Author: Afra

Concept: I wanted to create an interactive art piece while challenging myself code-wise. I settled on a little game of popping balloons. I used class to make the circles. I also randomized colors from a set of specific colors in an array. The interactive part of the art is when a circle is clicked, it disappears, giving the popping effect.

Code: I’m specifically proud of this line of code because I used the not condition to check whether to continue growing based on a mouse click.

grow() {
    if (!this.clicked) { // Only grow if not clicked
      this.radius += this.growthRate;
      if (this.radius > this.maxRadius) {
        this.radius = this.maxRadius; // Capping the radius
      }

Problems: A problem I faced was having the circles overlap the text, hiding it from sight. Another one was needing to refresh the sketch to repeat the art. I wish I could have implemented a way that when all balloons are popped, it regenerates them by itself.

 

Crawford argues that big ideas are elusive and hard to capture in a sentence-long definition, and I agree. However, he then proceeds to do this and limit what can be considered interactive. He argues that books, movies, and performance art are not interactive, but I beg to differ. Consider a choose-your-own-adventure movie or book; is this not regarded as interactive? One could argue that Crawford’s book was published in the early 2000s, so he might not have heard of such media. Yet those interactive forms, specifically books, were famous in the 90s.

Another example that he fails to consider is stand-up comedy. The comic interacts with the audience, listening, thinking, and speaking, all of which Crawford states are part of an interactive piece. Add to that, many of the jokes in a set come from the ability of the comic to improvise based on the audience, further proving the point that performance art is interactive. Putting that aside, I agree with him that interactivity relies on good listening, thinking, and speaking. This could be applied to p5 by implementing real-time feedback mechanisms that respond to user input—for example, having the sketch change based on whether the mouse is pressed.

Concept: It took me a while to decide on what to create. I had so many ideas but couldn’t implement them without very complicated code that I didn’t understand. I decided to make the following art piece, using the for loop, inspired by the Olympics logo since I’ve been watching it recently.

Code: I was proud of figuring out how to randomize the colors by making it choose randomly any value between 0-255 for red, green, and blue.

stroke(random(255), random(255), random(255));

Reflection and ideas for improvements: I wish I could make the stroke choose out of a set of specific colors instead of choosing randomly because some colors aren’t that appealing. Having a certain color scheme might help make it look more pretty.

Casey Reas’s talk on chance operations made me reflect on an issue I deeply care about, AI art. As an aspiring artist, seeing how far AI has come truly worries me about the future of this field. One can argue that AI can never take over art because the human touch and emotion cannot be replicated. However, when randomness is introduced to art pieces, what is the line that divides what is human and what is AI? If an artwork primarily uses randomness, does that make it AI? What about replication? Would having more chance elements in a piece make it easier or harder for AI to replicate?

I believe that randomness has value, yet I can’t help but wonder whether the artists who have designed these chance art pieces have thought of the implications of their work. Sure, at the end of the day, the person is creating the code and setting the limits for randomness, but what happens afterward, the actual conception of the work, is out of their hand. Using that logic, one could argue that the artwork isn’t original. In my own work, I’m not against using randomness, but I will limit it to simple things like choosing color or text from a certain array. That makes an art piece more human; therefore, I believe the optimum balance is having more control than randomness.

Welcome to my first IM project!

Concept: I was surprised that I can include emojis in coding so I wanted to play around with it. I went with a simple but cute design since this is my first time coding. I used the emojis to make eyes as well as a waving hand that is tracked by the mouse. I also used my two favorite colors, blue and purple, to make a little smile.

Code: I was a bit worried on how to implement the hijab in the sketch because I did not want to use two circles. I ended up using the stroke of the ellipse to make the hijab and it turned out great!

//face and hijab
fill('rgb(218,173,130)')
stroke('rgb(112,11,11)')
strokeWeight(30)
ellipse(200,200,250,300)

 

Reflection and improvements: Overall I had fun exploring the different variables and testing things out! I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I chose to enroll in this class but I’m glad I did. Interactive media seems like the perfect blend between computer science and art, two things I’ve always wanted to try out. Coming back to the sketch, in the future, I would try making a curved line for the smile because I couldn’t figure out how to do that.