ADAD2400 - Angus Braico

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Assignment 3 - Kazbah Projection

For this assignment, we were tasked with creating an audio visual experience in the form of a mapped projection for the Burning Man Festival’s Kazbah tower. We decided to develop a concept surrounding that of polarities in weather and climate, more specifically, fire and ice. This concept of ‘fire and ice’ reflects the many different weather phases and how they change and interrelate with one another. We wanted to visually explore various climates in our work to emphasise a passage of time through the seamless transitioning between these different weather extremes. I worked with Melba and Nina for this project and we all designated various roles throughout the creation process. While Nina and Melba were more responsible for the planning and designing phase of the process, my role was mainly implementation and coding. Having a sound knowledge of coding concepts, I was able to incorporate various animations using Processing to vividly represent our concept as effectively as possible.

One of my implementation contributions was creating the hourglass to be projected within the Kazbah. This required the use of classes to create individual sand particles and have them fall down to the bottom of the Kazbah at different velocities and positions, simulating that of a realistic sand pouring motion. I utilised the incrementing of variables to achieve this as well as with animating the pile of sand that builds up in the hourglass. My idea with this was to tie in weather (dust storms and desert climate) with the concept of time and the proverbial ‘clock’. By having an animated sand hourglass, it reflects that of Burning Man’s environment but also symbolises the passage of time and how important that time is to us. Another sketch that I developed was a circular phyllotaxis pattern that spreads outwards over time. I was drawn to the aesthetic of this through a video in which Daniel Shiffman broke it down, explaining it mathematically and through code. The phyllotaxis pattern is one that is found commonly in nature, e.g. sunflowers, and I thought implementing it into our design would fit into the natural aspect of our concept. Although it doesn’t specifically represent a weather system, it’s circular spreading nature does simulate that of a cyclone which is consistent with the concept and rhythm of our animation style. Developing this pattern required the use of trigonometric concepts which was interesting to utilise and play with, seeing how messing with the different variables changed the nature of the pattern.

Along with developing some of the animations, I was also responsible for formatting those animations to the Kazbah shape as well as compiling them together in a cohesive flowing visual, reflecting the change in seasons and weather over time. I used gradient techniques and variables to create a transition between some of the sketches. This involved setting the colour of the Kazbah (in RGB format) to three variables, and using if statements, incrementing those variables until they matched the colour of the next sketch. I incremented the variables by 0.5 to make the colour transition more gradual.

For the audio component of the work, I created reverb-laden soundscapes using my guitar, amp and pedals. I aimed to create something more melancholic sounding to reflect the contemplative tone of time passing. The ambient style of the music also brings an effective sense of texture to the experience that would otherwise be unachievable with just the visual component alone.

I believe our work follows the guidelines of good audio visual design as it takes both the concept and the implementation and combines them in a way that is both cohesive and aesthetically pleasing. Our design works both as a deconstruction of time and change as well as just simply providing a powerful audio visual spectacle. Our work takes great inspiration from many projection mapping projects shown at events such as Vivid Sydney which similarly have an overarching concept designed to be as effective an experience as possible. Our work differs in that it is being supplanted on an unusually tall and thin structure which has our sketches stand out in a media field where visuals are typically projected on television screen-like formats.

Throughout the development of our design, we encountered more than a few issues that got in the way of our progress. Because our work consists of multiple different sketches, a problem that we found was trying to combine all of our sketches into one Processing file that flowed from one to another and looped repeatedly. The complexity in trying to achieve this was too much for us to handle considering none of us are really ‘skilled’ programmers. Instead, I used a video capture library within Processing to record each sketch and combine them together in Premiere Pro. Although each sketch runs well on it’s own using Processing, the feasibility of combining them altogether in one Processing file was far beyond our expectations. Another issue we had was with developing the dust storm effect being that it was difficult for us to visually represent a realistic looking dust storm satisfactorily. We tried experimenting with flowfields to create a whirlwind effect but it ended up being too complicated and arduous for the program to run so we rejected it and instead went with the more achievable implementation of the phyllotaxis pattern. Despite much of our issues being rooted in the complications of programming, I believe we developed an overall effective work that is both conceptually strong and visually engaging.

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Assessment 1 - Final: Entropy

Entropy is a concept that is the core to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which states that:

‘In a closed system, entropy only ever stays constant or increases over time’

Entropy is a complex concept but it can be simply defined as the amount of disorder or chaos occurring within a system at any given time. It relates most closely to thermodynamic theory in which heat is transferred and spread out within systems such as heat engines and refrigerators. Entropy can also be used to describe other types of systems such as social structures pertaining to groups of people and societies as well as in software and computer programs. Although entropy is based very much in the realm of the scientific and statistical, it can also prove very useful to describe various other phenomena.

