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Monday, May 30, 2011

52 Posts: Work, Creativity, Inspiration, the Interface...and Scary Stuff


My Creativity:
No creative outburst for me as I’ve had a busy week; again my work life has had most of my attention.  Teachers know the feeling… even when you have time off you feel like there is something you need to be doing.  In my case, we are winding down the school year, planning for the next, and refreshing credentials and certifications, etc.  

If I have played my cards right I will not be taking (work related) classes this summer, meaning 5 weeks all to myself.  I’ll take a weekend trip or two to see friends and family.  But, I look most forward to catching up on exercise and reading for pleasure.   Of course I’ll continue my various creative endeavors (w/ Processing & JavaScript).   I also hope this means I can get back to creating in Second Life on a more regular basis… of late I’ve been lucky to get in more than twice a week.  

The Creativity of Others:
I found several sources of inspiration this week.
One thing I was happy to see was the documentary on Ai Weiwei will be completed thanks, in part, to funding via kickstarter.com. The trailer is interesting and the Colbert Report episode was good.  I’m glad the project will be finished and look forward to seeing the documentary.  

On a more mind blowing front…I dug into the work of AaronKoblin.  Until recently, I have only been vaguely aware of him… I had seen something on the Johnny Cash project in the past.  Then I saw last week’s post via The Imagination Age blog and was motivated enough to dig a bit deeper… several of his projects are flat out amazing.  The Ted Talk was tantalizing and I have since explored his website, the Arcade Fire “The Wilderness Downtown interactive video (integrating user specified data from Google maps) and the  interactive 3D music video Rome (by Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi, Chris Milk, et. al).  The later two only work in Chrome and the Danger Mouse video only works in the Chrome Beta Canary (To see about Rome minus Canary go here). Both projects might push an older less powerful machine, but it is worth a try.  I found myself flying around in the Rome video (inspired by 70’s spaghetti western theme music)… and thinking of some of the 3D in a browser work being done with Unity on the web…

If that New Media theorist (Quoted by Koblin in his TED talk) is right - that “… The 2st Century will be defined by the Interface”, then I look forward to learning to create via that Interface.
 
On a more sobering front… i.e. threats to creativity and freedom of speech… see sororNishi’s “scary stuff” post and link out to the petition if you are so moved.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

52 Posts: Random


An advantage of working on ‘academic’ schedule is I have my summers off (really only 5 weeks unpaid… but hey I still look forward to).  It is a great way to get refreshed and to avoid burn out.  Of course with this luxury of 5 weeks off comes the flip side… an intense work schedule until I get my building shut down for the summer, etc.  

Somehow, I still managed to get some time in for both Javascript and  Processing.  This week with Processing it was a section on understanding the use of Random values as well as Noise.  I now know that Noise is random but smoothly incremented randomness; whereas, pure randomness might have a small random increment followed by a giant one, followed by 10 humongous ones followed by 3 tiny ones.  This might not be what one wants thus the use of Noise to force the steps across an increment to change at a uniform rate.  Anyway… here you will see a few demos with size, direction, color and speed to increment incrementing randomly and with noise.

So today’s video is truly random… enjoy.  
Another Random Production from Robward Antwerp on Vimeo.
More fun w/ Processing 1.5
http://processing.org
Music sample via http://dig.ccmixter.org
By: cdk
Creative Commons - NC