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oF Letting Go

Oh yes, a pun. I am not sorry.

As yesterday’s quick tip may have tipped off, the last two days have been all about openFrameworks (with a brief detour into spacebrew).

Homework #1 was to dig into oF and create a sweet sixties-esque animation in the style of James Whitney. It started off super-frustrating; I had no idea what I wanted to make and imagining in this generative space is still really new for me (even though I like the idea of being able to make some neat stuff). Worried I was going to have nothing, I started with a basic example that used sin waves of different magnitudes and elapsed time to modulate the position of a rect. Some colors and numbers-jiggery later I had some rainbow rain.

Rainbow Rain

This was … less than exciting, though you can get a trippy cylinder effect. And I was pretty disconsolate, even after the kind of after-hours pep talk SFPC excels at. (“You feel lost and confused? I feel lost and confused! We must be doing it right!”)

So this morning I woke up somewhat disconsolate at the project and spent my shower thinking about something my bff had said: “Sometimes it is useful information to know what you are not good at. You can decide to leave it and come back later.” So I decided to do just that: tweak a little more and then leave it as ‘a thing to improve on later,’ and then, in letting go, of course you know what happened: I had way more fun. I may need to get this tattooed on my eyeballs, I swear.

gif 2

gif 3

Also see my two little rainbow seizure machines, now in video form: seizure one seizure two.

Thus broken in on the oF messing around (and the fun of xCode crashes), I moved on to project #2, adding feelings to a little mouse-following rectangle mouse. He began just following the mouse, using Xeno-inspired math to catch up with it over time. We also learned to rotate the matrix so that the shape rotates around itself instead of off the screen. So far I’ve made the rectangle buddy a little scared of the mouse, and just a little scared in general.

mouse

I’m really digging this project even more that the pure generation stuff we’ve, which dovetails a bit with things I’ve been excited by since Sara Hendren came to visit, mostly around the idea of objects and their feelings, paralleling as it does the way Proust speaks of spirits trapped in familiar things. Not totally certain where that will end up, but really excited to keep on it.

Finally in summer camp watch news: the first care package has arrived at the studio. If this is anything like real camp, the tears as we say goodbye will be epic.