480 Blog

While looking at Charles Gaines' artwork, one stood out to me the most: an untitled colorful piece made from 1969-1972 with acrylic paint on a canvas. It hasn't been seen since 1972, and Gaines would make a squiggly pattern with one circular band at a time to form a circular pattern. I think it's great how minimalist the geometric painting is, and there's plenty of different ways this could be approached in TouchDesigner.  With the theme of a colorful and spirally pattern, making it non-static could involve adding noise into each spiral in the project, or possibly a looping video to generate the textures within them. Interaction-wise, I'd love to make use of the webcam in order to somehow influence how the circles rotate/scale. Using the mouse to zoom "into" each circle to see details, possibly mimicking space as if each one were its own planet, could be interesting too. The simplicity of colorful, textured circles makes it possible to do essentially anyth...

   For this project, I took inspiration from an audio visualizer project in another class and decided to make another song-based creation. I decided on a list of songs for the data - alongside information such as their moods (valence), energy, danceability, and genre - which gave me lots of flexibility in terms of how to visualize it. I knew I wanted to have a control to select songs and decided on a separate control to select the genre as well.    When it came to the experience, I wanted almost a graph of different quadrants for different songs to move to based on selection - happy songs to the right, sad to the left, those with high "danceability" on top, and those more serious/calm on the bottom. I also wanted more ways to represent vibe/movement - the songs scaling based on energy (intense as large vs. peaceful as small), the background changing based on valence (happy as yellow, sad as blue), and noise/movement on the song/shape also demonstrating how "danceable...