Pete Hindle

Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.

Tag: homework

March 9, 2009

Let a Thousand James Hugonin Paintings Bloom

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3539565&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing.

This would probably annoy the bejesus out of Hugonin. Sadly, this is not my concern, as this is another exercise set my Jamie Allan, my tutor. Obviously, if you’ve seen my last piece of work for him, you might be getting concerned that Jamie is actually running some form of art world Project Mayhem, and that all graduates of the DM course will be changing their name to Bob soon. This is probably not the case.

I am Pete’s complete lack of surprise.

If you’re going to procedurally fake something, why just fake one? Therefore I set the program to stop cranking out fakes at a thousand. The colour’s a bit off, as if Hugonin had suddenly found his Northumbrian idle surrounded by flesh tones, but it holds together. The video ends up being 8.20 long, with two “paintings” every second.

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March 8, 2009

Processing Exercise – Click, Mortal!

This is a small amusement (it’s not a game, it’s too stupid) where you click the mouse to make something happen. This stems from Jamie asking us how we could make the exercise of drawing a five-pointed pentagram ‘more evil’. Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that (in the West) the pentagram was originally a Christian symbol that represented a man standing looking at the stars, but it’s connection with Venus – the Morningstar – in Eastern philosophies later caused the symbol to change meanings.

Anyway, I’ve ‘eviled’ things up a bit. Download the correct version for your operating system (Windows users, you’ll need to have Java installed) after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

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February 9, 2009

Basic Techniques of Digital Media, Week One

I’d like to say I’m looking forward to it, but it’s an unashamed truism in my family that we look gift horses in the mouth. In fact, we’d look any form of gift animal in the mouth, because animal dentistry is expensive. They just don’t see the positive sides.

Back when I had a tv, I saw a program where Cheetah – the monkey from the 1940′s Tarzan – was in his ape retirement home. He wears pants and smokes cigars, which means it’s a significantly better retirement home than most of the one I’ve been to. Like cats and dentistry, there is no way that you can convince Cheetah to stop smoking those stoogies.

Hey, smoking’s a right.

You can, however, communicate with Koko, the gorilla fluent in sign-language. She’s even demanded that she sees the dentist before; she’s also demanded that people show her their nipples.

I’m not expecting any nipples in my Basic Techniques module, but I do expect the same sort of cross-species confusion. How are those with artistic backgrounds going to get on with the logical thinking processes expected of programmers? Badly, I suspect, from knowing some of my cohort.

Personally, I would like to completely avoid any timewasting with patcher languages. I’m going to nod wisely at your arguments and then point to the smoking chimp wearing a diaper, because there is no way on earth you’ll ever get me to use a patcher language out of choice.

Continuing on, I’d also like to say that I feel this module is going to eat my time right when I don’t have any. I think this should have been the first module in the course, and Theoretical Foundations of Digital Media should have been either special sessions or otherwise shifted. Why?

When I finish this course, people aren’t going to ask me about my views on cyberfeminism. They are going to expect me to work some kind of art-magic, which is what this module is heading towards.

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