List of references for lecture about interactive art for AHO Interaction Design.
11:58 | April 20th, 2010 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Exercise: Computational typography
Create an interactive type experience. Experiment with animated and interactive approaches to typography, applying computational strategies for animation.Tell a story or make the user create their own story.
Work in groups. Make the result printable. The challenge is to make a static object become alive, transform and move over time. Key goal: Engage – interact – surprise.
Examples: Typographic animation, text scrollers, dynamic letters, emotional typography, automatic layouts, type as pattern, randomized fonts.
Deadline: Presentation Thursday 27.11.
Theory / blogs
Reference projects
14:16 | November 18th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Exercise: Computational weather
Create an animated weather system. It can be literal or absurd, but should include multiple elements moving as part of a greater whole. Animate simple shapes so that they give the impression of natural phenomena. Use colors to hint at emotional qualities. The weather should have an interactive element, reacting to user input.
Examples: Snow and rain. Leaves falling. Wind blowing. Dust storms. Tornadoes. Sunshine. Waves at sea.
Deadline: Presentation Monday at 10.00.
11:40 | November 12th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
This month I am teaching a foundation course in computational aesthetics at AHO together with Hans Gerhard Meier. The topic is computational typography.
Files from the workshop so far can be found here:
http://workshop.evolutionzone.com/workshops/081104_aho
All you need to do is download the ZIP file and unpack it in your Processing sketchbook directory. When restarting Processing there should be an “aho” hierarchy of examples in the Sketchbook menu.
Links & tutorials
The following is a list of some useful Processing resources.
15:07 | November 7th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
In general, I’m a fan of social software, believing that it has great potential to be useful in the overlapping spheres between the personal and the professional. Nevertheless, I’m somewhat of a late comer to the Twitter revolution. Despite early enthusiasm from smart people like Tom Carden, I initially saw it mostly as a pseudo-chat medium and a potential timewaster. I signed up, then never came back.
However, a recent conversation with Burak Arikan about Twitter and collective thinking made me revisit the Twitter network. And guess what? I like it. Sure, there’s plenty of noise in the Twittersphere. But by wisely choosing whose streams to follow, Twitter becomes much like a collective conversation, providing in-progress snapshots of thoughts and ideas from some people I have come to know and admire.
At its best, Twitter is like a Hive Mind, echoing with ideas and spontaneous viewpoints.
By using a tool like Twhirl or Twitterfox, Twitter becomes an ambient information feed that you can tune in and out of at leisure. Its immediacy means that you’ll never experience the blog reader’s guilt of having 500 unread items in your feed reader. But by following the twitters of interesting people you’ll quickly find links to useful resources and learn about their creative processes.
Twitter tools & visualizations
The following are some recent Twitter-related resources that give an idea of the bigger Twitter picture, including network visualizations and Twitter hacks a little outside the mainstream. Feel free to post comments with links to interesting Twitter tools and hacks.
My own Twitter stream can be found at http://twitter.com/mariuswatz/. I try to keep my Twitters somewhat topical, but occasional digressions will occur. After all, that’s the beauty of Twitter.
05:21 | August 25th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
This landscape of randomized cube-like structures proved popular with the students in the AHO workshop:
Code: randCube.rvb
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15:38 | February 14th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
While looking for RhinoScript resources for the Digital Architecture workshop at AHO I found a recent posting of the final projects from a RhinoScript workshop at MIT IAP. It features some very nice-looking work, including the Danzer tile forms shown above. It also provides the source code for most of the experiments, well worth checking out.
The resource page for a previous MIT workshop is still up, it has more scripts and some useful links: Computational Design Solutions Part 1.
22:40 | February 11th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I am teaching a 3-day workshop in Digital Architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO) this week, as part of a course by Søren Sørensen. The workshop will give an introduction to Processing, with a focus on synthesis of spatial form. If time permits we’ll also look briefly at Rhinoscript.
Be sure to look at the page I have prepared with links related to computational architecture. Code will be uploaded to:
http://workshop.evolutionzone.com/workshops/080211_aho.
Workshop contents
- Basic Processing syntax
- Simple animation
- Control structures: If / else, loops, keyPressed(), mousePressed()
- Transformations: translate(), scale(), rotate()
- Complex drawing: beginShape(), endShape()
- Data structures: Arrays, classes
- Polygon mesh generation
- Output: PDF, STL, DXF
Possible advanced topics
03:50 | February 11th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Rhinoscript sketch, extruding a revolution surface along random curves. Good cheesy fun.
I had a chance to see a bit more of the impressive tool Rhino 4 during the Generator.x 2.0 workshop, and so I thought I’d have a go at making a simple sketch in Rhinoscript. As it turns out, the fact that Rhinoscript is based on VBScript makes coding feel horrible at first. Seriously, who would want to use syntax like that? It might be easy for beginners to pick up, but it quickly gets painful once you’re dealing with complex API calls and 100+ lines of code.
Nevertheless, frustration soon gives way to amazement at the built-in Rhino library and its vast array of heavy-duty functions for creating and manipulating curves, meshes and NURBS surfaces. In comparison, mesh generation in Processing is enough to give anyone a headache, and I seriously doubt anyone would even attempt to implement NURBS. Even Boolean mesh operations is a staggering task, with no good Java libraries readily available.
While Rhinoscript is firmly a non-realtime tool, its power for pure geometry is amazing. I would definitely use Rhino as a creative tool for digital fabrication projects, where animation is not the goal. There are some excellent RhinoScript resources online, for starters look at RhinoScript 101 and David Rutten’s tutorial. I would also definitely recommend using the Monkey Script editor instead of the built-in editor, it’s more powerful and has a very useful documentation feature.
The script below gives a basic idea of the Rhino syntax, and while it is a basic sketch suffering from 3D clichées, it shows the power and versatility of Rhinoscript. I just wish it wasn’t Visual Basic.
Code: RandRail.rvb
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12:42 | February 5th, 2008 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
The AHO students needed a simple file uploader that would automatically transfer files from a local folder to a web server. The following application will simply watch a given folder and upload any files it contains to the FTP server. Note that it will delete the local copy upon successful upload, so be careful how you use it.
Code: FTPUploader.pde
The code for the application is given below, but downloading the following ZIP will give you the required edtFTPj library files as well as a sample config file:
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12:03 | December 7th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
