Michael McCullough
Semester 2, 2024
The rest of this course is focussed on the major project.
itâs up on the course website
Itâs worth 40% of the your final mark, we expect much more effort/polish than for the regular assignments.
In this course we have looked atâŠ
software engineering for artists.
artistic process for software engineers.
Goal: create a compelling and sophisticated interactive artwork
with high assurance of success!
iteration is building upon ideas through trial and error
this is an immensely valuable process when youâre stuck with your ideas
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. - Chuck Close
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that itâs not boring at all but very interesting.
âJohn Cage, 1961 (Silence)
whatâs the right way to make art?
letâs look at some examples from other creative fields
VFS Digital Design
CC-BY-SA-3.0
what do all these processes have in common?
Casey Reas, one of the creators of Processing (the inspiration for p5) recently wrote an article describing the aims of the project
One idea was the synthesis of graphic design with computer science, combining the visual principles of design with ways of thinking about systems from computer science. We also wanted to share a way of working with code where things are figured out during the process of writing the software. We called this sketching with code. - Casey Reas, A Modern Prometheus
the reason for Processing (and therefore p5) was to open coding to the quick sketch processes from art and design
instead of taking days to create a polished progam, these tools allow coders to rapidly try many things and versions
some examples
just like artists/designers use pencil and paper as well as photoshop, coders can still benefit from thinking through ideas on paper
your sketches can be a combination of these (animations, interactive interfaces, artworks, designs, etc.)
this is why your week 9 lab is about creating a âstoryboardâ for your major project
We are making âstoryboardsâ, but that isnât because your MP is supposed to be a âstoryâ.
Viewers of your artworks will be having an experience, your job is to design this experience.
The storyboard could be seen as âthe story of a viewer experiencing my artworkââwhat does the viewer see and do?
In computing, this process is called âuser experience designâ (UXD)
What is a hook?
How can an artwork hook a viewer? (and not a fish).
How can we map out an experience as a trajectory?
Is art evil?
Nir Eyal
Hooked
2014
James Montgomery Flagg
I Want You
1915
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Donât assume a viewer wants to interact!
Your job is to grab their attention.
(Hopefully without being too annoyingâŠ)
Nir Eyal
Hooked
2014
And how are they supposed to know what to do?
This relates to affordances: the action possibilities!
Nir Eyal
Hooked
2014
Advertising promises us that it can deliver on our needs as consumers.
According to motivation psychologists, we are all motivated by the need for one (or more) of:
source: three needs (David McClelland) + intimacy (from Dan McAdams)
Nir Eyal
Hooked
2014
Marina Abramovic
The Artist is Present
2010
3 month performance, Museum of Modern Art NY
p5
?What are your affordances? (hails)
What are the actions?
What are your rewards?
What will the user invest in your artwork?
This is a different way of framing interaction than we discussed in week 5!
Is it a more evil way? đ
Letâs talk again about iterationâŠ
and how it can be encoded within an artworkâŠ
and how iteration can be made interactive and part of the viewerâs experience!
inspired by pixelsâŠ
various
pixels images taken from google
2019
Tony Curran (b. 1984)
Attention Machines
2019-20
oil on linen
Tony Curran (b. 1984)
Hot Attention Machines
2019
Screen print on BFK Rives at Megalo Print Studio, Canberra
Tony Curran (b. 1984)
Pixels in twelve #2
2019
oil on linen
Can an interactive artwork evolve itself?
Check out: PicBreeder
Nature of Code: Evolution of Code