As part of an exploration of ephemerality and memory loss, I decided to code effects of data dissolution into images that were part of my portfolio as a hat designer, as a way of documenting artistic development over time.
I first worked with color, using Processing to manipulate pixels, similar to applications such as Photoshop in Instagram, but with an interactive effect using mouseX and mouseY.
I then applied p3d to explode another series of images, at first, using mouseX and mouseY to instigate the deterioration, and then making them into an animation, having them evolve on their own using a time function.
Simultaneously I began making a web page and launched a new URL www.elwyncrawford.com.
To better understand web design, WordPress and web content formatting templates, I started with a fully loaded Theme, One Child by Theme Forest, featuring parallax scrolling effects. Parallax is my preferred method of web design because of the dimensionality of depth and time that it offers the the user. I dismantled the template piece by piece to come to the current stripped down result.
Loading the processing sketches on the website was very tricky, and after hours of various attempts, I decided to install them with video, exporting from Processing through png frames to QuickTime, loading onto Vimeo and then installing into the site. Likewise, the video exporting was finicky, and I was only able to get one sketch to export properly. All other sketches were tried numerous times with the resulting message “QuickTime Movie failed. Error skipping PNG metadata” coming up after all frames were exported into a file on my desktop.
You can see the one (mostly) complete video here OH Explode1. And there is a second one that was cut short and doesn’t have sound here OH Explode3. One of the big challenges with this project was large file size. I must learn new methods for dealing with the giant files I’ve been generating (the last 7 sec video without sound is 67mb)!
The resulting final project is a series of 11 Processing sketches and a landing page that uses my photography and words to create an interactive visual poem. It is titled “Hear” and replaces the standard “About” page. The rest of the pages Smell, Touch, See and Taste, are yet to be developed, but have elementary markings. The site is currently live. The video I created from my OHExplode1 can be found on “See”.
From font to content, the site is a work in progress. After this unpacking I think that the next step is to build the site using pure CSS parallax, however, if I want to add 3d content, I’m not sure how to combine with the p5js.
While I was hoping for a more comprehensive result, I learned a lot through this process and developed a good foundation in web coding and site building from scratch, to further develop this space for my DT work on Arti{fact}shion :: identity/sense/sensuality/ephemerality.
All sketches are available on github.
https://github.com/mfadtparis/CreativityAndComputation/tree/master/Elwyn
