Advanced Beauty: Enerugii, part II
| Advanced Beauty is an ongoing collaborative activity initiated and curated by my friend Matt Pyke of Universal Everything and his brother Simon, sound artist extra-ordinaire, active under the monikers Freefarm/Freeform. Started in late 2006, for the first project both have gathered a group of 18 participants to create a collection of sound sculptures, audio-reactive visual pieces further exploring the related themes of synesthesia, mixing the senses to create interference and so improve the quality of perception, the re-mapping and visual re-interpreting audio - all under the overarching direction of “minimalism” (purism) and the application of new & uncommon processes to realize the pieces. | Earlier this year in May, over 1.5 years after inception, all 18 pieces were completed & premièred at Lovebytes 2008 in Sheffield and are now waiting for their release as Blu-ray DVD in their original, pristine HD1080 resolution and 5.1 surround sound later this autumn. Before that though, all pieces will be made available individually as podcast (or via iTunes) and on vimeo every Monday until November, 3rd. This will be followed by a public art commission at the London's Victoria & Albert Museum later that month and various planned showcases around the world throughout the next year. Today (2008-07-21) my contribution to the project went live… |
Unstable energy
The piece was actually started even longer ago than Advanced Beauty and came together from 2 separate ideas I had for some mini-tools described below.
| The first image is a sketch for an audio (pre-)processing tool. User can add marker shapes in the spectrum which when activated will trigger certain (to be defined) events in the host application. Markers can be placed directly on the spectrum or on its derivative (changes between frames) in order to only react to certain dynamics… | Another sketch trying to figure out how to skin/create a mesh from a point cloud in 3D whilst retaining more detail than just using the standard Convex Hull technique. Status: unresolved / given up on this initial route, but a few interesting abstract images were created on the way… |
Volumetric modelling with Marching cubes
| After not achieving the nice results I'd wished for as quickly as I'd wished for, I switched from point clouds to volumetric data & turned to one of my old favourite 3d algorithms for help: Marching cubes. Working with 3D volumes is a much different approach to modelling than working with meshes, since the polygon mesh is only the output of the Marching cubes algorithm and can only be really controlled & shaped by manipulating the underlying volumetric data. | This volumetric data consists of a more or less dense 3D grid of density values in a cubic space. The MC algorithm can then be used to find a (number of) surface(s) in this space for a certain threshold value. After completion, all grid cells with a higher density will be closed inside the surface and all less dense cell remain in empty space. More recently, I've re-used the same algorithm to create the 3D model for the cover design of the August 2008 issue of Print magazine. |
Marching cubes explained at Wikipedia
The idea starts to unfold...
| Using 3D Simplex noise as driver for creating the volumetric data, I've started supplementing the basic visual output with further the post-processing & scattering of mesh vertices controlled by an audio input. | The new idea for the piece was now to create a structure which would be in a constant flux between two behaviours forming either crystalline forms or disperse into a number of polygons flocks… |
First steps with exporting the meshes for rendering in Sunflow. Starting to add colour highlights.
Back in Processing, further post-processing of colours:
The whole scene is first rendered with an inverted light setup in OpenGL,
then background pixels are replaced with the sky gradient and
mesh colours inverted and super-saturated.
Enerugii wa antee shite inai, part I
| Marius Watz, the driving force behind the successful Generator.x blog, conference and workshops co-curated and invited the piece (alongside others by C.E.B. Reas, Ben Fry, Lia, Marius himself…), to the FURTHER PROCESSING exhibition taking place at Medienturm in Graz, Austria from September-November 2006. | Below are some images of the piece at this stage and some more in these flickr sets, plus some more documentation on the Generator.x blog. |
Enerugii, part II
| Encouraged by the positive feedback from this first attempt, but equally feeling it's still incomplete & unfinished, I decided to use the work done so far as starting point for my Advanced Beauty contribution. However, this time I was working together with Simon on agreeing a general direction for the audio and new visuals. | Having a fixed length audio track to work with also gave rise to a little story telling aspect (however abstract it ended up in the final piece ;), and so I decided to only render fragments in Processing and edit the overall flow afterwards. Doing justice to the full HD resolution also meant using a higher resolution for the Marching Cube algorithm and so quite increased render times. |
Antonioni's absolutely stunning climatic ending of Zabriskie Point
...was probably one of my main inspirations for this piece and deserves special mention here
An abstract interpretation of the above
Spontaneously crystallizing forms
4D Simplex Noise & displacement map
It's raining noise
Fade it out slowly...
Playing nicely with the Exquisite corpse format & art direction of the DVD: all pieces are supposed to be living in a white void whilst ensuring shuffle mode playback works aesthetically.
Last but not least...
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