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Final Project

 

 

 

 

For my Final Project, I created a divination simulation of a three card spread. The spread could function as representative of – Past, Present, and Future – Mind, Body, and Spirit – or Background, Problem, and Advice, as well as other personal interpretations. The cards were drawn by me and were originally inspired by the 22 Major Arcana class of typical tarot decks since they’re the core of the deck. For right now, they could be seen as Oracle Cards which have more room for personal interpretations. Though I intentionally planned to create a full deck, I didn’t have as much time to do so and my laptop was already freaking out from loading the amount of files that are already in. I do plan on adding more into the code just for my free time. My original format was to be on a table with candle lighting but some weirdness with my code caused the cards to be covered so I changed it to more of an open space. The cards are generated randomly when you click within each of their parameters and the textual interpretation will appear as well. The divination descriptions are based from dariusk’s JSON file of tarot interpretations. A star like vortex circulates in the background and a pair of mysterious eyes blink over the cards. Using the p5.sound library, I added the instrumental version of Billie Eilish’s “idontwannabeyouanymore” to run in the background since I think it contributes to the calm and mysterious atmosphere of the coding work.

Link:

//https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/621998

Bibliography:

Ameyasrealm | art. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ameyasrealm.com/realm-series-1

Dariusk. (n.d.). Dariusk/corpora. Retrieved from https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/divination/tarot_interpretations.json

Mills, R. (n.d.). The Major Arcana of the Tarot. Retrieved from http://www.byzant.com/mystical/tarot/MajorArcana.aspx

Three Graces. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://merakilabbe.ca/offerings/

 

 

 

by Thao Minh
ResearchPost8

Thao ResearchPost_8

Super Mario Clouds is the work of said to be hacking by ArcAngel. It has become an iconic piece of modified game art and pop art. He attained a copy of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros and removed all the elements of the games except for the moving clouds. However, while he claimed to have hacked the game, which he highlights as having “no generational lost” in the final product for viewers, further insight into the programming behind Super Mario Clouds shows that ArcAngel didn’t just leave the clouds alone. There’s a change in color palette that is notably unlike what Nintendo would’ve used and a closer look at the coding behind the cloud shape reveals a small change. Patrick LeMieux’s remaking of Super Mario Clouds reveals the difference between ArcAngel’s piece and if the original game was really stripped away of everything but the clouds. If ArcAngel’s Super Mario Clouds was really meant to be an authentic hack of Super Mario Bros, the detail of the coin at sprite zero would’ve had to remain such as in LeMieux’s Coin Heaven. This casts doubt on how much of Super Mario Clouds really is a Rom hack.

I think that the nostalgia given to Super Mario Clouds by saying it’s a Rom hack brings part of the attention to the piece, but on its own, its a homebrew take on a simple element of the game that emphasizes the actual art of it. The claim of a direct representation of the original game builds its appeal, however, I still like how stand alone it is as a work of pop art.

by Thao Minh
Uncategorized

Thao_ResearchPost7

Reconstruction 7 & Ambiguous Icon #5 (Running, Falling) 

These two of Jim Campbell’s works are composed of LED lights to construct low-resolution imagery broken down by light units. The images are defined more by movement and rhythm rather then modern technological pushes for higher resolution of every detail. Ambiguous Icon is a matrix of red LEDs to form pixels drawing out various light values to animate a loop of a figure running and falling. Reconstruction uses a resin diffusion screen to soften the LED array of pixels to form a traffic scene.

Being able to see how each LED pixel defines a small part of the image shows the dependency on such a small dot to be able to form a cohesive picture. It seemed almost vintage to me because everything in the world is focused on picking out the smallest detail in high definition. Campbell’s work here defines a simpler visual that is a lot easier to take in. It makes me feel like what’s around me isn’t so busy and fast-paced, that the motion of the world around me is more gradual as if I’m watching an old video. As mentioned before, Campbell broke away from mainstream high definition images. Rather than making everything in these pieces extremely clear, it’s like he’s allowing the viewers to interpret it themselves with only seeing the vague shapes and movements. There’s more human perception in picking up how the lighting works.

Tilted Plane

This is an installation also by Jim Campbell. Hundreds of light bulbs are suspended along an angled ceiling in a dark room and follow a flickering pattern to depict low resolution patterns. Viewers could define for themselves what the obscure patterns are, which is only sensible by its rhythm. Since we could walk through the grid of light bulbs, our perspective keeps changing in how we see the lights.

The whole lowly lit room seemed other-worldly and intimate. If I were to lay down on the floor, looking up at the light bulbs would be almost like staring at the stars at night. It’d be a very nice way to end a busy day of working and moving around, entirely peaceful and quiet. It’s relaxing and free.

This work is similar to Campbell’s other art based on low resolution displays. It’s a continuation of working with how perception of light and movement defines what we see. The old fashion light bulbs is a departure from high definition technology on bright screens and billboards. Campbell brings LED lighting to primitive technology in order to capture the basics of images.

 

 

 

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Thao_ResearchPost6

API – Houndify

Houndify is an audio and language API that could be implemented to provide voice-enabled intelligence and audio identification to make products and services more interactive and personally responsive to customers. Through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), the API allows users to add an AI experience that continuously learns and collects data that can be customized. It follows a speech-to-meaning system with deep meaning understanding to allow a natural voice service so that users can find the results they want on any connected software or platform. Houndify has private beta features by request that include iris recognition, emotion detection, and face recognition. Users of these features don’t necessarily know how this information is being collected and what the data is used for.

