Untitled from maria mendez on Vimeo.

First step of using CV in Openframeworks to develop a generative design that takes the contour of an image as limit points.

Determining if a point lies on the interior of a polygon. By Zach suggestion I used the method described by Paul Bourke

...make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non-
stable...

...make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which
cannot be predicted precisely...

...make something which cannot 'perform' without the assistance of its environment...

...make something which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air
currents and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity...

...make something which the 'spectator' handles, with which he plays and thus
animates...

...make something which lives in time and makes the 'spectator' experience time...

...articulate: something natural...

Hans Haacke

Description:
The installation consists of a small screen that displays a generative design of plant-like shapes, attached to a network of sensors that allow it to use the immediate surroundings as raw material.
When a user approaches to see the display, a video tracking system is activated and a projection that expands the design is displayed on the body of the spectator. Thus, the space is altered once through interaction with the participant.

In this project, I am interested in two main subject:
1) the integration of environmental data as part of the system of rules governing the generative design.
2) the improbable encounter, the causality , which adds another layer of complexity, as the second participant completes the design.

A “curious place” then, is an exploration of how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces.

Download code

“On February 4, 2008, several rallies were held in Colombia and in other locations around the world, criticizing FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) and demanding the liberation of hundreds of hostages. The protests were originally organized through the social networking site Facebook. Millions of people in Colombia and thousands worldwide participated in the rallies.”

The Facebook-promoted global protest against FARC is a cas d’ecole of the power of social networking as a means to foster civic and political engagement across different countries and social groups. Looked closely, it made evident subtle processes that operate at the levels of culture and language, such as the alarming process of polarization of opinion in all sides of the Colombian political spectrum. A reflection of this are the online discussion forums of El Tiempo, the country's most influential newspaper: the content and tone of the entries reflect the tendency to radicalize against political opponents of either side. While supporters of the government consider anyone holding slightly leftist positions as guerrilla, conversely, those supporting the government are labeled as accomplices of the paramilitary death-squads. This dynamics has quietly generated a reversal of ethical values among Colombians of all political parties, to an extent in which members of either side tend to condemn the atrocities of only one of the actors in the conflict, while justifying the others.

The level of language violence in these public forums is a reflection of the surrounding physical violence, and can be analyzed as a function of the kind of media coverage that a given particular instance of a forum is about. The hypothesis is that the wages of the public’s opinion are affected (exacerbated or otherwise) by the language and inherent political biases of the corresponding newspaper or social network, and that this can be made visible through technical XXX in order to produce a compelling artistic reflection of the complex interplay between reality, media and individual and group politics.

Right now i just have one working version of the networked graphics visualizing the most used words in a text, in this case one of the latest speech of the current Colombian president.

For the networked pong I decided to build paper pop-up controls.

First I tried the code with an accelerometer. The main difficulty was to work with the ArduinoMini for first time. I found this page very helpful for the setup, and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts I realize that I had to change the chip in the Arduino software from atmega8 to atmega168.

For the pop-ups I used two simple switches