C a p r i c i o u s

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646413667/our-better-nature-how-the-great-outdoors-can-improve-your-life

The latest NPR Hidden Brain episode titled “Our Better Nature: How The Great Outdoors Can Improve Your Life” discusses how beneficial surrounding ourselves in nature is for the physical, mental and socio-economical aspects of life are. While listening I couldn’t help but tie this in with our project and the drawings that I’ve been working on. I’ve been drawing up the two states and including lots of greenery in the “good” future. While doing this, I was wondering how this would be perceived by the audience. Would it be interpreted as a future that is more advanced as they don’t need to expand and concrete over nature, or one that is technologically behind as there are no impressive structures that stretch the landscape?

For some people, this ^ is an impressive and desirable future. This podcast was great in terms of backing up my perception of an advanced future being one that has integrated into nature instead of replacing it. The part that I found most interesting was how images of nature calm people and immediately has positive connotations associated. This makes me confident that by including images of nature in the “good” future it becomes clear to the audience that this is the intended “good” future. 

Some other interesting points are that when there’s a large amount of nature around communities, gun crime is reduced by 9%. There a significant drop in sickness and also anxiety. All of which has massive financial benefits and overall improves quality of life. 

It also reminded me of a reference from last semester which was Le Corbusier's Broadacre City. Where he argued that the metropolis is undesirable and so designed a community that took the modern lifestyle and put it in a more sparse setting focused on the quality of life. You can see the prominence of nature in his vision.  

Early this morning Reza and I conducted an interview with Captain Hayden Smith from Sea Cleaners, an organisation that goes around Auckland’s coastlines every day to collect waste. We thought that he would be a really good person to talk to since he was at the front line of what happens when waste disposal goes wrong. We were not aware of this but it turned out that Sea Cleaners actually worked with Foodstuffs to create the Bag Vote last year that asked customers if they would want to see a phase-out of plastic bags. Through this partnership, Foodstuffs began phasing out single-use plastic bags which then gave the government a foundation to implement the plastic bag ban. I personally found this really interesting as previously we believed that the only way that change within businesses could be achieved with government intervention. In this case however, Foodstuffs acted first. The reason they did this is that over the past 4 years, they had been building a relationship with Sea Cleaners so that they can be associated with the company and as a condition Sea Cleaners had Foodstuffs conduct the Bag Vote. By being associated with Sea Cleaners, Foodstuffs can be presented as a more environmentally active company which is good in the consumer’s eyes.

We asked him what his opinion was as to why people generally don’t care about how they dispose of waste. His response was that people don’t actually see the piles of rubbish as generally, the environments that people populate are clean. i.e. streets, offices, schools. however all of the rubbish actually ends up in oceans, forests etc. “We see the unseen” Other views that he had was that he’d like to see container deposits opened up to include anything with a bar-code. This way, even if people do litter, you could have kids picking rubbish off streets for pocket money. He did acknowledge the difficulty of logistics with this though. He also said that in an ideal world he would like to see that everyone picks up one piece of rubbish a day. This would also implement values of correct waste management and reduce the chance of them littering with their own waste. In terms of our installation, he expressed his satisfaction with most installations that use salvaged waste to build something, saying that at the end of the day it’s still rubbish and will eventually end up in landfill. He mentioned that he’s talked with schools who wanted to create artwork around sustainability and that he heavily advocated for painting murals to promote change. This is definitely something to keep in mind for our own project.

We’ve encountered some hiccups in our original direction for the project. Looking at the Auckland Council’s waste management plan, it was clear that the primary source of waste was commercial. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest thing to address as changes can only be made at a government level. As a third party, we were hoping to gain insight from both the council and businesses to come up with a design solution that takes into account the concerns and goals of both. Alas, both Reza and Jolie’s contacts in the Auckland council couldn’t find the time to participate in a quick interview and directly contacting businesses proved futile. We unanimously decided that the chance of us finding any sort of insight into commercial waste was unrealistic. Thus, using the research that we’ve collected over the past couple of week we decided that it was best to still continue on the path of New Zealand’s environmental sustainability but targeting consumers. This allows for us to make our Open Studio presentation targeted to those actually coming to open studio.

