Over the past week Greg and I have been talking about how we were going to draw/animate the clouds properly. As discussed earlier, we have problems with the cropping artifacts showing up in the animation. Greg has taken every cloud (we have 36) and blurred the edges and added synthetic components to make the clouds look more real — kind of ironic that we had to make them more fake to look more real.

Over the last week I’ve written a good deal of ActionScript to dynamically control the cloud animation. The clouds are split into three levels the front level moves the fastest, the middle clouds moves at the middle speed, and of course the back clouds move the slowest — this is to make the sky seem more real. As the clouds go off the screen they are queued so that we have an unlimited supply of clouds. You could what this animation for days and it would constantly generate new formations because of the queuing system combined with the variable speeds of the clouds.

As for I/O, Bobby’s program that simply takes vibration data and writes a text file must integrate with my flash program: the “spped” text is actually the data from a text file on web server. At some point, Bobby’s program will write that text file with the necessary speed data.

Link: http://collegiatelabs.com/chris/lightning2.html

Over the weekend and throughout the day I have been importing Greg’s initial cloud’s and experimenting with the quality of the cloud’s in addition to some basic animation. I built a basic linear animation with one of the clouds just to see how these clouds would look when animated together.

Two key problems

1. The cloud’s don’t look great in flash (the artifacts from the cloud cropping show up plain as day).
2. The clouds have are all the same opaqueness and just look weird.

The simple solutions

1. Blur the clouds around the edges and reduce cropping artifacts.
2. Use a gradient at the top and bottom so that the clouds integrate into the sky.

Link to today’s creation: http://collegiatelabs.com/chris/lightning%20experiment.html

After thinking about our project for a while everyone agreed that our project lacked enough artistic direction. Greg came up with the idea of using a drum to make the thunderstorm strong, Ryan came up with a seasonal change (or throughout the day) change of day, and I thought of trying to integrate these ideas together with some sort of African tribal theme — but it just didn’t work.

Dr. Harrison Advice

I talked to Dr. Harrison about our problem and how I felt that we still lacked the art in our project. He told us of a psycologist who used a train during his therapy — as you got calmer the train went faster and you got more stressed the train went slower — a sort of play on danger (almost reverse psychology).

The New Idea

The new idea we came up with was to make the drum a very scary looking drum (that perhaps shocks you?). As you play the scary drum faster the storm gets calmer and if you play it long enough the time of day changes to a bright sunny morning or afternoon rather than a scray night time thunderstorm (stealing ideas from Ryan’s time of day, season idea). Our project now has a theme playing off danger/safety.

What makes a final project good? What makes a final project bad? Sometimes (correction: oftentimes) it is actual difficult to generate good evaluation criteria for our final projects. I think evaluating our Cyber Art projects comes down to five key criteria:

1. Originality
Whether you are talking art or computer science originality is key. If a project has been done 5x before — the project is obviously not as good as a project with a totally new idea.

2. Effort
The amount of effort put into a project is key to the success of any project. Even a simple idea needs considerable effort to tweak that simple idea into the perfect project.

3. Completeness
A half finished project cannot be accepted. Every project must live up (or at least get as close as possible) as living up to their initial promises — don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.

4. Audience Reception 
If the audience cannot react with the project, ignores the project, or doesn’t find the project interesting — that’s a problem. Our pieces are (in almost all cases) built for an audience and thus it is extremely important how the audience reacts with the project.

5. Coolness
A project which looks, sounds, or just feels cool should recieve a higher score. While coolness is a subjective criterion, coolness is what will seperate the great projects from the good projects.

Hopefully, we meet all of my evaluation criteria.

My concern of our group’s size was addressed today. Two of our CS members: Estelle (from Design of Information), and James (from my Multimedia/Hypertext class) left the group for other projects. In return we inherited an art major, Ryan, who will add his expertise to the team.

Ryan has already got us thinking into a new direction — perhaps integrating seasons or time of day into the storm. I think the idea we have now is too static and more reliant upon a technology demonstration rather than an art piece.

Hopefully Ryan will add more expertise to our group.

Today we selected our final project teams. I chose the Thunder Strike project simple because I think it has the most promise for creative and technologically impressive project. Currently our group consists of five people, Greg, Bobby, Estelle, and James — all of whom are CS majors…this may be a problem in the future, especially because I had imagined this project with three people, instead of five.

“Of a Luminous Soul,” represents a fusion between light and sound. The idea (put simply) is to use a light to sound converter to convert light waves into sound and write software to write (and sing) lyrics to sync with the music generated.

The presentation “Of a Luminous Soul” will begin with participants holding various colored flashlights, lava lamps, and other luminous objects to interface with the light to sound converter. The participants will then act as band shining the flashlights and other luminous objects at various intervals to compose a song.

