lately, i’ve been contemplating ideas of replication, copies, doppelgangers, iterations, clones, etc. as a possible starting point for my final project in ICM.  i’m currently looking into exploring this as both a physical and visual interface, having an individual act as the subject for the piece.

the main premise behind this piece so far is to have a person’s shadow projected onto a wall or the floor and be frozen in a moment in a time.  the shadow, which shares a certain set of characteristics with the original, is also its on entity, but in nature is still dependent on the original.  so, what if the shadow was imbued with its own set of individual properties? giving birth to your own shadow in a sense through a process of multiplication (perhaps mitosis) and becoming something else entirely.

an example of shadow manipulation

another example of shadow manipulation

there could be several ideas for pushing this concept further:

(1) manipulate people’s shadows into different ways that artists and designers have viewed objects in real life.  cubism, modernism, bauhaus, etc. type filters

(2) placing the shadows in different architectural type situations, on the sides of windows, walking on ceilings upside down

(3) placing the shadow in immediate hyper-tensioned situations that the viewer is currently not in, movie scenes, dinner party scenes, etc.

(4) imbuing the shadow with a set of physical characteristics not shared by the owner-  making your shadow fatter, shorter, taller, bigger feet, wide hips, etc.

(5) having your shadow multiply (clones) and forming patterns or form to become another object, pattern, etc.

ICM MIDTERM PROPOSAL

PURPOSE:

in order to present a unique and fascinating insight into people’s interest in weddings and obituaries, Diego and I are going to create an interactive platform with which the user can examine these two events using the NYTimes RSS feeds. it is also a commentary however on the types of people who would submit wedding announcements versus the types of people who are deemed worthy of announcements (as in obits).

GOAL:
create two swarms that are rotating around two foci on our screen.
one swarm represents obituaries
the other represents weddings

the user will be able to roll over one of the objects which will bring up a small block of information with a photo and the announcement

STEPS:

- requesting the xml data from the NYT RSS feed
- create a new String that will find and replace all of the hexadecimal for apostrophe (which is giving us problems) with “/’” (apostrophe in processing)
- save the new String as the old String
- save the file in our folder
- create two classes of objects, weddings and obituaries
- have objects rotate/swarm around focal points
- create a mouse rollover effect that detects when the mouse is over the object
- create a timer effect that detects how long the mouse is over the object so that it will hover and grow while a pop-up screen appears with the linked information from the NYTimes
- when mouse rolls out, the object will return to size and to the swarm

CODE:

the initial code is here.

this week’s project was building on my last week’s assignment and arranged the objects i had created, “balls” and “orbs,” into two different arrays.  Clicking the mouse will add additional orbs to the sketch through appending.

This week has been learning about object-orientating programming in processing.  the first time is definitely ABSTRACT.  but after i had about 10 different analogies explained to me (cookies, bikes, factories, people, sheep), I came up with one that would be the most familiar to me.  the prefab dwelling.  a class is like the design for a prefab home that doesn’t yet physically exist but for which all the properties have already been defined in the blueprints.  along comes a potential owner who buys the design and hires contractors to build the house (aka the object) which in processing is like using the constructor to create an instance of an object of the class House.  phew..

and now for some prefabricated goodness.  thanks to robert and john for their help and trigonometry refresher. click on picture below to go to sketch, and refresh to change colors and orbs.

here i wanted to play around with repetition and shapes.  it was a little difficult at first to figure out the layers of some of the objects, but I sketched it out the old-fashioned way (is old school allowed here?) with pen and paper because i wanted to mess around with it a little before i finally started plugging away the coordinates in processing.  i am sure that there was some code out there that would make it easier and faster but it was good for me to do it step-by-step so i could see how it was generating the shapes one-by-one.