A workshop about boxes.
In this workshop for the first and third year et Ecal I asked the students to build a (virtual, metaphorical or physical) box. A secret way to open the box had to be implemented. The subject was inspired by “trick boxes” (few examples here and here). It’s always a good exercise in communication design to build a trap or a trick as it involves the complete understanding of effectively communicating real and fake intentions.
Live visual for “Il Domani” — The Tomorrow.
People had access to a Monome and could draw their own shapes.
Written in an 8h rush, this version is still lacking the foreseen beat detection and a decent color management.
The last two columns of the Monome have been sacrificed for the interface: by pressing the buttons in the last column it was possible to choose the actual form, save the whole shape or eventually discard it. The second-last column was just turned off to designate a separation from the “draw area” and the “tools area”.
Thanks to @cyphunk for lending me his precious.
An (attempt of an) interactive particle system based music video.
Peter Kernel asked me to build an interactive video for their upcoming album.
I was really tempted to write the program in JavaScript (Canvas or WebGL) but I didn’t feel agile enough to deliver in a very short time so I decided to build it up with Processing and to depoly it via the crippled Java plugin (a decision which I now regret, for the plugin part—not Processing!).
And yes: sound and Java always sucked.
But I didn’t think so badly.
I had so many problems by embedding the fullscreen applet on different browsers and platforms without dramatic frame-rate drops and sound hick-ups that at the end I decided to abandon the project without any time left for a new one. We (the band and I) also felt that the whole project didn’t really take off, so any extra effort to make it run seemed useless. Sorry guys.
Anyway: it was fun to rewrite the particle engine I was working on and to test different behaviors and colorings. I tried to overcome the “organic” feel of force driven systems with grid snapping and other “smart” distribution rules.
It was interesting to sync the animation to the sound. I also tried to sync videos with a constant framerate to the main system: it worked quite well but later I abandoned the whole idea of working with video feeds.
The main idea was to visualize the word-lists in the song but I didn’t want to introduce a font directly into the scene so it was kind of obvious to form words with the particles… as in any dot-matrix display.
Oh and the particles: simple (bitmap-cached) circles. I tried different shapes and always came back to a plain circle. But in a moment I tested with donut kind of shapes and the result was simple but interesting:
The only part where I had time to implement the sum of those shapes was in the beginning sequence.
The choreography is unfinished (especially at the end), the color-scheme is inaccurate, the mouse interaction is kind of dull, and there is (or was) still work to do but you can enjoy my failure by watching the captured frames on Vimeo if you feel brave enough:
A simple, easy to implement and very fast particle system.
Old school effects built on the two days workshop at Processing Paris 2011 with Hartmut Bohnacker.
Click images for Vimeo video.
A five days workshop at doc:LAB in Istanbul.
“In how many ways and with what techniques can one produce variations on the human faces seen from the front? The graphic designer works without set limits and without rejecting any possible combinations and methods in order to arrive at the precise image he needs for the job in hand, and no other.
Looking at the technique of the past we notice that a human face made in mosaic has a different structure from one painted on the wall, drawn in chiaroscuro, carved in stone, and so on.
The features—eyes, nose and mouth—are ‘structured’ differently. In the same way if one is thinking of making a face out of glass, wire, folded paper, woven straw, inflatable rubber, strips of woods, plastic, fiberglass, or wire netting.
The relationship between the features will have to be adapted to each material.”
in Bruno Munari, Arte come mestiere, 1966
(english version, Design as Art, Penguin Books)
For the first three days we (Alain Bellet from ECAL and me) used processing to build some very basic (almost trivial) tools to cover a set of six topics we identified around the human face:
In the last two days students were then asked to explore one of the subjects and to develop a personal project around it.
For more images and an overview of the five workshops held visit doc:LAB’s blog.
I was asked to create two prototypes to graphically display the search results of the powerful EBSCOhost online research databases.
“Blocks” prototype:
“Columns” prototype:
Proof of concept for a series of 360° stopmotion animations for an interactive exhibition-installation.
Several very little archeological objetcs and jewels where physically showcased at the exhibition. A huge projection on a wall acted as a magnifying glass: users could select an object and observe it at different angles. The final objects where still photographed on the same turntable but with better lights and camera.
Below some toy prototypes with 75 frames each, realized in 2006 for theredbox
protog1
protog2
protog3
protog4
protog5
protog6
protog7
For my first workshop at the Media & Interaction design unit at ECAL in Lausanne I proposed a simple task to my new students: design a clock.
One of the many stereotypes of Switzerland is the “swiss punctuality” which somehow relates to the history of the swiss watch industry. The broader subject about time and time keeping permits an investigation and an approach in technological, historical, social, conceptual and philosophical domain.
I also came across of some of Yugo Nakamuras beautiful “Clock experiments” (Clockblock and Industrious Clock) and thought that the kinetic nature of the object but also it’s implicit simplicity made it a perfect subject to explore with the students.
Some interesting projects from the web:
standard time
a study of time
time twister (LEGO)
This Time Around
world-clock
dropclock
crashclock
uniqlock
a dot for every second
swatch beat 2
email clock
albin karlsson
kinetic clock
polar clock
flickr time
sonicode clock
verbal conversation clock
pong watch
colhour
clocky
qlocktwo
the clock clock by humans since 1982
qr code clock
hms
ink calendar
south watergate clock