Refrigerators are an example of a closed system which uses heat transfer to cool food items. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that the heat energy within this refrigerator would spread out and create entropy. This occurs when the cold temperature of the fridge is exposed to the warmer temperature of a food item. A heat transfer occurs wherein the fridge cools down the food but at the same time the food heats up the fridge. Due to this, the fridge would need to expend more energy to stay cold from an external power source. If no external power was being supplied, the heat transfer would eventually try to create an equilibrium where both the food and the fridge would reach the same, neutral temperature. This would create disorder within the system because the fridge would fail its task at cooling food items and hence result in increased entropy. An important aspect of entropy is the ability to differentiate chemicals or groups within a system. The harder it is to tell where certain energy had come from, the greater the entropy within the system. In the case of the refrigerator, the more that the two sources of heat energy spread out to create equilibrium, the more difficult it is to tell the temperatures between the fridge and the food apart. This increase in entropy is what dictates the performance of the refrigerator in cooling down the food. Following thermodynamic theory, the entropy can never decrease because the heat energy is always spreading out, making it never easier to tell where the energy originated.

A more unconventional example of entropy is that of relating to social structures and the behaviour of human beings in groups. In large societies and governmental structures, disorder and chaos among people is either shown to increase or stay the same over time in the form of dissatisfaction with social and political rules. As humans, we are seemingly random and unpredictable systems that never act the same way repeatedly, contrasting with typical mechanical systems. In this way, societies are similar to mixing multiple liquids in a container where over time the solution becomes more complex and harder to understand. The various chemicals mixing represent the social and political rules and regulations imposed on society. The amount of variables to account for in a societal system such as this would almost always result in some form of confusion and unrest among the people. The entropy of this system can be explained through a thought experiment of an alien visiting Earth. From afar, if an alien were to see rioting, protesting and violence among people in a society, they would be confused as to how this dissatisfaction came about. If the alien were to come closer and analyse the society, they would begin to understand that in fact the unrest originated from the social and political rules that the society imposes on its people. In this way, humans act as energy where by themselves they are easier to understand but in large groups become very complex and seem to ‘spread out’ and create chaos through the form of unrest, crime and disorganisation.

To a lesser degree, entropy can occur in computer programs through modification of code. When a programmer is building software, the code will start basic and become more complex as it’s modified over time. As complexity grows, the code becomes more difficult to understand and this complexity increases the potential for bugs and errors to occur when running the program. The entropy in this case comes from the difficulty in finding where errors that arise come from. It is inevitable that this difficulty will increase when developing a computer program and hence the entropy will increase. There are measures that can be taken to lower the rate at which entropy increases by making the code easier to understand and read such as internal documentation, but it can be assumed that entropy always increases proportionally to a program’s complexity. Programmers’ Andrew Hunt and David Thomas utilised the broken windows theory to show that cleaning up small areas of program code can prevent the code from becoming disorganised and chaotic which reduces entropy. While the system in this case isn’t the software alone, it is shown that human input does increase entropy through understanding code and the bugs that arise from its growing complexity.

Despite being very rooted in thermodynamic theory, entropy is a very universal concept that can be applied to a whole range of systems. Through analysing entropy, it’s interesting to see how energy acts in similar ways to human behaviour and computer logic. By adding complexity to these systems, whether it be food to a refrigerator, groups of people to societies or modifications to computer code, the potential for entropy will either increase or stay the same. This entropy allows us to analyse exactly how chaos and disorder can arise in systems and ways in which it can be lessened or prevented.

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Assessment 1 - Brainstorm

Thinking about the concept of entropy, I drew out a mind map of systems that incorporate entropy and the various ideas surrounding it. This made it easier for me to digest how each system is different or similar when it comes to the prevalence of entropy and its effects.

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Week 2 - (Slightly) More Advanced Coding

Still working with drawing, I learnt how to create two different works using some new concepts.

Firstly, I created an interactive animation type program that moves a ball with the user’s mouse movement. I also made it so that depending on where the ball is on the canvas, it changes colour so the user controls not only its position but the colour of the ball.

The next program is a simple static image of multiple faces layed out in a pattern resembling a grey scale colour gradient. This was achieved by using functions to print out the same face but adding slight differences to the properties for each one (position, colour, etc).

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Week 1 - Basic Coding

For our first activity in class, we learned about how to draw basic shapes and colours in the program Processing.

I made a basic face composed of circles and bezier curves and coloured it in.