Computational Arts by Matthew Brown

I received some feedback on my earlier versions of the walking lines in the form of a trackback from Alex.

The feedback was part of a practice peer review, but he went into some detail on how i could fix up my current code so that the lines follow on from each other and how to reduce the load on the CPU per cycle with the same effect. The advice is greatly appreciated.

View the new version online here.

The changes and source code are after the jump.

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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.

Continuing on from the original walking lines I did in Processing, I went on to develop this version of it. This is done effectively the same way as the original, but the code is cleaner and it provides for more variation. It also runs slower.

This version should allow further development to make the lines even more random by separating all the variables, where the original was more limited since the numbers were largely defined within the line parameters.

This version is also technically more stochastic then the first one as well as the lines are added to and built on using the += command to add the new line position to the previous line position. Unfortunately this still draws a new line every frame that is not necessarily joined to the line from the previous frame.

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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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There were a few problems with the first responsive lines that I did. Mainly related to visibility. For the lines I decided to make their visibility based on the audio spectrum as well as the volume, so sometimes they vanish altogether when they shouldn’t.

I have mostly fixed this now, it does still occasionally happen but not too often and in general it responds to all audio better than it did before. It is more sensitive overall.

There are some changes to the rotations as well so now there is more variation in how the lines appear, including the illusion of a horizon, so there is a lot more randomness to it.

I have also gone through and added in notes to make it easier to figure out what does what later on, also so anyone looking at it can figure it out relatively easily.

The Quartz Composer file, responsive_lines_2.qtz is available here.

It requires input via the built in mic in Macbook’s or iMac’s. It can of course be changed to accept audio input from the microphone-in, or line-in on Mac Pro’s or Mac Mini’s. With the right plug-in, it can also accept input from iTunes.

The most ideal is via line-in or microphone in as this gives the most control over what exactly the graphics are being synchronised with. However, using the built-in microphone means that no extra accessories are required.

Note that this was done using  Quartz Composer in Leopard.