I have been promising that I would like to upload all of the articles I have written over the years so that they might be of use for people rather than them languishing on my hard drive, but I’ve been a bit slack at actually doing so because converting them to decent HTML and fixing it all up takes a bit of time.
So, the plan from here on in is to upload one article from the archives per week (which would mean about two year’s worth of posts!).
Man of the Hour – Jonathan Harris
If recent world events have taught us anything about the media it must surely be that it is relentless organism. We have seen live videophone feeds from the frontline in Iraq, the explosion of blogging and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds and recently mobile phone camera images on the front pages of newspapers. Use any RSS news reader and you will see stories being updated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With all this information flying around the Web, how can we make sense of it all and what would an hourly snapshot look like? That is exactly the question Jonathan Harris set out to answer with his 10×10 project. In an ironic twist the site held the number one slot on Blogdex for several days as news of its representation of news spread around the Web.
I’ve played with Processing a fair bit over the years, but never really got stuck into anything solid – most of my time has been spent fixing up my students’ projects!
Over the break I’ve been playing with some other ideas, working through the very good book by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read in terms of introducing and explaining how to code for people without a computer science background.
Inspired by Robert Hodgin’s wonderful Processing work I thought I’d have another crack at particles as they seem to be all the rage at the moment. The particle creation part is easy, but getting them to interact with decent physics was getting too much for my mathematically challenged brain. Thankfully I came across the Traer Physics Engine by Jeffrey Traer Bernstein, which handles a lot of that maths for you.
My “Hello World!” code for any platform tends to be a bouncing ball (or an array of them) because it covers most of the structures – if…then, variables, arrays, etc.
So I started building and engine that has a bunch of particles that are all attracted to each other, but more attracted to a single one which is following a target invisible bouncing ball around the screen. (It would make more sense to collapse the particles into the ball code, but at the moment I’m just plugging stuff together.)
It’s very simple at the moment – just an ellipse as the graphic with some trails going on. The above is a version that rendered out in non-realtime with 20,000 particles. I like the way they seem to rope together and struggle to break free. Sometimes there’s a kind of breakaway flare.
There’s also a bit of gravity going on, which drags everything down. Any particles that go off the bottom of the screen are simply recycled up the top (you’ll see this in the initial explosion). A interesting upshot of this is that sometimes the tail of the flare/rope falls off the bottom and those particles make a break for it from the top.
Following on from my last post about Hereafter, my podcast interview with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists is now online at Core77. We chat about a range of UVA’s work, process and interactivity. Matt gives some great insights into working across disciplines and the exciting and emerging field of interactive installations much more tightly [...]
If you have been missing the sound of my voice (or have no idea what my faltering, mumbling sounds like) the podcast of my seminar at Urban Learning Space about Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education that I posted about a couple of weeks back is now available from ULS’s iTunes feed. There’s a [...]
I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. FOTB runs from 4th- – 7th November and my session is on the last day. I feel a little bit of a cheat here as I’m not really known as a ‘Flash guy’ (and my students will know that [...]
I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really interesting projects concerning future ways of working, playing, thinking and learning. I’ll be presenting the Creative Waves 2007 – VIP project in detail, talking about the using a [...]
I was clearing out some old CDs and found a Videobrasil XII one with this Antirom RGB performace on it. I think Gisela may have shot the footage as there are also some interviews with us at the Antirom office (looking very young). But I’m not sure where this performance was and have no doubt [...]
<img src=’http://www.polaine.com/playpen/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/sagmeister_pigmobiles.jpg’ alt=’Stefan Sagmeister’s designs for a touring protest about US spending’ /> The latest issue of Desktop is out with an article by me called A New Set of Design Principles. It’s based on interviews with Stefan Sagmeister and [Milton Glaser](http://www.miltonglaser.com] that examine the role of graphic design (and design in general) in dealing [...]
Omnium, the research group that I am part of (now online) in Australia, has just launched its next ‘Creative Waves’ global e-learning project ‘Visualising Issues of Pharmacy’. The ‘VIP’ project is the first fully online international education initiative designed to link students and teachers in pharmacy and Graphic Design departments from universities and colleges around [...]
A few months ago I spent a very fun couple of weeks doing some work for the folks over at Pokewhere my friend (and ex-Antiromer) Nik Roope is one of the partners. I was shooting (I was going to say directing, but it was a fairly collaborative effort on that front) the video for the Yahoo! Mail Championships microsite as well as doing some of the compositing. It has finally gone live so I can write about…