Using the information of the song generated a program (custom written for this project) will be used to generate lyrics based on the beat, tempo, and pitch of the music generated. The lyrics will then be song by either text-to-speech (with perhaps modifications to make it more musical) or via pre-recorded words (since in theory only a limited number of words would be needed for a demonstration).

The software can generate (using the sound data) visualization, so that this completes a cycle: the light generates sound, and the sound generates light.
The software would also record the song being generated, so that after the song is generated, the musician(s) can play the song back (and then sell it to music labels for millions of dollars).

what the piece is about
The piece is titled Tao, and likewise, it is about the concept of Tao. The word “Tao” is derived from a concept in “Taoism” and “Confucianism.” The Tao symbol is translated from Chinese to literally mean way, path, or route.

what technology it uses
The piece uses an HTML page as the container for an Adobe Flash object. The HTML page includes a few lines of JavaScript to automatically resize the browser window to fill the entire screen. The HTML page is set to be hex color #00000 or black and the page uses JavaScript to focus the Operating System on this window.

The artwork uses Adobe Flash 6 (as identified in the source code) for its display. The flash is used as a container for two lower resolution movies. The movies themselves house the majority of the art work including the driving car video, the stars overlay, the color changes, and the 3D figure that is overlaid is embedded with the video. The 3D figure, the color change of the video, and the stars were likely overlaid in a video post-production tool like Adobe After Effects. Adobe Flash is used to control different view of the moving car, restart the video, and control the gradual reading of the text.

what content
The piece (as seen in figure 1) begins with two neighboring videos displayed side by side. The word “TAO” appears atop the videos, which slowly fades as the video progresses. The video on the left is displayed in a sepia color, while the video on the right is displayed with a lime tint. The videos take you on a journey through a road near a water reservoir, this represents the direct translation of “Tao,” of way, path or route. On the right video, stars appear (as seen in the screenshot of figure one) above the cars journey. On both videos a 3D object is blown through space to obscure the audience’s view. The clouds appear ominously in the window of the car. Additionally, an atmospheric, almost mystical sound is played throughout the presentation that slowly fades at the artwork ends.

A brief poem “earth blown out to stars * stars blown down to earth by fast cars * baghdad and addresses of the invisible,” is slowly revealed below the videos. The phrase “earth blown out to stars” means that millions of miles away from earth, amongst the stars, earth would be seen as a very tiny spec (if visible at all). The phrase “stars blown down to earth by fast cars” means that when you are driving in a car the stars become blurred and obscure. Meanwhile, the phrase “baghdad and addresses of the invisible” represents places and people that we forget about, like those in Baghdad. Even tough we hear about in the new every day, we never fully understand life in Iraq.

how audiences encounter/experience it
Audiences experience the artwork via a web browser on virtually any personal computer with speakers and the Adobe Flash plug in installed. The work is accessible from the eliterature.org collection via:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/strasser_sondheim__tao/index.html.

my experience of the piece
I personally found the piece very intriguing. The “Tao” concepts alone are very interesting from a cultural perspective, but this work does an excellent job of capturing the “Tao” concept via visual and audio communication.

I especially enjoyed (after watching the piece many times) that I constantly found new things about the piece that I had missed. For example, the first time I watched the piece I missed the stars, which were layered on top of the video. I also missed the small black lines, which appear atop the video randomly three times, to add to the mystique.

I also enjoyed the entrance to the piece. When you first navigate to the work of art, all that is displayed is the word “TAO” in capital letters with the authors’ names displayed in small print below it (as seen in figure 2). I enjoyed this because it is simplistic and keeps the user guessing what will happen when you actually click the word “TAO.”

sources
The Work:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/strasser_sondheim__tao/index.html

Other Electronic Literature:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/strickland/vniverse/index.html
http://www.ifarchive.org/

General Information on Tao:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao

Our “Wonderings” presentation went very well. I think almost everyone enjoyed our project because it was very unique, not to mention I think the introduction of just having the participants walking into a room (having no idea what they were about to see) worked quite well.

I think two things that went well was the originality of our presentation and the introduction. I think we could have improved upon our ending and of course another improvement would have been more “wonderings”

I particpated in the “Magical Box” skit as a volunteer. I was able to quite quickly guess that the part of campus they were portraying was the Drillfield. Overall it was very exciting to see other group’s projects.

I collected a large amount of “wonderings” from people around campus, family members (over the phone), and friends. Below you find a selection of these “wonderings” collected.

Wonder: Death

Wonder: Dogs Talk

Wonder: Why Doing This

Wonder: Easy to Go to Space

Wonder: Education

Wonder: Everything Free

Wonder: Grass Purple

Wonder: Fly

Wonder: Moon Made of Cheese

Wonder: No Religion

Wonder: Trick Ponies

Wonder: Sharks Had Legs

Wonder: Unicorns and Fantasy Worlds

Wonder: Virginia Tech Tropical Island

Wonder: My Tombstone

Check back tomorrow for the results of our presentation.