.
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays!
This is the 3D animation I made for my holiday cards. View this with red-cyan 3D Glasses (red on the left, cyan on the right).
If you don't have 3D glasses you can watch the non-anaglyph version.
Type on the Move
Our penultimate assignment for this class involves moving or interactive type while also thinking about our final project.
My idea for the final project involves falling snowflakes morphing into letters and forming words. This is an idea that has been percolating in my mind for a few weeks now but faced a critical problem: I didn't know how to properly morph one character into another. I was very happy to see my friend and fellow student Oren Shoham accomplish this last week for his assignment using rune.js and flubber.js.
Final Project Taking Shape
One week left to the semester and I am pleased to report that my final project is taking shape in a meaningful way. I've made a lot of progress since my last post where I said my project is facing serious difficulties. I'm in a better place now.
Drafts of Final Project Due
Drafts of our final projects are due this week but unfortunately my project is facing serious difficulties. The general idea of what I proposed in last week's post to remap bird migration patterns is terrible. The dataset that I thought existed doesn't exist at all, and even if it did, doing that re-mapping would be complete garbage. For a lot of reasons. When birds migrate they fly within large territories but choose specific flight paths that follow the guidance of the earth's magnetic field and the sun and stars but also adapt to changing wind patterns, weather, and food availability. Trying to force birds to follow a specific route is insanity and if it could be done it would kill lots of birds.
Font Experiments
For this assignment we experimented with fonts as data using the opentype.js JavaScript library.
I wanted to experiment with perlin noise to make the letters wiggle in a non-repeating manner but periodically return to their normal, unperturbed state. I did this using P5's noise function multiplied by a factor linked to the sin of the frameCount. Periodically this will be equal to zero, effectively turning off the noise. What I like about this is that it distorts the letters in a coordinated fashion that (almost never) makes the letters overlap.
Topic 2 Project Description
The end of the semester is in 4 weeks and I need a concise plan for what I'm actually going to do for this research project on light pollution.
Description
I am going to do a critical design project that will examine the impact of light pollution on bird migration.
As I've learned over the past few weeks, light pollution is a growing problem that unfortunately isn't generally accepted as an actual problem. There are serious consequences to our ecology because of light pollution. We lose the ability to see the night sky. Our circadian rhythms are disrupted. Bird migrations are thrown off course. Astronomers can't study the stars.
This is a large topic so I am going to focus on bird migrations and how birds are impacted by light pollution.
Concrete Poetry
This week we learned about Concrete Poetry. Our assignment is to use JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to create a concrete poem programmatically.
For some reason I got the crazy idea to create anaglyphs. An anaglyph is a stereoscopic illusion created by offsetting an image's red channel from its blue and green (cyan) channels and viewing that image with red and cyan glasses. It happens I'm quite interested in the subject and have done a lot of work with anaglyphs in the past. I know how to do this with pixels, but can I do it with HTML instead?
Understanding Critical Design
In class we learned about something called critical design. The idea was completely foreign to me at first but after discussing the practice with Marina I now have a better understanding. In a way it kind of reminds me of science fiction. A good science fiction story will change something about the world and then build a story around it, examining the consequences of the altered world. The story itself can help us see our current world or potential future from a new, critical perspective. Similarly, critical design can help us gain a new critical perspective of the world through the design of new objects that are not necessarily useful beyond their ability to make us pause and think. This is closely related to design fiction.
I'd like to do a critical design project for my light pollution topic because doing something like critical design is outside of my comfort zone and I know I learn more when I do things like that.
Let's do this.
First I need to brainstorm some critical design ideas. I thought about it for a while and come up with these ideas: