Creative Garden and Generative Art

12th October, 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…

Organism News

9th October, 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 »

More Thought for the Organism Project

7th October, 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…

More Virtual Organisms

3rd October, 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.

Organisms

30th September, 2006

As I slowly churn through the insane coding side of this task, mentally trying to organise it into a workable system, I begin to think about whether our initial visual concept for the organism project is really the most appropriate. After all, what we are doing is enforcing our own preconceptions and reality on what should be a brand new lifeform with the ability to grow into its own shape and structure. Of course, in theory if our ‘flowers’ are broken down into enough building blocks, and a reasonable system of natural selection is created, then the organism should have enough freedom to take its own form.

Weird plants with petals growing from the roots perhaps? Must discuss this with Rob.

As it is now progressing, a new plant within our environment has an approximate lifespan of 400 seconds in which to develop, attract our bees which will have their own rules as to what type of organism they find attractive (but ultimately I foresee a symbiotic relationship where the bees are attracted more to what is available rather than a fixed ideal set by us) and eventually expire. The bee population will be determined by the number of flowers and the flowers and the survival of their set of ‘genetic’ attributes will rely on the bees to pollinate them.

Thought for the Organism Project (idat204)

28th September, 2006

Here begins the Organism Project, and following Chris Speed’s not-so-subtle hinting, its appropriate for me to start blogging about this project in an appropriate place. The general idea is to create a simulation of a living organism that can be distributed to an end user’s computer, so naturally the development environment of choice is going to be Macromedia Flash deployed in a web browser.

About the project

I will be working with Rob Gregory on this project.

To see the progress we’re making, you can view it being developed here: http://www.srjm.co.uk/portfolio/idat204/organism/

Research

Areas of research now include fibonacci in nature, the golden rule, average temperatures and optimal growing conditions for plants. I hope to be able to use Actionscript to simulate some of these phenomenon.