Kat Masback Presentation

Presentation

Opus Regulatum

This piece was an exploration of aesthetics. What I began with was a rudimentary system in which fragments would pulse randomly between a series of colors, stopping when they encountered a neighbor of like coloration. This resulted in many, many small groupings of colors that were random, but uninteresting.
From there, I had the fragments trend toward a randomly selected neighbor's color. This was interesting to watch, but it trended between two overall colors, blue and magenta. At this point, I also realized I was lacking the feedback necessary to complete my system.

As I was attempting to correct the color trend towards the middle, I also discovered and corrected a glitch which I realized later was what was keeping my system from trending to a single color. After correcting the color flux so it would wrap properly and remapping the color wheel to represent more warm colors, I set about adding in feedback. The solution I arrived at was to calculate the average color of the screen and select FOR colors that were furthest from that average, thus favoring the 'underdog' color. This resulted in a pretty fluctuation across the color wheel. However, this was pretty uninteresting when it happened to the whole screen at once, and ended up looking too uniform.

To counter this, I create a synthetic brush that would affect only those pixels within its radius. This brush moves and changes sizes randomly within a range. However, it was too obvious where the borders of the brush were, so I added in some randomization. There is a chance that increases as we head outwards from the center of the brush that the fragment will be ignored.

Again, this was interesting, but the rainbow trend still felt circular and not robust. I considered ways to modify the color wheel, perhaps sticking to a specific color scheme rather than the whole spectrum? But as I considered it, I thought about how interesting it would be to watch this process play out on patterns or even well-known art works. This digital degradation produced some wildly interesting results that I wanted to share.

Watching these degrade into chaos is really fun. The way I'm picturing this being displayed (with infinite time and resources) would be in framed displays on the wall in the dimensions of the original painting. There would be a pressure pad in front of each painting which would trigger the mosaic process. On removal of the stimulus, the painting would slowly reverse the process back to the original painting. I think the draw of watching the painting animate would cause people to pause and watch each painting for longer than a static version. The fact that it starts to animate back when they step away would probably encourage the audience to stay and watch even longer, while off the pressure pad. Perhaps they would even try stepping on and off the pad to watch the results! (I know I would!)

Final Project Proposal

For the final project, I'm planning on building off of my 2nd project to create an interactive installation piece.
The piece will consist of an application by which the audience can create a customized L-system (the audience can choose either lightning strikes, spirals, or potentially point clouds). Alternatively, I may generate the system based on remote interaction with the audience, i.e. webcam tracking to move the camera within the scene, clapping to advance the system, etc.
After the audience member completes their system, the program will export and display a growth series of the system on a subdivided screen showing others that have been made.
Visuals of the setup will follow when I have more time and fewer things due.

One Root

I initially thought of the concept for One Root after our lesson on L-systems. I loved the complex aesthetic that resulted from what amounted to be a very simple set of rules. In thinking about the different possibilities for how to visualize these systems, I thought about how it could be possible to evoke different imagery from slightly modified code. For instance, the classic l-system, with it's linear collections, resemble trees. I thought about what it would look like if I were to replace that linear representation with curves instead, or point clouds, or time-based particle systems.

After presenting my concept, I decided to focus on the most visually interesting of those options, the curves. My first challenge was after discovering that the type of curve I had originally pitched (a bezier) produced a far more unpredictable and harder to control aesthetic. I wanted a type of curve wherein I could place control points and know the basics of what the curve would look like. Catmull-Rom splines were readily available in the processing API, but the look was not quite right. The first and last points were used as control points and were not drawn to, leaving my curves shorter than what I was picturing. It took a bit of trial and error, but I found that by repeating the first and last points, they could be end-points and the curve could originate and finish there.

My next challenge was instantiating the system I had pseudo-coded. There were some basic rules I wanted my spiral system to follow.

• Every branch has either 1 or 2 children. One that follows the existing course, and the second to be an offshoot.
• The chance of a branch having an offshoot should reduce further along the system.
• An offshoot should have a chance of going left or right from its root
• A branch can go left or right, but once it starts a spiral, it should continue spiraling
• Since we don't want a line to go on indefinitely, the chance to spiral should increase further down the line
• A branch should reduce in size as it progresses
• In order to draw the system, a branch must know it's parent's location

I got started making this system and applied those rules to the parent, and not yet to the offset. The result was not what I was expecting.

It turned out that I had never set the initial direction of the system, so when I set the x rotation to be 45*direction, I was rotating 0. Duh. After fixing that issue, I had much more satisfying results.

I recognized early on that having every branch draw back 4 previous was not only inefficient, it wasn't clean or pretty. The curves weren't smooth, and there were too many overlapping lines.

So I set the draw function to instead draw only from the leaves and to draw all the way back. This cut down on the overlapping lines, but not entirely. It was really exciting to see how one equation could produce such different results!

Interesting phenomena could also be produced by changing the angle at which children turned. Here is a system using 90 degree turns.

