Today’s lesson in that things are always more difficult than they seem. Tried adding a MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVED detector to the onSceneTouchEvent() method of my TouchSprites so they could detect when a finger dragged over them and subsequently would knock them about, but had a bit of trouble. Apparently, as I’ve learned on the excellent AndEngine forum, an object needs to first catch an ACTION_DOWN event before it will start to receive subsequent ACTION_CANCELED or ACTION_MOVED events. This makes sense in hindsight, but it also make things a bit more difficult when you’ve started thinking about it from the other way, as if these events were just globally propagated down the chain of objects that are subscribed to receive them, until one steps up and handles it.
The solution is to create another physics object that’s hidden, and move it about to knock the other objects around when necessary. Also, I had to update it in a different thread, and I still get some crashes occasionally due to memory errors. Need to look at those…
So it looks like “kicking” an object (a cat, in this case) is going to be all I can get done today, because tonight is the opening at The Brick Box in Brixton Market and I’ll be showing Drawn Together there amongst some other visual and artistic goodness.
I did add simple scoring to this version – this should be handled by a GameLogic class, which I’ll work on a bit tomorrow if I get a chance (have some other stuff to do).
Today I’m going to create more of a “game,” eventually called CatFishTron. No, really. I’ll be learning how to add sound to a game, a moving background, and maybe, if I have time, add some self-removing sprites (for explosions, etc!)
First task – to make a sprite “blow-up” in AndEngine you use a SequenceModifier and attach it to the Sprite:
this.mBlowupModifier = new SequenceModifier(new ScaleModifier(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.2f));
final IShapeModifierListener listener = new IShapeModifierListener()
{
public void onModifierFinished(IShapeModifier arg0, IShape arg1)
{
// this is a function in my main Activity that removes a sprite entity and physics body in a separate thread
destroySprite(_spriteEvent.mSprite);
}
};
//set a listener to listen for the modification having finished
this.mBlowupModifier.setShapeModifierListener(listener);
// attach it to the sprite entity object
_spriteEvent.mSprite.addShapeModifier(mBlowupModifier.clone());
Here’s today’s code (again, it’s not complete, just building on the previous day, but you might find it interesting…)
Here’s the app itself, you can open the link on your android phone to install it.
It’s a work in progress, remember. It take a bit to make a video game… even a crappy one!
Also, I promise that at the end of this I will write a tutorial.
Drawn Together allows groups of individuals to create a music video by asking each of them to visually interpret small sections of music, and combining their work.
This particular video came from the collaborative results of about 80 people drawing 211 individual drawings (frames of animation) that each interpreted a frame of audio (at 12 frames per second, that comes to 66 milliseconds).
The experience begins with a piece of music broken into short sections, be that a slice of a drum break or a sliver of a synth warble. Individuals are given a black screen, a digital drawing tool and a looping, random section of the music. They are encouraged to draw their own visual interpretation of that sound. Once satisfied with their handiwork, the drawing is saved, linked to the sound it represents and becomes a small section of the music video. When all the sound clips have a visual representation linked to them, the video is shown.
Like the early 20th Century animator Oscar Fischinger, participants are encouraged to draw in black-and-white line drawings, giving them a free range of expression within strict stylistic constraints.
Drawn Together builds on ideas of collective consciousness and puts a modern spin on the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse – where artists would draw body parts and conceal them under folds of paper, before passing it to the next person to add to the mystery figure.
Like in Exquisite Corpse, participants in Drawn Together do not get to see the video until it is entirely complete. Cards are handed out with details of how they can see it online, or in a private viewing.
A Bit More:
At the same time, Drawn Together is a completely Open Source production (developed in Processing, graphics created in Inkscape) and the source code will be available after The Big Chill on this website.
Additionally, Drawn Together explores the idea of factory production in art by dividing up an artistic task (e.g. creating a music video) between a collection of anonymous, interchangeable strangers. The result is uncertain – is it stronger or more interesting than a conceptually coherent work by a single author? Is it more interesting because of its complexity? Or is the result something different, entirely? Answering these questions requires us to use the software and judge the results.
The medium of production, e.g. the Open source software, constrains the artistic possibilities of the images (black and white, with limited ability to create complex shapes). Yet, the Open source license of the software allows anyone to create a derivative version with more visual possibilities built in. The trade-off to this approach is that the more specialization and complexity are built into the visual tools for the software, the more the participants are constrained to the software’s authors’ version of visual possibility, resulting in a production model more like a traditional factory where the creative power is in the hands of those who design the system, not those who carry it out.
Contact:
If you’d like more information on Drawn Together, or to show it or other pixelpusher projects, or to schedule an interview with the artist Evan Raskob, please contact pixelpusher at info@pixelist.info.
(Exhibition catalog for WAVING / DROWING by pixelpusher)
An interactive exhibition by the multimedia artist, pixelpusher – http://pixelist.info/
I am very pleased to announce my first solo exhibition, WAVING/DROWNING, brought to you by Artsite in Swindon, UK.
