October 25th, 2006
Not a great amount of time has been available for blogging so here is an update:
soft221
In addition to the current projects with rapidly approaching deadlines we have been introduced to a small mid-term exam from soft221. Marvellous stuff.
HCI
HCI (Human Computer Interaction or isad223) will be wanting coursework done by the end of this term, involving the creation of an interface based on the design techniques learnt here. That would be a four thousand word essay comprising 100% of the overall mark for this module.
Simulacrum 3D Video
Simulacrum (trans-spacial design) admittedly has been in the pipeline for a while but at least there are a number of thoughts as to an idea (I like this project as its the first that asks for a reasonable amount of creativity from my part - yes thats not f*ing actionscripting aka java) if not much to show for it yet. I have effectively what I want to create planned out already, but more of that to be revealed soon…
Critical Contexts
Idat203 - Critical Contexts, what else can be said? The ‘other’ four thousand word essay comes to mind.
Organism Project
Orrrrganism project proceeds and has a week-before-deadline deadline tomorrow, hence this is my current activity. The flowers grow, the bees move. The flowers currently undertake a form of assexual reproduction though, and literally create a clone seed of themselves which is planted and grows and seeds etc.
Creative Garden
For the Creative Garden company, our chosen niche of professional school and college websites seems very fruitful.
Oh yes and finally, I still want to create a working new design for my own website!
October 12th, 2006
Creative Garden Update
Each of our roles have been decided for The Creative Garden team, and work gets underway to creating our company persona, website and example products. It has been decided for now that I should produce the main HTML portfolio website while Tom and Lloyd handle the visuals and portfolio pieces.
idat 203
I have now considered examining the Generative Webpaintings by Stanza as a basis for my work in idat203. It has also been suggested to me that I should look into the photographer and artist Paul Smith (http://www.paulmsmith.co.uk/)
Other Stuff
Catalina Estrada - Artist from the Computer Arts magazine also featuring an ex-MLA (media lab arts was the course I signed up for but it changed to i-dat on our first year), Pete Harrison.
Back to replicating bees; having placed traces on every value surrounding the creation and death I have discovered the problem was far more elusive than I thought originally. Every-so-often a bee would die twice, or even three times, causing the total count to go down more than it should for a single death. The effect of this can be seen here, but be warned, running this for a while means a lot of extra bees and serious CPU stress. ALSO, it quite often needs to be left a while before things start to happen.
UPDATE: An even better code bug, just wait for the second generation plants to reproduce…
October 9th, 2006
While running a test of our organism flash project, and in particular studying my brand new Bee and Beehive behaviour, something which shouldn’t have been possible occurred. With a theoretical maximum of 3 bees, a fourth bee appeared. Believing this to be an interesting fluke, I was proven wrong again when a fifth and sixth bee appeared over time.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 7th, 2006
I am starting to become more attracted to vector generated artwork, after not really considering its potential when it was briefly covered in the first year (I used bitmaps more often than vector work in my Illustrator coursework page). As well as its use in the organism project to create clean graphics that can expand and shrink to any size, I am considering using vector for the idat206 module.
The Concept
The general idea we have had is to take a pretty common concept of organisms developing in a minature environment which includes its own ecosystem with variables which affect the organisms and place it within a virtual snowglobe, which can be shaken by the end user as a form of interaction. So I have been trying to think through how I could possibly go about creating a system where shaking our organism snowglobe could disassemble each flower and then recreate a load of new random ones. Got to create a growing flower first however…
October 3rd, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4272418.stm
A possible form of virtual life? Although its completely manmade, this is the sort of thing that might be relevant to the organism project. The BBC news article discusses it in terms of being a contagious disease, like a real organism.
Flash Organism Scripts
Having studied the scripting on blogged flash animations, I see that while being complex scripts, and based on randomness they have no potential for growth or alternative outcomes.
And they certainly aren’t affected by any external factors.
October 3rd, 2006
We begin the plans for our brand new imitation company, The Creative Garden, an internet-based web design company that creates websites specifically for schools. I will be working alongside my compatriates Tom Stembridge and Lloyd Randall for this group based project.
Promotional Website Specifics
We have chosen the idea of a garden to promote both growth and and a fertile environment as well as healthy, natural and fresh web design. In turn, the look of our site and products should feature aspects along this theme. The main site is being developed at http://www.cgarden.srjm.co.uk/.
Having checked for any domains for the words ‘Creative Garden’ we’ve found that it is quite popular so securing a real domain would be very difficult.
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.