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.