#bearpad

Patrick and I made COZYSPACE.

It’s my first year of grad school and I was confused about what I was supposed to be working on, how I was supposed to be working on it...

The digital arts and new media mfa that I’m in is like an understaffed makerspace inside a university.

I had an idea for a much edgier, weirder thing to make for school. I realized after working through it and talking about it that I was making it for the program, for the university, for other people. Undergrad basically ruined me psychologically and what I really needed was to chill out. I came up with an art project about me chilling out: a 4 channel ambient music with 3D shapes bouncing around, and a Super Nintendo controller that can affect them. I started building it in Unity as a proof of concept.

There’s a church in Santa Cruz at the center of a series of roads in concentric circles.

In the center of those circles is a church, and that church is getting torn down (to make space for housing). The owner of the church gave access to the building to a local arts collective until it gets destroyed. That collective, Liminal Space, put a call out to artists for art, installations, and murals, for a one-night party called Northern Lights that doubles as a send-off for the church. Patrick and I heard about it and decided to bring COZYSPACE to life there, first.

I was planning on building a final version in Unreal 5, but learning the software was too much of a learning curve for me in the time constraints, so I continued to build it in Unity.

My first build I used a package of ‘low poly clouds’ as the shapes. Here’s a video of the first build of COZYSPACE.

The shapes weren’t cozy though. I actually really liked the flat surfaces and hard edges, but it didn’t fit the theme. I asked Patrick to design the shapes, so he built them in VR using a sculpting program.

I changed the motion slightly and mapped the controls to a Super Nintendo controller. After adding controls and a ridiculous amount of bloom in the high definition render pipeline, it looked like this.

It was projected onto the ceiling with 2 projectors playing the same visuals, slightly overlapping. The vignette removed the hard edge of the projectors, giving the installation a more organic feeling. The person interacting is able to change the speed of the objects and the rate of rotation. They are also able to add and remove objects, both large and small. When removing large objects there is a particle effect that appears as either slow motion fireworks or a weird fuzzy phasing jittery thing, which just happens when you change some settings in the trails. The lights are also changeable. There are 3 lights at different points in the scene. While holding a button they all rotate around the center of the scene. Another button shifts the hues of all 3 lights.

My desire was to give the user control over both elements of sound and game at the same time, but it turns out getting quadrophonic sound to work in Unity is a nightmare on Windows. Unity defaults to the Windows audio driver, which didn’t work great with the Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 audio interface that I was using. In other software I was able to process the audio through ASIO, and that worked great with the audio interface. There were plugins to get Unity working with ASIO, but they were old and kind of confusing and expensive.

I ended up running the audio through Ableton Live for the first installation, mixing the tracks down to wav files to make it easier on my processor. They were about a 2 minute loop, but they were simple and background-y enough that they didn’t get old being in the space. Here’s a link to the ones that I used for the first installation. A nearby installation had ambient music that was ‘all black keys’ so I retuned my ambient stuff to g flat major. I actually have a much better more seamless method for looping, but I didn’t implement it this time because I ran out of time and kinda forgot about it. This means that the beginning of each loop gave a little bit of unintended punctuation.

Patrick built projector stands so that they would shoot out at angles that worked best with the space and projectors.

We worked together on painting the space, using Patrick’s designs from BEARPAD. He freehanded a couple of bubs on the walls and I added some blobby colors around them. 

We also projected the classic HANG 10 design onto one end of the room, painting the lines where they fell to give it an optical illusion that only looked right from one spot. Otherwise the lines were skewed.

We bought some rugs from my favorite thrift store, Grey Bears, and cut out fun blobby shapes. The remnants of the rugs were nailed down to the edges of the room. We took one of the doors outside and Patrick spray painted on them, experimenting with freehand lines with spray paint for the first time. There was a couch and a chair in one room downstairs that we hauled up to the room. We also sourced a couple of oversized bean bags from a friend up in San Francisco. They’re honestly enormous and almost didn’t fit in my car.

The event went really well! Here’s some pictures and a video compilation.

project:

BEARPAD (art)

artist:

[unknown]

subject:

1) [unknown]

2) [unknown]

3) [unknown]

4) [unknown]