One would think that me being technically unemployed would mean that I would technically have more time to post to this blog but one would technically be mistaken. I have been even busier in the last two months than I was in the several months prior. Doing my own thing has definitely revitalized my artistic efforts. In December, I am showing work at V&A (London), Wing Luke (Seattle), and GAFFTA (San Francisco). I thought I would write a bit about each.
Victoria and Albert Museum
I was contacted a couple months ago about contributing to the Decode exhibition. I will definitely be in good company. Among the contributors are Aaron Koblin, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Golan Levin, Daniel Brown, Daniel Rozin, and many others. According to the site, Decode “will show the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations.”
They asked me if I could make a real-time audio reactive version of Solar. I created Solar two years ago. It originally came about because I was working on a demo for a talk I was to give at UCLA. It quickly became one of my more popular works. It features a magnetism and gravity sandbox where particles react to the intensity of the audio. Creating a compelling real-time version is definitely a challenge. The original Solar render probably ran at about 0.5 to 1.0 frames per second. Getting that up to between 30 and 60 fps is not going to happen easily.
Thanks to some great advice from Andrew Bell, I was able to create a robust version that still had a nice visual density but would still run at a good clip. It involved using instances of the parent sphere and child particles instead of calculating a set of particle positions for each sphere. Since I was definitely CPU bound (the magnetic repulsion calculations can get really heavy really quickly), this turned out to be a great way to still show tens of thousands of particles but only need to do repulsion calculations on a set of a few hundred.
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
Im still not 100% certain what I will be showing at GAFFTA but it will likely be a series of prints based on modifications of the Solar engine I worked on for V&A. I created a tangent project called Moment of Fission. For this project, I place a few hundred charged particles in an extremely small space and then run the simulation. The particles don’t want to be that close so they instantly start moving away from the centroid. I trigger a render shortly after the particles start their rush to expand into unoccupied space. Below are a couple images from the series. More images can be seen in my Fission flickr set.
Wing Luke Asian Museum
The Wing Luke is having a show called Cultural Transcendence. I chose to try and recreate a memory I have of my time in Japan. My father met my Japanese mother when he was stationed at Okinawa for the Air Force.I lived there for only two years, between the ages of 3 and 5. I recall little of that time. My only strong memory is of a trip my family took to Mount Fuji. I remember climbing the gentle slope at the base of the mountain. It was very foggy and the path we took meandered through dense bamboo. There was an old man selling walking sticks from a wooden shack. My father bought one. I cherish that memory fondly.
A couple years ago, I asked my mother about the time we spent there. She laughed and said we had never gone to Mount Fuji. The memory I had was totally fabricated. We were actually in a public park just outside Tokyo. Mount Fuji was visible in the distance. It was not foggy. There was no bamboo. I had apparently made the whole thing up.
In this piece, Mount Fuji always remains far away but looms over the landscape. It is always partially obstructed by bamboo and mist and other weather effects. Sometimes you can only see it because it is silhouetted by the passing full moon. It is a moody piece running in black and white.
Here is some test footage I shot off the monitor. Okay, the wind speed is cranked up too high but it should give you a decent idea of how the final piece will look.
Fuji test footage from flight404 on Vimeo.
Busy busy! I will post better documentation after the pieces are shipped and in place. Im excited for all of them. I am particularly excited for Fuji because I have been working on it for a few months. It is starting to feel right.