Circles is a meditative exploration of... circles! When you are ready to progress, press the right arrow key. See from a different point of view by moving forward with the up arrow key.
I feel a bit unresolved with this project, because I didn't develop it as much as I wanted to. I've been all over the place the past few weeks and kept switching up the project concept - so it's really at a milestone stage. But, I am happy that I landed on this calm and abstracted vision. Since I was trying to make it meditative, I ended up having some nice moments: picking out colors and playing the audio back over and over again as I fine-tuned parameters.
If I had more time to work on this, the first thing I'd do is add more user interaction. I think it'd be neat to have more control over color and sound parameters - and maybe also to have the control mechanism be calming in itself (like moving your mouse in clockwise circles to increase the tempo).
Anyway, I'm still happy overall with everything that I've learned in this class. I feel like I have a newfound superpower - to be able to have an artistic vision and then, with enough time, create it in 3D with custom audio. I've also loved learning from everyone else's potsmoking projects and bad ideas :) Thank you for this wonderful class, Ge and Julia!
Over Thanksgiving break, I had an interesting conversation with an Uber driver. He explained to me that Global Warming is really just Mother Earth defrosting herself. In his mind: "If the ice reaches past Alaska, the whole world will freeze over. Try this experiment when you go home: make a line of water from the back of your refrigerator to the front, and you will see that once a little bit starts to freeze, the whole thing will become frozen." I also asked him about his thoughts on vertical farming, since he grew up in an agricultural area (running around lemon trees all day, he said, which I thought was very sweet). He thinks vertical farming will lead to "the end of humanity" because it is artificial and we will no longer have natural produce.
For my final project, I want to create the kind of world that this man lives in. One in which everything follows a kind-of slippery slope effect. Once you turn the temperature down, for example, it will keep getting colder and colder. And once it hits a certain, perhaps arbitrary point - everything suddenly freezes over.
Literally, what will happen in this interactive scene is that each element you place (like a tree with a bass line) will continually multiply and get louder at a slow rate. Then at a somewhat random point, it will start exponentially increasing. I want this to create chaos, and one that you can't simply dial back. The only way to prevent these explosions is to put in a counter-acting element, which will also follow the same growth pattern. The point is that our actions always tip the world towards one way or another - there's no static equilibrium where everything will stay in balance.
I'm still figuring out how abstract or literal to make this. I am currently imagining either a literal nature scene, where there is fire, rain, sun, ice, disease?, bunnies? etc. It could also be more metaphorical with love, hate, etc. Or maybe just abstract shapes and colors? Something where a ton of elements together create a beautiful chaos, like the purple and blue images below (in Milestone 1). Right now I am just focusing on simple mechanics, since changing elements should not be a big deal.
I'm not particularly attached to any idea at the moment, but here are some potential inspirations!
An Optical Poem by Oskar Fischinger and A Phantasy in Colors by Norman McLaren are really beautiful animations that translate a piece of music into moving geometric shapes. I think it could be neat to be able to generate your own visual like this... maybe playing a piece of music and then adjusting color and different parameters to your own taste.
skribbl.io is a game where one person draws, and everyone else tries to guess what they drew! What if there was some musical equivalence? Trying to get people to guess an emotion based on some music + visual that you create?
The Park Bench is a graphic novel without words. It's centered around a bench and shows all the different people passing by, using it, and intersecting over the course of months/years. I like the slow passage of time, seeing people repeat the same routines, and reflecting on how our lives are so intertwined. I could see some kind-of musical piece made out of people's movements as they go in and out of the frame and intersect.
