PandaMachine

This post is a documentation of my student internship over the semester break this June with the Lasalle Media Lab, under the direction of Andreas Schlegel. The internship was to create a reiteration of Shifting Interactions, which was a multi disciplinary project conceived by Andreas Schlegel, Brian O’Reilly, Melissa Quek and Muhammad Dhiya. This iteration featured the similar theme of combining art and science together, taking a step further from having the usual dancers reacting to electronic sensors and light structures and brought in the star piece of the show which was a robotic arm dance duet. The robot arm would be controlled via OSC messages sent from a phone to an arduino computer chip.

Joining me in this internship were fellow electronic music students Chong Ming En and Deon Chan. Together we took a relatively hands on approach to the project, coordinating rehearsals with dancers Cheryl Chin, Lim Xin Ping and Dada Pichmutta and liaising with the Esplanade programmers and audio team to make sure our clearances for bumping in and out of the festival were made smoothly.

Working on a sound art installation was a new experience for myself as it was slightly different to having a regular live musical performance. There were other aspects like aesthetics and technicality that we had to think about to make visitors to the installation be intrigued and wanting to stay for the music and dance performance.

On top of that we had to learn how every part of the installation worked in order to troubleshoot any issues with the computer codes and wiring/signal flow of the electronic components. This made me feel slightly overwhelmed at the beginning as we had only a year’s of introduction to coding so the learning curve was steep initially. Thankfully because of the modules Andreas had taught us in previous semesters, we were able to make sense of the latest version of the codes given to us and build upon it.

I’d definitely say this internship experience was overall very successful for me. I had a chance to learn things that I had learnt in school and apply them to actual projects that would be displayed publicly. This project also allowed me to collaborate with students from the school of dance, forging new relationships with them for any future projects.  Below will just showcase a few more highlights from the rehearsals to the actual performances at the Esplanade. 

https://ugenocide.github.io/My final post for these series of p5js sketches will be putting it onto a website using css and html. Here are some screenshots of my website, there are 5 tabs that feature 2 fullscreen interactive sketches, an about section that also features some screenshots, a page that has mini sketches that are mouse interactive and also a video page where I have a performance of the sketch I made and also a video where I talk about it.

THRU: A 3D SUPERSHAPE SOUND REACTIVE SKETCH

This is the final sketch for “THRU” which combines the idea of Supershapes and perception of the 3D field that also reacts to sound. One new thing added to this sketch is the use of a camera to give perspective to the entire sketch. My concept was to have the viewer be able to feel immersed inside the visual space whilst listening to the music. 

The idea of 3D supershape was inspired from Reza Ali, and my colour scheme was based of the idea of an endless dimension much like the “Dark Dimension” that is found in Marvel’s Dr. Strange comics when he visits Dormammu’s lair.

The code for this sketch is found below:

2D SUPERSHAPE

The next step in the process of my final project is to create a 3D supershape that simulates moving through the first tunnel sketch that I created. However, before diving into that I shall first tackle the idea of having a 2D supershape first. This sketch focus on manipulating a circle using 2D supershape formulas that can be found on http://paulbourke.net/geometry/supershape/

THRU: Working with SOUND!!

In this mini sketch working towards the big sketch for THRU, I decided to learn how to integrate a sound source into p5js, analyse those numbers, and then proceed to create visuals based on them. It is possible to extract amplitude and frequency values from your sound source, so in this example I am using a combination of both. The audio you are hearing is an original composition made on the MakeNoise shared system specially for my final project.

THRU: GOING TO THE 3D WORLD

For the next mini sketch for my final project, I am focusing on WEBGL, which can make p5js render in 3D. In this sketch I have made an Atom based on using 2 toruses and a sphere which size is manipulated with my mouseX and Y.

My final project titled ‘THRU’ will explore the idea of visual arts in a 3 dimensional world. Here I am playing around with the idea of a never ending tunnel or the idea of walls and walkways.

PARTICLE SYSTEMS

This sketch is based around the idea of repetition which I was largely inspired by from the Form and Code website.

RECURSION

SLIT SCANNING

Another use of the camera is the idea of slit scanning, which basically tells your code to repeatedly take a snapshot of your code and place it into a canvas. We are now very familiar with this idea through the use of our mobile phones’ panorama function.

PIXEL ARRAY

This sketch is a study on pixel array, through the use of my laptop’s camera to recreate my body’s image in the form of tiny ellipses. This code was inspired from https://www.thecodingtrain.com

L - SYSTEMS / RECURSION

L systems (Lindenmayer systems) was used to describe the behaviour of plant cells and to model the growth processes of plant development. A series of algorithms and formulas were created to represent how certain trees actually follow a pattern in their growth and now is used in coding to create one. Here I have a simple L systems tree that grows and bears leaves that fall off and float away.

Another topic in Algorithm and Data is ‘Parameterize’, which is to decompose a form into variables to create an art piece. Here I am making use of different rectangles to make a strange wall formation.

GLITCH ART

Glitch art follows an algorithmic style of creation, manipulating the parameters of any image and resizing/resetting them into another position. This example of my glitch sketch shows just a some createImage generated in p5js being manipulated with mouseX and Y.

RANDOM WALK sketch

This semester we have begun learning to use code to make visuals. To begin with, we did an exercise based off inspired visuals from 3 famous visual artists: Ryoji Ikeda, Sol Lewitt and Frieder Nake. The test was to use arrays and loops to create patterns with shapes and objects to form the images. 

Here are some of my inspired recreations of these famous visual artists’ past works. I am also using Atom to run my code on a local server.

Sol Lewitt

Ryoji Ikeda

Frieder Nake