Computational Arts by Matthew Brown

Fractals have always particularly appealed to me. They seem chaotic and yet orderly. I actually focussed on this concept in year 12 for my major art work which was selected to be featured in 5 galleries across NSW.

If you look at my Deviant Art account at all, you’ll notice that it is absolutely full of fractal stills. I also had some big A1 and A2 fractal prints on exhibition, as well as an animation, at a recent inter-university festival between QUT and UQ. So I can easily say that fractals are definitely where my love in art is at. Since I first began experimenting with fractals, there has been one particularly big influence in my work, and that has been the work of Scott Draves aka Spot.

Spot’s work has been of interest to me basically since I began working with fractals and it continues to do so.

He has done a lot of work in fractals and started the Flam3, Electric Sheep and Dreams in High Fidelity projects, all of which are quite influential on my work, both in fractals and in other computational arts.

Not all of his work has been focused on fractals, but many of his idea’s share similarities with them. One example of this are his Dub Visuals which take chaotic still images and morph them, to form other still images in a flow similar to that of the evolution of his fractal animations.

I have previously done fractal animations where they are synced with music, both music performed by another artist and music that I have composed myself. However, this hasn’t been done in real time and has been a long process to setup each portion of the animation and sync it up with the music. Ultimately, I would love to develop a way of rendering fractals, even low quality or low resolution fractals in real-time based on audio input. Basically this would be combining the work I have done previously with the basic concepts of what I did for KKB210 where I did a series of lines and boxes that responded to audio input. The lines one was probably getting close, though ultimately no where near as detailed as I would like it to be, and definitely nowhere near as chaotic and fractal-like as I want.

That is my aim though and hopefully I will get to it sooner or later.

In the week 2 tutorial for KKB211 - Computational Arts 2, we are looking at doing walking lines in our chosen development tool.

Walking lines are effectively randomly generated paths that the lines follow to create a random image.

I have been using Processing for this particular focus. Thus far I have random lines, however they don’t follow any particular path as of yet. This is effectively still walking lines as the position of the lines is added to and built on. Unfortunately this actually draws a new line every frame that is not necessarily joined to the line from the previous frame.

Have a look at it online here.

The code used to do this is extremely simple and just involves a few random variables based on the width and height of the canvas. I don’t believe this is entirely stochastic because the randoms are tightly controlled, but it is random within its boundaries (unless you want to get into the nitty gritty of it, which I don’t).

The source code is available after the jump.

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Last semester this blog was focused on my ongoing computational arts development for my uni work as part of the KKB210 - Computational Arts 1 subject.

This semester, I am moving on to KKB211 - Computational Arts 2, so again, this blog will be used as an online portfolio of my development in the area of computational arts. The aim is to develop a series of works by the end of the semester that can be used as exhibition pieces as part of a computational arts exhibition at QUT Kelvin Grove.

It will also act as a process diary to help my keep track of my development and help me filter out the not so good works so I can focus more on the ones that are worth pursuing.

Portfolio Item 1 -

• Audio Responsive Particles.

Portfolio Item 2 -

• Audio Responsive Lines.
  

Portfolio Item 3 -

• Kaleidoscope.

Finally had time to start experimenting with things for my KKB210: Computational Arts 1 Assignment 3. For this assignment, we have to write 3 computational artworks.

My first experiment is using Java and the Processing development environment. It is based on one of the week 4 exercises we did to create moving boxes that leave a motion trail.

Using this, I have added the mouseX and mouseY inputs to position and resize the box depending on whether the left or right mouse button is clicked.

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