This series of works in sculpture, interactive projection, archival digital prints explores the shape of the hand in a series of modern mystical symbols. Their meaning is uncertain, removed from their traditional context: are they waving at us, or flailing in a sea of lost meaning?
The exhibition will run from 24 May to 29 May, 2010 from 11 AM until 4 PM.
There will be an artists talk on Wednesday 26th May from 5PM until 7PM.
There will be a closing reception / private view on Saturday, May 29 from 4PM until 7PM
All these events will be at The Post Modern, Theatre Square, Swindon, SN1 1QN.
From 24 May to 29 May, 2010. Reception on Saturday, May 29.
A very limited number of signed, high-quality exhibition catalogs will be available for purchase at the gallery and artist’s talk, with a limited number of smaller versions given away free to visitors, while they last.
Please email info@pixelist.info if you are interested in purchasing prints of the works, or the works themselves.
For an upcoming exhibition (my first solo exhibition) I’ve been working on a series of 5-7 new works, from interactive software to prints to sculpture. These tests are from a live capture of my hand opening and closing in front of a camera attached to the computer, using custom written software (a bit of OpenFrameworks and lots of standard C++) that exports each individual motion into a vector-graphics file (SVG) that I can edit and send to a laser-cutter (in our excellent arts workshops at UCA Farnham) to create a sculpture that solidifies the motion into a physical object.
This test is about 80% size, and about 25% of the total slices (the rest I will add this week). Its using 6mm plywood from the local building shop, and will be 78 unique slices in total when finished, connected together at the bottom via a metal cable.
An interactive exhibition by pixelpusher – pixelist.info/
This series of works re-imagines the artist’s hand in a number of different mediums as a series of modern mystical symbols. Their meaning is uncertain, removed from their traditional context: are they waving at us, or flailing in a sea of lost meaning?
A visualization of each individual word used in twitter status updates overnight from 6PM GMT on Feb 22 2010 until 10AM GMT on Feb 23. Movement is caused by the list of words growing, as the program sees more individual words. Words used more often are larger and brighter (they grow logarithmically). There were a few points where the feed was lost, and it recounted the same status update over and over (you can tell where because the same words grow larger) but I decided to post this version anyway, because I still think it is interesting in this state. I have collected more data, such as word ordering, and will work on another version. done in Processing – source code is here (you need to add your twitter username and password)
The video above is a bit fuzzy – here’s a better image:
A visualization of words used in twitter posts over a single night
I’m working on a music video for a song by PJE called The Employee and doing some tests. The idea is to create the surrealistic daydream of a 1950′s woman on her first day on the assembly line of a dreary, machine-like typist job. I’m doing all the visuals rendered in fluxus, cut with some excellent archival footage of office films from archive.org. This one, a 1950′s film called “Office Etiquette” is singular for having some really nice, sweeping, tracking chots mixed with good close-ups, which work well in a music video. The original has such a cheery attitude about mind-numbing, repetitive busywork that is practically crawling on its knees and begging to be subverted.
I will first cut the video as a straight music video, with close/wide/tracking shots and clean cuts to the beat, then add in the surrealistic, colorful 3D animations done using fluxus and bit by bit break down its sanity. Look here for more…
Recorded from a live performance. My first audio-visual (not just visual) work in about 5 years. Created for NOISE==NOISE and The Curiosity Collective’s JohnnyMass on 28 Dec. 2009. Uses Fluxus & SuperCollider.
I’ve been experimenting with extruded shapes, with the end goal of fabricating some interesting ones using a 3D printer at the University I teach at, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (UK).
So far, it has been a long learning process – first, making extrusions of my hands using Fluxus and a custom-written OpenCV-based image-outline-tracer in C++ (using some OpenFrameworks); then, using Dave’s extrusion functions in fluxus mixed with my live-drawing sketches, coupled with the OBJ-file export, and finally imported into Blender (for some nice ray-tracing).
The trouble is, I can create 3D shapes but hey have no “solidity,” which means their outlines have no thickness. Apparently you can’t 3D print objects and just hope that they are thick enough, or tweak it on the machine, as I’d hoped. No, as with all computers and electronic devices, they only do EXACTLY what you tell them to do, and nothing more or less.
The image here is a reject from Fluxus/Blender, where I created an inner shape by duplicating the original shape and growing it outward along its normals (used for lighting, normals are perpendicular to the surface of the object, meaning they point exactly outwards and are useful for expanding shapes). The problem is that my shape is so complex, I can’t get away with simply growing it. I’m going to need to do some horrible maths, I can feel it…
Still, I really like this image. I’m a big fan of Salvador Dali (don’t laugh) and the infinite blue background and contrasting, surreally-melted hand shape in front lends this image a particularly Dali-esque quality, I think.
pixelpusher is…
Evan Raskob (USA & UK) is a University Lecturer, creative and technical consultant, and practicing artist whose works span the mediums of moving image, sound, installation, performance, and interactive art.
