Final

Well, I competed my programming final and was very happy with the result. It was a challenging program that came together after a few days of working on it non-stop. It seems like it is a really good combination of a lot of different material learned as well as a decent art piece. I really enjoy Machen's recorded speech mixed in with current news. Some words and stories almost match up where other times he will be saying everything is alright and the news will read FIU will close down if these budget cuts go through. I will work to get this program online and to an audience. I think a lot of poeple might be searching for this information and might be tricked into looking at this progra. I just need to hack the rss code so it can look at the rss on another server. Thank you for the great semester.

I wanted to share with the class a project in design I did with processing. Images of it and a description are at gregcoledesigns.com.

Budget Cuts Vinyl

March 2009, Graphic Design: Illustration
Processing programming language
Mock-up of a 120' x 60' building vinyl

For this project we were asked to create a vinyl building covering for a gallery exhibit about local issues. I choose to explore the problems associated with budget cuts to the university arts and music program. To create the image seen below, I created a program from scratch that rotated vector shapes around an origin point while changing their color from vibrant hues of blue and purple to dulled out grays. Programming was chosen over more traditional techniques because its mathematical system that creates this work of decreasing quantities is related to the structure of the system that has led to these problems.

The program that creates these images can be interacted with here.

Falling a little behind in Posts

Well I have been working in processing and have made a lot of progress. I was able to figure out how midi sound works and to understand how the program works. I went with ProMidi but I have also tried themidibus, and ESS as well as some other stuff on the forums. For my project though, I am probably going to use Sonia to change sampled music based on values of a moving or collection of images. My latest program at the time is a one that changes a tone based on the average brightness of a frame and the volume is tied to the red value of the frame. It can be found here(I dont think it works on the web). Right now I am working on my gallery piece that I created in Animation I that I could possibly finish up with a soundtrack. I kind of have small project ideas at the moment and no large scale final project.

Almost April

Not too much more to report on about my final. So far I have been finishing up the book, as well as researching materials from the other one. Learning to read text and internet files was a big step in my project, so I think I am still on track. I am excited that we can focus on the final project now, and progress weekly towards finishing that. This week I will work on pulling sound from an image. I have been looking at midi files and how they are represented by letters and numbers. I have a lot to learn about that as well.

Final Project Direction

I am continuing research on sound and music in processing. I am still interested in storing data in a visual format. Even if my project ends up only storing a few notes on a sheet of paper, I will be happy. Right now there are a few big issues that I still need to adress. 1. Simplify Midi music tones or an even simpler format to as few notes as possible. Give each note a unique shape and color/texture value. Format processing to output this data into a visual piece. 2. A way to read back the visual data back into processing to create the midi file again. I envision that a scanner would work well for the purposes I need. 3. Processing has to be able to read back the data on the page. It would have to follow a certain timeline and find colors and analyze them to pull out the notes. It could re-create a midi file and play it. Eventually I would like to have a handheld scanner that could create music from any surface. What would a gallery wall sound like if you could hear music in it. I still need to research more. Maybe I should just jump to the ability to read sound in textures instead of creating my own system for encoding.

I keep finding people working with music

I was flipping through the Blue and found another artist who did interesting work with sound. Shape of Song by Martin Wattenberg is a great project that starts to constuct a pattern created by identical groups of notes in a song. I find it very interesting and relavent to the work I am doing. I wonder if I will need to use midi music instead of an mp3 to store the data I want to.

Research

So I looked up the term 'Digital Media' at UF libraries and there were only about 20 books or so that contained that phrase. It was kind of surprising. There are so many different things poeple are doing with the field in film, programming, photography. Not many poeple have choosen to get all of this work in one place though.

Well while reading Digital Art by Christiane Paul, I came across a piece by Nam June Paik called Random Access. I had one of those moments where I had been wanting to do a project for a long time and then have realized that it has been done before (and in 1963 for that matter). Anyway the piece involves a collection of cassete tape tacked to the wall, and a reading head that a viewer could run across the magnetized surface, to hear a bunch of different audio collections. My idea for a piece like this though is being able to encode data visually where it could be read back and played to the system. I kind of have an idea in my head that if you can somehow program texture and color into sound, you could hear any surface. I ask myself what would a Pollock sound like compared to the wall it was hung on.

Other books I looked at were two by John Maeda. I found them really interesting to read because the creators of Processing, have their student work in the book. I believe processing was their thesis project or something similar. Anyway the books have a lot of great insight into the field and into being a creative professional in general. Especially exciting is to see how someone can jump from being a porgrammer most of his life, to a well known artist and professor. He gives much of his insight on life, learning, design, art, programming, and history of the field. Its a good read.