So after 2-3 months of summer sleeping, let me say hi again. Yes, the school starts on Tuesday! It is going to be a tough final year. Bring it on!

Stefan and I were talking about the subject of pioneers of Generative Art today, a subject which came up talking about Joshua Davis’ situation, and this reminded me of Philip Galanter. Check artificial.dk interview with him. He puts interesting perspective to roots of generative art there. Also It is funny because he was an instructor here at ITP couple of years ago! Guess what, Daniel Shiffman was his student by then.

The work and comment of Roger Ibars‘ about interaction make me think of it once again. This is not something new,it is the ongoing debate of how interaction should be between the user and the device/application. His approach is leaning towards entertainment, so right and agreeable, although I must say I find him kind of biased by the concept of joysticks. Hacking a regular controller and tying it to someone in a different context was something I have been looking forward to. It looks like he has been doing this for a while.

Still, I want to brainstorm more about this area and come up with at least something I can put in my room and play when I got bored.

I am going back to Istanbul at the end of this month, I am going to try to stay away from all this technology hype while I am there. I want to keep my head rested for one month hopefully. In the long run for the summer, I am thinking to play with different things that I have collected from streets (Scanner, basic p2 controller) using Arduino. Arduino is a very good environment for playing and since it is programmable on macs pretty easily it can be a boost in developing one’s skills. Also I have plans to learn C and C++ as a preparation for the fall class I am taking pixel by pixel. I have found great opencourse site from Berkeley WebCast. For a development IDE I am thinking Xcode that comes with Apple. So to learn it is in my plans too. Thus, I must study Zachary Lieberman’s eating video workshop beforehand and hopefully get quite comfortable playing with pixels. Also right now I am trying to learn basics of a relational database. To build a site using this knowledge might be quite a good practice over the term.
Let’s make a list:

• Start Learning C/C++ in Xcode. Watch the courses from Berkeley.
• Play with Arduino using Scanner and Controller (building a game can be good exercise).
• Do Lieberman’s Video Workshop. Get comfortable with playing pixels in processing until fall.

Those are what I can think right now. I might add more in the future. But now I am going to be lazy for a while!

It has been a productive semester to say. Especially I have improved my coding skills in every way. I have a great understanding of Object Oriented Programming now. Not only that but also I have a good grasp of knowledge in topics like data mining, web crawling, physics simulations, particle systems and what not.
So here are the url of classes that I have taken this semester;
Programming from A to Z
Nature of Code
Live Image Processing and Performance
and I also took Digital Sound Lab and Midi which was quite disappointing for me.

Tristan Perich reminded me a different approach that I didn’t think in general, maybe because I was taking it granted as it is what it is:An Interactive piece. The question arised from his post to the list asking for an example of successful interactive art. The thoughts are generally collected around the transparency of the piece, how much easy it is to grasp for the audience, how smart it is by its message. Tristan’s reply to me was interesting. He mentioned when the user understands the piece is interactive it puts whole relationship into different level, more like a product-consumer relationship. So the idea is interacting with the piece without understanding it is actually interactive. He gave the example of Bruce Naumann’s video corridor. I googled it and come with different readings.

The piece which is dated early 70’s, is a 50cm wide corridor, where the user sees a video at the end of the corridor which turns out he is seeing himself from the rear. Kinda disturbing experience as Chris Gibbins puts it. This article is also good for showing different kinds of internet based art from Lieberman and Napier. So the question that still left in me is: What kind of relationship, or better yet, what kind of experience does an art piece bring?

I am also going back to Cage back and forth these days. I am interested in his approach to an art as an experimentation, disabling the intention, subjectivity of the artist.

We have finished our project for the final part, here is a working prototype in 2D. It is running slow in macs, it is way much better in pc thanks to Intel. So right now, in every generation the system is creating 20 different type of creatures with different number of springs and masses. It has been a good project. You can find the documentation on our project page.

It is here. It is online in P3D mode, it is looking kind of jagged but whatever. Here is the applet. Beware though, it is 800kb, and crashes once in a while… It has been a great experience for me. What did I learn?
+ I truly understood how it is hard to maintain a large scale project.
+ I have the most fun using OOP and improving my skills to the max.
+ I grasped the concepts of data mining and web crawling in Java better than past.
+ Now I feel much more comfortable using Eclipse with Processing applications.

source code is downloadable and running on a local computer would be much more reliable than running this on an applet. I am not sure but it is just not loading from google on a web browser…

I haven’t touch to video part yet as I have another project to finish in one week. (Nature of Code). I can continue this exercise over the summer. It can be a good one thinking I haven’t touch any pixel reading or displaying concept in Java. (Liebermann’s workshop is still waiting for me).

Overall I can say that this class and Daniel Shiffman’s instructing was much of a help for me developing my coding skills throughout the semester, I feel myself lucky taking a class from him.

While I was searching processing boards about Verlet integration(that’s totally another post) I have come up with this Israelian fellow named Ariel Malka. From the site, I see he spent a decent amount of time and his energy on displaying text in different ways. He is also interested in literature too so it is not hard to figure out his passion about text.

Text Wire 2 is one example among those. This is a good exercise to do if I want to combine my nature of code and programming from a to z skills. I am trying to find a way to display in my application so those examples are really handy.

Also this is a total different example of using ASCII art in a java applet.

So we are doing this final with Eliot Rosenberg, and here is our proposal for the final. We are proposing to build a evolutionary creature system with mass and springs. Ideally the system will be start as random number of springs and mass generated creatures and over time will evolve into a ‘better’ one by certain targets we set. It could be either displacement over time for each creatures as the scenario suggests, fittest ones are ones that can move better over the screen. We can bring different things into equations. The first part of the project is building this creatures.

The idea I mentioned in the previous post has evolved into something else. Actually I am still sensing the user’s color values through a camera but instead of using this data with flickr I am sending queries to the google by changing the values into color names and adding some arbitrary words afterwards. “red color symbolizes” is one example. For the first part of the project which is going to be until final, I am hoping to finish this.

I am still researching text based projects over the net. I have come up with a guy named Peter Cho and it looks like he did incredible projects with text. I want to list ones I liked the most:
Letterscapes is a comment on letters. Very perfectly solved isometric angle fits great with the animations.
I am really curious about his thesis, and expressive dimensional typography overall. I am hoping to read it when I find sometime (hopefully after show).
Actually I have found out he did a similar project called Money Plus, while he is in UCLA, he is sending queries to google and searching words that are coming from users plus money. He is displaying them on a screen.