My remake of the Alvin Lucier artwork I Am Sitting in a Room was released 10 years ago today. To mark this occasion I want to revisit how I made it and troubles I had remaking it for 2019.
In November 2019 I Am Sitting in a Room was exhibited at Gamerz Festival in Aix-en-Provence in France. It was a pretty nice surprise to be invited to exhibit that piece, especially as it was made in 2010 and hasn’t been exhibited since aroudn 2015.
For the Improviz gifs one of the requirements that Rumblesan set is that the gifs loop seamlessly. That is, one would not be able to tell where the gifs beings and ends. In Blender making an animation seamless is pretty easy. There’s lots of examples out there but for completion here’s my simple take on it.
With the default cube selected press I and then press on Location. This inserts a keyframe for the location (this menu can also be accessed in Object > Animation > Insert Keyframe). On the Timeline at the bottom move the animation 20 frames. Then, move the cube to somewhere else.
In 2019 I made an internet artwork for Fermynwood’s programme Toggler.
For this work I decided to use a similar aesthetic and process to Visually Similar. I talked a little bit about the process behind Visually Similar in a June’s Development Update. The node tree to overlay each of the transparent textures looked a bit like this.
When trying to do the same with the Toggler artwork I came across something weird that meant some textures just weren’t showing. So I decided to ask on Stack Exchange and Reddit why this might be the case.
In this final part of this three-part series I’ll be going over installing Xuan Ye’s work in the Bcc exhibition. This work posed a similar challenge to Scott Benesiinaabandan’s work. I needed to automatically load a web page except this time I needed to allow for user interaction via the mouse and keyboard.
The artwork isn’t online so I’ll again go over the basic premise. A web page is loaded that features a tiled graphic with faded captcha text on top of it. The user is asked to input the text and upon doing so is presented with a new tiled background image and new captcha. This process is repeated until the user decides to stop.
The next artwork that was challenging to install was Monuments: Psychic Landscapes by Scott Benesiinaabandan.
I won’t be showing the full artwork as all of the artworks were exclusive to Bcc: and it’s up to the artists whether they show it or not. On a visual level the basic premise of the artwork is that the viewer visits a web page which loads an artwork in the form of a Processing sketch. There is a statue in the centre which becomes obscured by lots of abstract shapes over time whilst an ambient soundtrack plays in the background. At whatever point the viewer chooses they can refresh the screen to clear all of the shapes, once again revealing the statue.
I took a bit of a break from writing the Development Updates. September was pretty busy with Bcc: (more on that below) and then I was completing a commission for Will’s Kitchen/The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and preparing for my solo exhibition, We Are Your Friends.
With all of that now completed I’m writing a few posts about one project in particular: Bcc:
The Bcc: exhibition opened at Vivid Projects on Friday 6th September. It was a collaboration between Vancouver-based Decoy Magazine and Birmingham-based Vivid Projects. The exhibition featured a curated selection of works from Decoy Magazine’s online art subscription service called Bcc:. The basic premise is that each month you’d get specially commissioned art in your e-mail inbox.
The following is compiled from a bunch of Tweets that I made in December 2018. After reading you’ll see why I have to write it here! While it is not directly related with programming or making art, it does help with Getting Things Done, so I decided to include it here.
Like many people I’ve started to remove myself from a lot of social media websites. First was Facebook in 2017. The reason for this is that was really annoyed that it was using nostalgia to manipulate me into staying on the website. In shoving 10 year-old photos into my view through the On This Day feature it was giving me little hits of dopamine by reminding me of the good ol’ times, even if they were 10 years ago with people that, for whatever reason, are no longer part of my life.
For the AlgoMech 2019 festival in June I created a new performative drawing piece, A Perfect Circle. The piece is about how we interface with computers that analyse our activities. It consists of a video and accompanying plotter drawings.
Making A Perfect Circle presented me with a few challenges. The make the video element I hacked together a couple of Processing scripts that did basic motion tracking by following a user-specified colour. It would draw these lines, creating new lines (instead of adding to an existing line) at each major turn and giving them a unique colour.