In the beginning…

What is the main goal of creative coding projects? What’s the limitation of them? Why am I learning this? Which element should I focus and improve if I want to be a true artist/developer? In this term, I want to answer to these questions while developing each week’s assignments. For all of the outcomes, I selected three artworks that can answer my questions best. The first project is a narrative scene, the second is the collection of narrative scenes which becomes an interactive animation, and the last one is deconstructing typography. Each subheading contains a brief introduction, a short demo video, and a link to a p5.js editor. (I prefer this for weekly assignments because it’s more convenient when you need to manage lots of internal files.)

• git repository for all code collection: here

Weekly project 01: “It’s Cold Outside”

• Video description
• p5.js sketch

With the wonderful song ‘Time in a Bottle’ by Jim Croce, I created calm, Adobe Illustrator style snowy scene. I kept experimenting recreating vector style image only on computer code, rather than complicated Graphic User Interface(GUI). The extension of ‘A Cloud full of Cheese and Other Short Stories’ project, I tried to implement a short story inside of a p5.js sketch. Whenever I see the computational art, I couldn’t stop thinking but there are less sensation, relaxed, and thoughtful touches than fine art projects. I brought strict OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) style for particle systems, their lifecycles, and every elements inside of the sketch. Added user interactions with mouse click (a candle) and a slider (the wind which affects snow particles) this virtual window delivers a deep thought to the user who wants to relax, to focus, or to take a look at the computer and find any meanings from the relationship between the user and the computer.

Weekly project 02: “ignition”

{video description}

• ignition
• Video description
• Git repository

From week four, I was ordered to act like a senior developer and make an interactive animation until week six. This is the outcome of the group project. (Members: me(Astryd Park), Mishma Toppo, Shuqi(Liz) Qiu, Xinyue Chen, Yawen Lyu, Yi Xu, Yiwen Dai, Yucheng Wang) Because of the ambition and the limitation, I did almost 94% of work but all members did their best. Six students made three groups and they worked on each ‘the door’, ‘the brick’, and ‘the fall’ scenes. I created all structures of an animation, combined their code and matched variables with each scene. Also I created the ‘intro’, the ‘ending’, the title scene and the mind-boggling transition scene. Mishma helped me with the wandering scene.

This short animation inspired by Kids, a game created by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach. (That’s why most of the scene are showing the hand drawing style animation.) I wanted to make huge short animation with different scenes which show the development of the story. We focused on human emotion, mostly anxiety. We demonstrated anxiety into different visual aspects and I think we did a good job. For example, in the introduction, the player should find the colour difference when they move the mouse pointer around the middle of the screen and catch that if they keep pressing the mouse the ripple would be created. When they are waiting for the transition they would feel anxiety. In this animation, we kept asking questions for the interaction between human and machine, with what’s the value of interaction, what we humans actually get from it. Did we successfully grab happy, immersive experience from HCI? We tried to answer no.

Weekly project 03: “The World Wide Web”

• Video description
• p5.js sketch for digital display
• p5.js sketch for Axidraw

Are we sincerely paying attention to the words from others? Aren’t we shift weight of each words and decipher its meaning whatever we want, ignoring intention? This project is focusing on typography with entanglement and decomposition of each elements of the characters, the sentences, and the paragraphs. The user can type anything - from a single vocabulary to a huge paragraph from Project Gutenberg - and talk to the computer with their words. And they can watch the result of strings (not the data type String but the actual string from clothes) while they’re tangled or untangled. When they creates the strong entanglement the meaning of the word gets clearer. When they are untangled, the visual of the word is broken down into small pieces of string, also the power of the word. In this project, I wanted to explore thousands and thousands of words on the Internet and their customisable power. Some text that full of ignorance can gain power from sudden social media influencers or celebrities, while the truth could be ignored by general public because it didn’t match their taste. Like this p5.js sketch the choice is up to you. You can freely decipher the meaning and share that with your network, but you should be careful what you wish for.

The final thoughts

This term, my love toward creative computing was not huge because I focused too much on the technical aspects for the ‘best’ mark since last term. It makes my identity blur and made me confused about what’s my role in this unique creative journey of mine. Even I felt suspicious feelings toward the academic field of creative computing. But I decided that if I wouldn’t stop creating fine art, etc. with technologies, I could define the field itself and be a powerful artist in this huge community. I hope I could be a pioneer of a new definition of creative computing with Creative Computing Institute. These weekly exploration of creative computing helped me a lot to find my directions.