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.

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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.

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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.

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?

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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:

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This week we learned about Asemic Writing. This is something that has the appearance of writing but isn't composed of real, meaningful words or text.

I wanted to do more than a bunch of letters; I wanted the letters to be grouped together in words and the words grouped together in paragraphs. To do this I had to think about spacing between letters and words and line heights. Rather than pick arbitrary values for this I learned about Gold Ratio Typography. In theory it makes the text more pleasing to the eye. In the case of the below sketch, the line height, font heights, and font widths are all functions of the P5 canvas sketch width.

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I am continuing to do research on Light Pollution and am learning a lot more about this field.

For our first assignment we experimented with a JavaScript-based terminal emulator. In the early years of computing, terminals were the main interface for computer users. They provided a text-based interface for entering commands and receiving the results.

I wasn't around back then but as a kid when I started learning about computing one of the computers I used was a Commodore 64. During Allison's lecture I was reminded of the kinds of programs I wrote with that computer. It was a limited machine but with some effort I could program it to create simple games. One kind of game I made many times challenged the user to navigate through a maze. For whatever reason I was fascinated with mazes and created many versions of this theme over the years. For this assignment I had the opportunity to make yet another one, and I jumped at the chance.

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