sansumbrella

I just finished a short experimental animation. Independent objects move through space. Connections are formed between neighboring objects, creating an overall structure that grows, mutates and ultimately collapses.

Watch on Vimeo.

So I’m just putting in my final days at Domani Studios now. I had the pleasure of working on a lot of fun projects with some really cool people here. Figured it was appropriate to rick roll them for my sending off. Of course with a particle system, though. Of course.

get the whole experience

‘Ikebana’, one of my restructured photographs, was accepted into a juried show at the Los Angeles Digital Art Center. It’s a 32″x 12″ semi-floral image that abstracts a photograph I took of a restaurant district in Osaka. I’m looking forward to seeing the work on paper, as I haven’t yet been able to find an affordable printer in NYC.

If you live in/around LA, stop by the gallery between April 10 and May 3 to see my work and that of a whopping 39 others. I’m going to see if I can make it to the opening on April 10, since I’ll be in San Francisco that week/end.

The images were created with Processing.
More information on the LACDA website.

I began playing around with hydra a bit today (and I’m only six months behind…). It’s really straightforward to program in, but thinking about the resulting image one pixel at a time took a little getting used to. The environment that Adobe provides for developing shaders is fantastic. It automatically creates control sliders when you declare parameters, so you can tweak the resulting images on the fly. I’m looking forward to seeing how this shading language is implemented in future versions of the creative suite so I can play with it further. For now, I have a simple displacement function that operates both linearly and radially, and allows you to ‘fade’ out the edges a bit.

For examples by someone with a lot more control over shaders, see Quasimondo.
For source code and more, check out the Hydra Gallery (I added mine at the bottom).
More photos on flickr.

I started messing around with Conway’s game of life this morning when no projects were assigned to me (I got plenty just before lunch, though). I was pretty bored with the tried-and-true 2-d grid rendering, so I tried the tried-and-true process of exploding the individual cells out into space based on pixel brightness (colors are currently selected randomly from a photo). I’ll probably continue to explore this in the near future to see what I can massage out of it.

More images on Flickr.
Created with Processing.

I created a simple text animation class this evening that mimics the transition effect found on yugop.com. Type on the second line, then click ‘animate transition’ to watch the top line transition to what you entered.

The text effect now exists in both AS2 and AS3 versions. The timer class in AS3 provides a cleaner way to manage the animation, although I kind of liked normalizing the milliseconds myself.

Download source (AS3)
Download source (AS2)

Slick surfaces seemed pretty common around Chelsea this afternoon, as a brief stroll revealed the shiny dishes of Subodh Gupta, pearlescent paints in the Dillon gallery’s ‘ma’ exhibition, glossy bead installations of ‘Hidden Americana,’ and the friendly contours of anthropomorphized Vespa motorbikes created by Patricia Piccinini.Also on view are the paintings of Tu Hongtao, which depict fantasy women as plastic dolls, and the engaging landscapes of Sven Kroner.
See the art weekend photoset on flickr.

I took some time over the past few weeks to bring my portfolio site up to speed for the new year. Take a minute to check it out. A few new projects are in, and I revamped the interface to include way more fun. I enjoyed making it, and I hope you’ll enjoy looking at it.The back-end is currently a flat XML file, but I’m working on getting a simple CMS built in Ruby/rails (the animation stuff is so much more fun). I successfully integrated a rails back-end with a flash interface for a project at work using RubyAMF (for some details on how to do that yourself, check Mark Llobrera’s tutorial), but I still find working with the mediatemple rails install a bit tricky. Once I figure everything out on my server side, I’ll likely do a log-type entry to describe the process.

A few doodles from the week, including an ugly made-up mouth.

Alright, so the influence on this is pretty obvious. Type in the text field at the bottom to break your own message. I’m still messing around with the matrix in flash — it really bothers me that I can’t just push/pop and know where I am in space. I ended up using some trig at one point to try to predictably adjust the matrix values. Perhaps I will resort to papervision so I can do simple matrix translations. Anyone who cares to look in to the matter in 2d can download the source.