I’m drilling into the cat’s feet to mount them on a piece of ply-wood to put in the spring show. It was a delicate operation.
Some pictures:
Cats
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Cave Temple for Training Digital Ninjas
DIGIFAB: Final
My digifab final expands on the CNC assignment, using the joint that I created to make fully articulated cats, one with a screen for a face, the other with a camera that feeds the screen. This turned out to be a pretty time consuming task. The skeleton cat had 30 parts, plus about 15 dowels and 10 joints. The fat cat had 20 parts and about 10 dowels and 1 joint. The process was fairly involved, though I didn’t do much measuring or anything like that. In the end my parts were very strange sizes and I should have done more precise measurements. I drew the parts in my notebook and then imported them in Illustrator and live traced them, to get vectors for each drawing.
RWET: Final Documentation
For my final, I made a program through which I can write poems about other people. Right now it’s still in a few different parts that I need to fit together, but eventually, you could download it and run it, enter some keywords and your gmail info, and it will generate a poem about you, written by me, in a PDF, that can be printed onto a piece of paper, folded up and turned into a little book, like this:
This happens in a few stages. First, the program reads through all of the user’s saved gchats—one of the limitations is that you have to have a pretty significant log of gchats for this to work—and saves only the chats written by the user, using regex. Right now, this process happens through three functions, which are based on Doug Hellman’s imaplib.
COMP CAM: Final documentation 1
Sae and my final project, currently titled “Cave temple for training digital ninjas,” incorporated ideas and work from a few of the projects we worked on during the semester. We were interested in using Pepper’s Ghost along with live video feeds to put people in a new space. At first we were interested in doing an installation in an abandoned store front, using a video feed with some effects like the video filters I had made and background cancelation so people could see themselves as ghosts in real time. Unfortunately, none of the real estate agents I tried calling ever responded to my messages.
So we decided to do something smaller scale and eventually settled on a cave. The cave was inspired by an interest in meditation and self discovery. We planned to project people into the cave as they were looking into it, seeing themselves journey into the cave, projected on several plexi glass Pepper’s ghost screens. First, we build a prototype with three screens.
Markov midterm and slam poetry gettysburg address
This week I continued to work on my midterm, adding a Markov chain component. This generated new texts that were based on the alliteration/assonance machine. It made the machine more interesting in part because it made the word choices slightly less obvious and generated new texts. I used this method with the Devil Tree text.
I was also interested in making a slam poetry generator, because my journalism professor commented in class today that Norman Mailer’s style in Armies of the Night was like a slam poetry version of the Gettysburg address. I wanted to see what that would sound like. The algorithm is not very sophisticated, it basically just places line breaks every 1-5 words with some randomness, but its actually kind of effective. This also works really well with the markov-alliteration machine because slam poetry uses alliteration kind of excessively.
Here are results of the alliteration-markov chain:
Then some slam poetry results, with both the gettysburg address and the devil tree, run through the markov alliteration machine:
Movement
I was interested in creating something that would create a map of movement which could then be applied to different objects. Tak gave me some code that can record mouse movements into a text file and then read them back into another sketch to animate something. I got that far. Theoretically I would have liked to create different interactions of objects based on different factors like proximity, which could lead to more complex narratives or sort of choreographies. The video shows a few different examples of objects moving in space, the pink objects are using the recording text file, and the green object moves in relationship to the pink object, either moving away, or taking the path and using that. It would be really cool if the movements could generate new movements, but I didn’t get this far because I couldn’t figure out how to append files that had already been written on to. If you know how to do that, let me know!
Code (the parts that are supposed to write over the file are commented out):
Diminished Reality
I was playing with some Processing code to create weird effects on images, just to work out some ideas I have for the final.
AR + Junaio
I spent some time playing around with Junaio last week, mostly just using there platform to see how it worked. I added a bunch of different elements to an image tag using the batman logo on my wallet, but couldn’t get them to work at the same time.
CNC cat
I made a cat for my CNC assignment. I did a drawing in my notebook, took a pic with my cell phone, live traced the pic in Illustrator, imported the lines into Vectorworks, added circles to the face and jaw, imported a dxf into MasterCam, set up the cutting paths for the CNC, which took a while because there were a few small cuts that were hard to figure out, and then cut it on plywood.