I finally ended up correcting the overlap problem when I realized that offsets should only draw back to where they originated, rather than back all the way to the root. By modifying the way previous points were stored on offshoots, I got some much better results.

After that was fixed, I decided to start instantiating another draw system. Setting the mode to linear was very easy after having done curves, so I also threw in the ability to toggle weight.

These two are the same system in curvilinear and weighted linear modes.

And here's a gif of the system in action!

The way I see this being exhibited, given infinite time and resources, is as a large electronic display wall (8'x8', so probably projection as I don't imagine getting enough screens for that) divided into a 16x16 grid displaying one of these gifs each. To the side of this wall, close enough to be associated but far enough away to not obstruct the view, would be a tablet with this applet loaded onto it. A user could design a system (hitting restart as necessary) then when they decide they like the result, the press a button and presto! There it is on the screen, playing start to finish, looping indefinitely. I think it would be beautiful to watch these spirals coalescing around one another, all related, but all different.

For future advancements, I would like to try putting in the fudge factors I talked about in order to create different types of systems. For instance, the rules to modify this system to create lightning would be to increase the chance to create offshoots, to remove the check that continues spirals, and to turn the system upside down. Perhaps if I have some time later in the semester I could add that in.

If you would like to play with the generator on your own computer, below is a link to download the processing sketch. It doesn't use any special libraries, so you should be able to just plug and play. The code is well documented, so you are welcome to modify some of the variables to see what kinds of variations you can produce!

Link to download the processing sketch

Netlogo and butterflies

I started off playing with as many different models as I had time for. I particularly liked the virus model, but couldn't think of anything interesting to do with it.
Eventually I tried out the mimicry simulation. It was fairly easy to grasp what was going on and the results were interesting.

However, the simulation relied upon asexual reproduction. I wondered whether the simulation would hold up if I modified the reproduction model to approximate a simple sexual version. To do this, I took the existing behavior for birds eating butterflies (i.e. a butterfly checks around it for birds, potentially gets eaten) and switched it to if there is a butterfly of the same species nearby, mate with it. I also reduced the number of butterflies allowed in a population in order to make it easier to see.
Unfortunately, this had disastrous results for the viceroy moths.

I realized this was due to the reproduction chance still being set to 4% as was pertinent when the population was reproducing asexually. I bumped this to a whopping 50% (not truly realistic, considering the small percentage of insects that survive to adulthood in a real-world situation) and watched as the same result of the original simulation unfolded.

The making of Treaty

First, I cut 4 pieces of posterboard to the dimensions of a large playing card. I then sketched each of the four kings using Bicycle playing cards as reference. This took way longer than I expected, probably because I was so picky about getting the measurements correct.

 

Be sure to let your cat "help" at this stage because he will feel left out if you don't let him give input.

Next, I inked each of the four drawings using a Sharpie marker. This allowed me more detail than I could produce with my amateur painting skills.

After that it was a matter of painting. Painting took a million years.

But I finished it.

It nearly killed me to have to cut them up after all that work, but it was in the cards (aha).

I drew one card each from two decks and swapped the squares that matched the suit and value. I did this through one cycle of the deck.

I could have continued at this point, but I liked the aesthetic of the kings still being somewhat recognizable, albeit rather mixed up. If I were to do this project again, I would print them rather than paint them. I wouldn't have as high a quality of product, but I'd have more time to devote to playing around with the process.

The finished product!

And bonus: the making of VIDEO!

Chance-based art concept revamp

When we had our second review, I realized the limiting factor in the piece was meaning. There wasn't anything there. Rather than make up a concept to suit (aha) the existing concept (ie ridiculing the monarchy like they're in the stocks and we're in the French Revolution) I took some time to consider what we talked about in class.

One of the things we discussed was the visuals of the end result. Given enough time, all we'd have left is a black or red piece of paper. Without some story behind it, that would be a really disappointing product after so much work. Professor Gallanter mentioned the idea of entropy, of the trend of things towards chaos. He suggested the idea that rather than painting over the picture, the audience could instead rearrange the pieces. I shrugged off the idea too quickly because I couldn't see how it could be conceivably done except on the computer.

After class, I started thinking over the potential meanings behind such a movement. It could symbolize confusion, or inner turmoil. I wanted to bring in the leadership connotations of the Kings of the four suits. Then I thought about what could happen if I were to instead take pieces from one king and switch it with another. Then we're bringing in the ideas of mixing cultures and ideas, the sort of cultural drift, social melding that occurs when two countries comingle.

If we were to modify the original concept to draw from two decks, and the suit of each card selects a King and the number refers to the row from which we select, we will be left with a visually interesting piece on top of the more robust concept. I am making the decision to leave the border which contains the suit and K. This will result in the final card being recognizable only by name and a few remaining pieces, similar to the concept of a country that has in essence merged with its neighbors, retaining only its most ingrained traditions and customs.