Coincidentally though, there has been a government enforced change in waste management recently. That is the ban on single use plastic bags within the next year. Reza, Jolie and I found that this issue would be a really good focus for our Studio Project due to its relevance and the fact that some people have reservations around the idea. For example, ACT party leader David Seymour saying that the ban would “punish responsible consumers and may produce worse environmental outcomes." We’d like to create an installation that works to address this hesitation for the switch to plastic bags by creating awareness of the environmental impact. Of course, there are a lot of art installations that attempt to do this. For example, animals made out of salvaged waste.

Urgh, The challenge is that we have is to present this in a unique way that actually stays with the viewer after they leave the exhibit. And not to make it look heckin ugly.

The ban on plastic bags actually means that the public has to adopt new habits, i.e. remembering to pack reusable bags when they go shopping.

Overall a very important project for us as a group. This project is the first that we’ve had where we have an external party involved with a different audience. My personal workflow has changed dramatically this semester. I found that in previous years I would encounter problems that would grind production to a halt. This made the process a lot more stressful and often led to a lot of time being wasted. For example, with Ad.Me, I spent several weeks building multiple Processing sketches that I would hit a wall with as it got too complicated to manage or I expected things of processing that it couldn’t do. This semester, I dedicated time to planning out the whole project and asking myself “What can go wrong and if unavoidable, what compromises can I make?” By understanding limitations I was able to focus on the parts that i knew I could make work well, like Illustration.

Upon sending a draft of our animation to Laurent, the feedback that we received was critical of the colour choices of the project.

One was the choice of using blue as the secondary colour to yellow when violet is the complementary colour. While choosing colours, we did explore this option however, there are reasons why we didn't go with it. We had a set of colour tones that we wanted to stick with to give clear definition between objects and when we applied a colour to them. When purple was put in place with the yellow, it created a lot of contrast. A lot. With an image as busy as what we had drawn it all of a sudden became hard to look at. That, paired with the final size of the display we decided that it would become an eyesore and people wouldn't want to look at the image to see details in buildings etc. As a result, we moved around the colour wheel slightly to blue. We found that this was a colour that achieved a balance between contrast and overall busy-ness.

With the illustration and composition of Intra-city completed I used yesterday to test how the processing aspect will work.

Jed had exported a couple of files in the .mov format which encodes the video with an alpha channel (transparency) - something that we need if we want to run animations ontop of another. However, running these in processing, the sketch simply filled in the empty space with the colour black. Damn. I set to work finding different ways of getting around this. One way that I found was to use a mask effect. Similar to in Photoshop, we can create another video that is black and white which tells processing where to render the pixels on the colour video. This however doesn't allow for fade in/out as the mask only tells processing to render the whole pixel or none of it. This makes it hard to show the fade in/out of the buildings. This would also almost double the size of the program as for every one video on the screen there would be another running that isn't visible.

Another was to export from after effects as a .png sequence. The processing sketch then plays the .png sequence in the background process of the sketch. It then takes a snapshot of each frame as it happens and saves it in the data folder. It then renders the images on the screen in sequence to appear like a moving film. This is a lot of code but probably achievable if the output was worth it.

However, since the animation that we had for the buildings had already been toned back to a colour burn effect instead of a building animation. I wonder if it's worth doing anything in after effects at all. When a very similar thing can be achieved directly in processing through fade in/out and blending modes. This won't prove to be an issue with cars on the ground since it's the lowest layer of the animation but it would with the cars on the motorway. The .png sequence that I mentioned before might have to be implemented for this.

A weight off my shoulders. The roads, buildings, parks, carparks, trees have all been drawn up. This has taken about two weeks longer than I had hoped for but I'm happy with the way everything has turned out. Overall there would be upwards of 50 different structures across the three states not including repeated buildings. Although this is a lot, this allows us to create a massive amount of cityscapes. The scale of the city was also necessary as if we were to work with the original Block scale there would have been too few buildings for much noticeable change. While at the scale that we have chosen to work with, the audience should really gain a sense of density as the population increases/decreases.

