Hello Hsin!
Here's some feedback on your final project for the Code + Gestalt course 2014.
I really like your idea, and I think that it looks quite promising so far!
— Martin Schneider 02:56, 10 August 2014 (CEST)
Project Descriptions on the Wiki
Here’s two little things, that I would like you to do:
- Please make sure to post your project description as a sub-page of our course instead of putting it onto your user page.
Your project description should live here. - Please put your text directly into the wiki wherever possible instead of posting images that contain text.
Your Final Project for Code + Gestalt
Perlin-Noise
I think that your visuals look a lot like standard Perlin Noise which is somewhat of a visual cliché, albeit a very nice one.
Here's an implementation of this kind of stuff that look quite impressive: <videoflash type="vimeo">29074357</videoflash>
On Smoke and Space
While this is visually very compelling, I would like to encourage you to think about the relationship of the actual physical smoke and the visuals, and how they are supposed to interact! For example, when images are projected into the room, the light will already interact with the smoke particles in very interesting ways. In a room filled with smoke, you are projecting into space, rather than onto a surface. Also keep in mind that our course is a about “Gestalt”, so your work should somehow work with the Gestalt of smoke, rather than just visualizing data.
Smoke in the Box
As a simple experiment — think about this:
- Create a little smoke box, that you put in front of a projector.
- You can blow smoke into the box and capture the interaction of the light and the particles with a webcam.
- The image of the camera is processed (possibly using edge detection, blob detection etc.)
- The result is projected back into the smoke box.
This simple feedback loop might yield very interesting results that are based on the Gestalt of actual smoke, instead of vizualising a data sequence in a way that visually resembles smoke to some degree. Even without Step 3 the feedback of the smoke projecting onto itself might result in a both visually and conceptually interesting results.
The Computational Beauty of Cancer
I also wonder if there’s a way for non-smokers to enjoy your setup! I suggest you take a look at cancerous lung tissue as an inspiration. It happens to look quite beautiful, from up close, as you can see in this Google Image Search for Lung Cancer Tissue. Some of those tissue-like structures may even be created with particle systems in processing, similar to the one you are using. Check out the Cornel Carnarts Flickr Stream of Corneel Carnarts to see what I mean.
You might even use imagery of actual lung tissue, to set up some kind of gravity field for your particle system to interact with...
What's next ?
I hope you don’t take these ideas as criticism but as inspiration! I really like your idea to work with smoke as artistic medium in a VJ-situation. It would be great if you could somehow transpose the Gestalt of smoke into a work of art that's fun to look at. If you prefer to work with data from a smoke sensor, I suggest you plot some of the data so we can see if the time sequence has interesting features, that may be subject to a gestalt perception and that are worthy of artistic exploration.
I will be on my holidays for the next two weeks but I would like to encourage you to sign up for a consultation date if you need further assistance with your project!
Looking forward to see your progress!
— Martin Schneider 02:56, 10 August 2014 (CEST)