Uses of the API include being featured in voice control in automobiles, audio and music recognition for users to identify sounds and songs to discover, location based services to make results relevant to users, and wide multilingual capabilities that bring together more diversity and accessibility.

https://www.houndify.com/

P3-GenerativeLandscape

Thao-generative landscape

For my generative landscape, I’ve created a scenery of a night sky. It features a series of shooting stars passing through alongside the occasional constellation as the night progresses. I used classes to determine the functions behind the stars on screen, the shooting stars, and the constellations. I used a lot of images for many components of the landscape as well, with the moon, trees, silhouettes, and stars. The constellations passing by are the 12 zodiac constellations. In bringing the whole generative together with the images, I had to mess around with the scale command a lot. Scaling certain images led to shifting other graphics being displayed, so I had to make adjustments as I go. In making the constellations move, I used the raindrop movement code from the raindrop game as a backbone to how I constructed the code for this project. In making them move, I also had to make adjustments to the motion placement of each image so that their spacing could be ranged and more varied.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/618502

by Thao Minh
ResearchPost5, Uncategorized

p5 library – ResearchPost5

p5.scribble

The library p5.scribble allows users to draw out primitive 2D features with a sketch style. It’s a different aesthetic from the conventional and smooth look of regularly coded p5 shapes and details and allows room for more roughness in the drawings. Filling in color creates a scribbling effect that isn’t completely cohesive as well.The hand drawn look presents a friendlier approach to the program, particularly when it comes to displaying charts and data collection.

In order to use, this file has to be included:

/path/to/p5.scribble.js

And then you have to create an instance:

var scribble = new Scribble();              // global mode
var scribble = new Scribble( p5Instance );  // instance mode

p5.scribble also allows users to change the general appearance of the scribble effect, including the neatness and bowing of the lines and the amount of offset allowed in coordinates.

scribble.bowing = yourValue;          // changes the bowing of lines
scribble.roughness = yourValue;       // changes the roughness of lines
scribble.maxOffset = yourValue;       // coordinates will get an offset, here you define the max offset
scribble.numEllipseSteps = yourValue; // defines how much curves will be used to draw an ellipse

library link: https://github.com/generative-light/p5.scribble.js

code example: https://github.com/generative-light/p5.scribble.js/blob/master/examples/chart.html

This is a usage of p5.scribble in making a bar graph with various line visuals.

 

by Thao Minh
ResearchPost4

Eyeo Talk – ResearchPost4

Jason Salavon is an artist whose medium is primarily computational data and algorithms. His own designs analyzes a wide variety of communal material, such as art, media, and places, that have some form of irregular similarity, and then blend them together into shifting images that become more generalized and more typical of the common things seen in everyday life. He has his own custom software that typically overlay a multitude of photos, which then averages the visual results into an artistic composition, or takes in processed media into various layouts. Essentially, Salavon seeks out individual elements of highly diverse visual culture and determines hidden norms that could link together a relationship between groups and individuals. He presents a different perspective to things that are commonplace, thus making the material interesting again.

<Color> Wheel is a data composition piece that reorganizes thousands of images from search engine data that has been received by queries for color terms. The software produces a standard, tertiary ROYGBV color wheel made up of the search result images recorded based on their dominant color. An expansive color wheel produces a different lens to look through search engine data, from the regular to the more amoral information being requested by users.

Uncategorized

Generative Landscape – Ideas

  1. A white background with various bubbles floating from left to right of the screen, ranging in colors. There will sometimes be a little animated cartoon character or animal inside a bubble as it floats by.
  2. A person laying in a field at the bottom of the screen, staring up to the night sky filled with stars. Small shooting stars will fly by as well as random constellation outlines of images.
  3. A view from Central Park with the street seen between the trees. There could be cars passing by there with pedestrians. More toward the foreground could be birds, squirrels, and other park related instances.
  4. Black and white haunted house scenery. There could be random red eyes flickering in the windows, bats flying by the moon, floating ghosts, and various little creepy details.
by Thao Minh
Uncategorized

Lauren McCarthy @ 2017 Gray Area Festival

Lauren McCarthy created the app Follower as a step forward on how much people value their digital followers on social media platforms. We see our followers are part of a wide social circle that is in the know of whatever we’re doing but without the need to actual communication beyond more than a short comment or “like.” Since there’s this disconnect between online following trends, Lauren McCarthy wanted to see if anyone wanted a real life follower that simply observes what they are doing throughout the day. Today, we put a lot of worth in having as many people as possible to virtually feel connected to, to feel as if someone is interested in our lives, so Lauren McCarthy provides this service as more of a test to determine if subscribers in reality are more satisfying to this need. This is a push of personal surveillance, yet it brings up the matter that even though we’re so invested in maintaining our privacy from government surveillance, businesses collecting data, and such, we’re still eager to post whatever we want from our lives for the need to be acknowledged and approved on a screen. This app seems quite satirical of today’s powerful usage of internet connection by bringing back to reality.

P2-VisualizingTime

Visualizing Time

For this time visualization, I used the heating up of a mug to portray each hour transition. The cup sits on the heater which increases in flame particles as each second passes by, and every minute, a particle of steam emerges from the cup. When time reaches the hour, A large puff of steam appears to indicate that the cup is overheated, a combination of all the minute steam and small flame particles building up.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/609801