Author: Jania Jones

I found Casey Reas’ Eyeo talk to be really interesting because it gave me a new perspective on how technology can create art. Although I would consider myself a fairly creative person, recently I’ve felt surprisingly restricted by how I can use code to make art. Reas’ work, in particular the one that represented the movement of cancer cells inspired me because it showed how interpretive art can be and also the unique ways in which we can reference aspects about life to influence what we create.

I also found it interesting how Reas distinguished between pieces he deemed complete and others he did not. He labeled a few of them as rather simple or mundane but as a viewer they seemed complete to me. Although this seems rather insignificant I believe it highlights how personal the artistic experience is to an artist. This acted as a reminder for me to work with intention because once I have a goal in mind, like Reas, I believe it will be easier for me to deliberately work on my projects with creative freedom while still having goals in mind.

All in all, I enjoyed the refreshing prospective Reas provided through displaying his own work and hope to apply it to my own methods. Seeing the wide array of examples and applications has not only given me ideas for how I might approach this week’s project but also gives me more confidence to freely explore future developments.

Concept

For my self portrait I wanted something that represented a few aspects of my personality in ways that I don’t normally think about them. I tried to think of puns/inside jokes within my life that would add to the self portrait both visually and conceptually. I also knew that I wanted to add some interactive component/movement in the portrait but was unsure as to what exactly I wanted when I got started.

Components

To walk you through some of these components lets starts with the most obvious, the color changing background and sun-emoji mouse. I am a visiting student from New York, and have spent the last 10 years in Harlem, NYC but am originally from Florida. Florida is often referred to as “the Sunshine State” and although I consider myself a New Yorker, still believe that being born there is important to who I am. I found implementing the color tracking background components and sunshine mouse to be relatively simple but spent a lot of time working on this piece because of the color theory aspect. I had a very difficult time match the colors of the background to a “Floridian sunrise” but ended up on settling with this blue (representing night) to orange (daytime) transition.

let c = color(mouseX-200, 100, 100);
  background(c);

//sun
 textSize(48);
 text("☀️", mouseX, mouseY);

An aspect I am proud of

Another component I would like to highlight is the camera/flash feature. A big hobby of mine if film photography so I thought I’d add in a little camera around my neck to capture some beautiful scenery. I added the flash mainly because I wanted something interactive but also thought of it as a joke because I am quite bad at taking photos with flash. Although this code is also quite simple, it is what I would like to highlight as what I am particularly proud of because I had quite a bit of difficulty trying to get it to work. I was having a lot of trouble distinguishing the uses between mousePressed(), mouseClicked(), and mouseIsPressed() but ended up solving the problem by finding a tutorial on the click-event feature.

//camera flash
  if (mouseIsPressed){
    //referenced vidianindhita's tutorial
    noStroke();
    fill('white');
    ellipse(380, 550, 50, 50);
  }

My final product

Reflection

All in all, I really enjoyed this assignment and was excited to work with something new. I found manipulating the shapes to make different images more difficult than I expected it to be and enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what shapes could make what facial features. In the future, I would like to fix the color issue with the sunrise because I think it is a super cool feature that just needs a bit of tinkering. I’d also like to try and figure out what other dynamic pieces I could add. For instance maybe moving clouds or a sun that rises on it’s own without the mouse. Also, I did attempt to track my pupils onto the mouse within the parameters of the whites of my eyes but didn’t make much progress so hopefully I can figure that out too.