Beautiful on the Inside

21st March, 2008

I was fixing my second year idat203 Negotiated Project (since moving it caused various hyperlinks to break, making viewing it in action pointless) when the flurry of discontented emails about the new i-dat website design started in the DAT forum (roughly around two hundred… million so far methinks).

So while testing my project I decided to see what it would make of the site, bearing in mind that the idea of this piece was to reveal what you aren’t meant to see in a website. This project will react to the quality of the underlying code in a site in the sense that it looks for individual words to fit into ever smaller spaces. Crap websites, ie. ones that haven’t been hand-coded but are rather churned out of some program like MS Word tend to clog up the project with huge chunks of code, which never get displayed. However humanly-readable, XHTML compliant sites, the sort that have had effort put into the coding side produce wonderful results like as can be seen in this example of the i-dat site:

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Mixed Day

5th May, 2007

Ok, so its my brother’s 18th birthday which means that instead of revising for the AI exam I have plenty of distractions.

Some good news in the form of our idat205 Eden Game has been uploaded to the Eden Project’s website, and has been featured in a BBC news press release!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/6629765.stm

 

New Website Design in production

Meanwhile I am working to produce a new website design, which I am happy fulfils every intricate criteria I am striving for, and replace the current site which was a result of mashed together previous attempts with the aim of trying to keep everything active. So essentially EVERYTHING needs to be replaced and unified. This is of course while I am heating up the search for a placement.

Other Stuff

Seems relevant to the impacts of digital media as studied in idat203 –
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6627135.stm

An Update

27th April, 2007

Having worked right up to the deadline on the final courseworks for idat203 and 205 I’m pretty glad thats all over. And some good feedback from the few results I’ve had back.

AI Coursework

Exercise 4 – Tic Tac Toe AI – Play this simple noughts and crosses game against either an intelligent computer player, or one who choses moves at random.

Exercise 2/3 – A-Life and Genetic Algorithms – Demonstrates the evolution of insect-like organisms through the process of selection and mutation. Start by clicking ‘Initialise’ and then trying to catch 4 parent organisms before clicking ‘Replicate’ and watching the outcome of your selection.

Exercise 1 – Flash Arrays for Vectors and Matrices – A demonstration of the use of vectors and matrices, an important component of AI.

Lots of work… all at once!

25th October, 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!

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…