Cofa Blog

Iteration 5

So, Ive moved on a bit from my first experiment but I'm trying to keep as many similarities as I can because there are some ideas I haven't fleshed out all the concepts of. This is why I’m using the same X motif but this time I’m hiding it on the floorboards under a couch. Sometime in the future the X will be unvieled and ny erasure will be revealed. Until then it’s interesting to consider what erasure means when it’s covered. Much more work will be going into my fifthiteration, there are problems getting it off the ground but it will be better than wherever I pulled this from.     

I'll give you warning in advance that this post contains a lot more text than my previous ones. In any case, here it is.

It's been a hard slog but My five images are finally ready. The latest addition is a picture of sydney seen from a satellite 100000 years in the future. This was conceptually the hardest image to work out. My initial ideas involved infrared imaging and night vision. The idea of focussing attention on an individual person through different light spectrums was appealing and I may one day revisit it but it threw up a few problems.

Firstly, having a definitive image, even one in an invisible light spectrum, seemed far to solid for a concept so ephemeral and far fetched as the one I was confronted with. Secondly, I simply have no idea what the world will look like that far into the future. It's just not possible to come up with any judgements  about the future that seem justifiable in a majority of possible outcomes.

My next idea was considering the fact that there might not be any satellites that far into the future. I thought about complete planetary destruction, which would also destroy our satellites. I also considers that this might be avoided completely and that humanity would thrive and begin to expand throughout the universe. Thinking a bit more about this I realised that if we are going to have regular trips into space then we may want to consider removing all the large, solid objects that are spinning rapidly around our planet. I also considered that satellites may be used as docking stations for spaceships. 

While these lines of thinking made sense to me I found them really unfulling in a visual sense. A sheet of purely black paper certainly would be taking the easy way out.

To try and come up with a new way of looking at the problem I did a bit of internet research about future predictions. This was how my next, and final, idea emerged. A lot of what I could find seemed to suggest there would be some sort of cataclysmic event some time between now and 100000 years away. This could be a few things, biological warfare, nuclear warfare, global warming, an ice age, over population, pollution, solar flares, super volcanoes, asteroid collisions and so on. Thinking about these events I began to consider how they would impact on satellites. I came to the conclusion that many of these events would render them obsolete. Certainly super volcanoes, nuclear warheads and asteroids would have the effect of an artificial cloud cover that could last for years and cover vast percentages of the planet. Seeing that these three events also seemed to be among the most likely I decided that I could justify an assumption that at least one of them would happen and render any visual imaging from satellites useless. On the other hand, my ideas from before about humanity thriving also seemed to support this idea. If all of these events could be avoided then it is reasonable to assume that our cities would continue to grow and we know that they will grow upwards. I figured that satellites would have lots of trouble getting any useful imagery from really tall, self sufficient buildings This idea of satellites still existing but not being useful for visual purposes intrigued me a lot so I began to look into it further.

Communications satellites are already hugely important in our information age and will probably become increasingly more so. To visually represent this I decided to draw a picture that was as close to raw information as I could make it. Binary coding seemed the obvious answer. Seeing as though this sort of information is generally never seen in reality I figured I may as well look to fiction. 

My final image turned out to be a whole lot of green 1's and 0's on a black background. Very much like the imagery seen in the Matrix but still, in my mind at least, appropriate to my concept. It've got a few ideas to make it a bit more visually stimulating but am running out of time to implement so unless I find find a scrap of time somewhere  think that's how the picture will stay.

Sorry about the long read, I feel that this piece required a lot more explanation compared to the rather simple ideas in the others. 

Another drawing done. Probably not my best looking picture but it was very different to what I'm used to so I'm pretty happy with the result. Besides, at least I know what I can change next time.

I've started the next in my series on Sydney. This one is set 500 years in the future seen from a plane. I've tried to remain fairly neutral in my prediction. Our cities have continued to get more polluted so we have ignored the problem and built huge mini-cities, allowing us to have gardens and plants that have escaped the polluted air. Obviously the richest in society live at the top of the towers where the view is the cleanest and the gardens can be open to the air.

All of this is just speculative posturing of course, I really love the idea of huge towers covered in plants so I just ran with it and then worked out why they would need to exist. Even so I don't think my idea is unreasonable.

Three down! After an unprecedented two complete drawings today the task of getting everything done in time is looking a lot more attainable. This was another easier one, it has lots of black space that only requires one layer and didn't really require much research at all.

Things are definitely on track after today. I will admit though, the next two drawings are the ones I've been most anxious about right from the start. Designing a futuristic Sydney for one of them and then trying to imagine one hundred thousand years into the future. The latter is probably giving me more trouble at the moment but those are both probably better left until the morning.

My second drawing of my site (Sydney) is set 2000 years ago looking through a microscope. I figured that 200 years ago there wouldn't be much apart from aboriginal people, animals and plants. I think the dominating factor in this is the plants and animals, mostly because although the demographics of the people have changed dramatically, the numbers have increased out of site comparatively to 2000 years ago. 

For my drawing I focussed on plants. This drawing was much faster because it required only one layer of colour for the majority and the detailed bit had to be kept light.

Keeping things light is one of the hardest parts of drawing with pens. Pen drawing is where the concept of subtractive colours gets cranked up to 11. Once you have put colour on the paper it is impossible to lighten it, excluding painting over it or similar methods. This makes doing light colours difficult in a number of ways. Firstly, they are harder to make interesting because any mixing of colour will darken them. It is also a lot harder to hide mistakes while keeping it light. Detailing  things is another issue. 

As a foreword I should say that I didn't think of all of these before I decided on my final idea. These are just other possibilities I've come up with while thinking about random processes and chance.

Using maps of fictional places as an overlay on real maps and following the journeys of characters or just going to specific landmarks. Suitable maps would include those of middle earth, Alagaësia or Westeros.

Video game maps. Similar idea except that instead of following the fictional characters through the real world I would play a game for a predetermined time and the go to where I ended up on the game map/real map overlay. Survival mode from COD MW3 would probably be one of the best candidates for this sort of idea.

Geohashing. A remarkably suitable random place generator. For a more full explanation look here: http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Main_Page 

Join the dots puzzles. Another simple idea for a map overlay. 

Follow the news. Watch the news at night and record the first mentioned place you could travel to. Go there the next day.

Change something familiar. Pick a route that you travel on often and then just change it somehow. Maybe you could double the distance you go before turning, maybe you could tun the opposite way every second corner.

Songs on shuffle. Another one that could be varied a lot. Use the length of the songs as a way to determine  actions. eg: at the end of every son you turn alternately right and left.

Twister. An obvious chance based game, the problem's are that overlaying the random choices on a map would result in large areas. A possible solution would be to play the game until you have four points of contact, use these as the four corners of a quadrilateral and the add the diagonals and head to the cross over.