In this week's studio Laurent was discussing with the class that we need to begin thinking about the installation in open studio. So this post is primarily addressing the intentions of our group in regards to this.

Due to our project being tailor made for a building that won't be built by Open Studio, we're need to be a lot more creative to give the public a little taster of what to expect from the final product. The fact that the deadline for the building is later than the Open Studio may mean that the project may not be completed open studio simply because we want to be building the best project possible for the Engineering building.

So our option for open studio is to create a prototype showing the growth of the city in Intracity. There are currently two ideas for this:

1. To have a tv set up to run a looped pre-built animation of the city growing and shrinking, showcasing the day and night cycles as well. The problem with this could be communicating the fact that the final display is going to be data driven. This could be achieved however through strong communication through posters etc elsewhere in the installation. This option also means that there would be no need to present any Processing sketches for open studio which means less of a workload for me.

2. To link the data with the Manukau campus building. A potential option for this is to run the program for a day while linked up which we would record and create a time lapse of the whole day. Although this would communicate the live data aspect of the project very well, by making it a time lapse, we lose all of the animations in terms of buildings fading in and vehicles moving around.

While meeting with Tim Davison, the go-to man for the datasets we need for our project, it became clear that the best way that we could get a live representation of who is in the building at a time is by looking at WiFi connections. Previous to this meeting my team did believe that this would be the easiest way to gage an approximate number of people in the building at a time as opposed to CO2 levels, room temperatures etc. However we were aware that there would be issues around privacy as instead of looking at the data of rooms occupied by individuals, we would have access to individual's data. Luckily this doesn't seem to be a problem in terms of the building of the project since we're getting access to the data. But it would be interesting to look at other projects/artworks that use WiFi data in perhaps a more personal and invasive manner to see where people draw the line in how their WiFi related data is displayed to the public.

After the meeting, Laurent met with us and made us realize that now we know how we're creating approximations of people in the building, that we need to work out how we should be communicating this to the audience. How is the public going to understand that the number of WiFi connections correspond to the size of the city? This is a point that I think I've neglected and need to discuss further with the team. There are a couple of ways I've decided we could go about this without adding to our work load too heavily.

1: To have a simple counter showing the number of WiFi connections that our program is picking up displayed somewhere on the screen. Although this is simple it could give quite a different perspective on the people in the building. This is because as a user there's no way to really tell how busy or empty the building is just by walking around normally as the perception is based solely on the areas/floors the user walks through.

2: By spawning people in the display with WiFi symbols above their heads for every WiFi connection there is. Although this would be visually cool. I'm afraid that the footpaths would fill up much too quickly and end up becoming a blur - not to mention the fact that at times there could be thousands and thousands of people in the buildings so running thousands of animations at a time would slow the machine down to a halt.

Illustrator - the choice of this software is due to the visual style that we're trying to achieve with the project. If we were using photography or even adding more detailed tone variety, Photoshop would have worked however, the more comprehensive pen tool in Illustrator has proved invaluable in the production of vector based illustration.

Another reason for this software was the fact that at the beginning of the project we were unsure of the size that we would have to export the project at. Since Illustrator is a vector based software, it allows for re-sizing without any loss of detail. This has already proved to be useful as we received confirmation that the video is to be exported in 1920x1080p so re-sizing proved to be extremely straight forward.

Illustrator has already helped us on a technical limitation front as well. Since we were unsure of the resolution of the video, we would have needed to make the canvas size in photoshop highly exaggerated (since we can scale down but not up without losing fidelity). Because Photoshop is pixel based, the file size would have been massive and impossible to run on most of the team's machines.The performance of illustrator however is based on detail which even though there may be a lot across out project, it can be very easily managed by creating different artboards and files.

After Effects- For animation, we chose to use After Effects. This is for unity across the softwares since both are made by Adobe. This allows for After Effects to use illustrator files without having to export each image from illustrator individually into a png.

While After Effects isn't my area of expertise, I know that it is a go-to software in the professional industries for animation. Which will prove to be a valuable skill for Jed and Chris.