Electronic Media Studio: Introduction to Interactivity and Computation
60-210 • Spring 2021 • Prof. Golan Levin
I think pix2pix is fun but somewhat not serious. If the program was more heavy-duty and equipped with better brushes/bigger canvas it would be much more interesting, but I also recognize that browsers can’t handle huge programs with huge resolutions, so the simple and more or less instantaneous pix2pix works
My game is loosely based around a dream I had where I wandered onto the streets of pairs at night not being able to read or speak french. I wander into a cafe where a man sits who is me, aged up around 25 years and dressed very nicely. They claim to only have remembered existing once I walked in the cafe, and give me cryptic “advice” before telling me that I should probably get a move on and wake up. I wind up opening a trap door that leads me on for miles where I find a monster taking up the entirety of the cave made of white noise. The monster claims to have been the one that brought me to this world, and that I probably didn’t understand whatever type of message that they were trying to teach me. I wake up from there.
I found bitsy very easy to work within the default tools. I was able to construct the rooms and characters pretty easily and intuitively. I struggled however with the added functionality I wanted to add. I had this original idea for branching dialogue pathways, but after asking the bitsy discord I was told that I needed to do several steps that required I know a little bit of javascript in order to execute. I opted for a uni-track story that gave the same vague dialogue that I wanted with the original multi-track story. I did end up getting the transparent sprites to hack to work though, which for some tiles helps with the visual look of the game rather than the character just taking up the entire block. In the itch.io page I also added some royalty-free music that i ended up making very quiet and subtle so as not to distract from the game.
I looked at a few of the bitsy on the links given and landed on two that of my favorites but for two completely separate reasons that are just two of the genres of bitsy games that i’ve found.
The first is Continental Drift
Continental Drift is wonderfully straight forward and unidirectional storytelling that while having very limited user interaction uses the space of the screen for atmosphere and pacing rather than interactivity. The flow of the game works more like poetry with spaces of silence and looking for the next orange tile to progress the repetitive, hollow narration. I find this prose type of poetry or narration to help with the similar yet different visuals. This is my favorite example of the more cinematic bitsy experiences
The other one is Burger City
A fun story about the protagonist being forced to eat burgers and later imprisoned for not paying the bill. This game is easy to understand and while it has a very low contrast color scheme that can make items hard to differentiate it’s very funny but simple. I think this at least partially exemplifies the more game-ey interactive side that bitsy offers.
I found the actual experience of minting and uploading my NFTs to be rather simple. There was an unexpected feeling of accomplishment that I felt when Golan purchased my NFT for 1 tez and over the course of a few minutes seeing my wallet fill up. I was and still am conflicted with Etherium and Bitcoin based platforms because of the lack of empathy/foresight that the artists on those sites express. I would at the very minimum expect the argument of “Well my message is so important and so innovative and forward thinking that I can ignore it’s ill effect.” but that argument can’t really made because a large amount of NFT artists on proof of work platforms that I got to take a look at were just referencing NFTs or bitcoin and even Elon Musk. I have a hard time labelling all NFTs as evil or malicious, especially when ecologically the concerns of NFTs are largely mitigated at sites like hic et nunc. The issue is people who just one of apathy and hype. The hype around proof of work based platforms is self supporting and is drawing in artists daily. Artists who don’t really mind the ecological effects because they can’t see it, hence they don’t have to worry about it.
The NFT phenomenon is as fast moving as it is possibly destructive. We can’t talk about NFT’s without realizing it’s stem from the old fine art world. An art world filled with statements like “oh I could do that” with the only thing stopping people being the fact that they could never get a gallery to sponsor their work. NFTs eliminate the monolithic ideal that art world presence makes art valuable. If a random person’s work was placed in a museum with a completely unfounded artist statement hangs by the piece will be seen and critiqued and sold, subsequently giving the artist success. NFTs eliminate the middle man and is where my middle class concern comes in. Yes, there will be droves of people who will begin to make money for whom this will be the first taste of them making any sort of money from their art. Many artists stand to gain from this. However in the depths of the internet millions will be buried. Not every NFT will be bought, and many artists will use their last 100,200,300 dollars on gas fees. Small artists will blow up and be used as a tool for people with millions to spare to have protected assets. We are also seeing the apathy expressed in the NFT community regarding the environmental concerns surrounding more unsustainable currencies like Etherium and Bitcoin. For pretty much everyone, money now is better than money later. Not enough people are waiting for Proof of Stake to become fully viable and just as the purpose of crypto began, get in while NFTs are still “small”. This all doesn’t even approach the possibility of the NFT bubble bursting.
I took images that span the spectrum of NFTs. Starting with the piece that I dislike the most is the Elon Musk collectible. There is nothing inherently wrong with collections or archives of cards or books or whatever the collection may be of, but the image is of no interest to tell a story or connect with somebody on a level deeper than a novelty. It is a funny moment in internet history and the piece clearly seems to be just a way to share that reference in a baseball card type of way. The artist does not say anything about Elon or referencing the platform it exists on. I find this weirdly placed against the other 3 images because while the other 3 can exist on somebody’s social media or even an online gallery showing; Elon only makes sense as an NFT baseball card. A gallery of celebrity baseball cards doesn’t provide philosophical or even technical interest beyond the fact that it can only exist as an NFT. The others I have less of an issue with because they use the NFT system as a way to try and make work that they have already sunken practice, time, and overhead into. It is also not lost on me that the majority of the work shown both here and the etherium based platforms are entering the Instagram trend of digital art where there’s a million of the same slick, shiny, highly rendered psychedelic images. While on the other end of the spectrum there are pieces that require no skill at all like a woman eating various fruits in front of a camera. While there are many artists trying to experiment with the in-between etherium based platforms are not interested in placing them front and center.
What I saw on these sites was concerning. Yes, I was able to find meaningful, skillful work that speaks to me such as Night Shift and Still_Life_02. What concerns me is the jarring amount of art that rides the wave of being controversial or trendy and existing only with the new platform because it’s new and flashy and shiny rather than artists who weren’t making money before suddenly given a new opportunity. The big fish are garnering a lot of attention very quickly and many people will enter NFTs and never make their gas fees back. All of this, not even mentioning the ecological side effects is scary.
In this project I wanted to experiment with interactions based on camera input. I used the set up and code from handsfree.js for the tracking of the hardpoints and used vectors to add gravity to the spiders as well as to add bounce/springiness to the springs connecting to the spiders. This project taught me a lot of new tools though. I used an array to remember the updated position of the spiders, as well as a classes so when I wanted to create a new spider all I had to do was ask for one to be drawn at a designated anchor point in one line of code. I ran into many many walls with the details of this, specifically with understanding how classes worked and the idea of calling the spider an “object”. Right now the spiders can only connect to one hand at a time, and I transfer “ownership” of spiders between hands by shaking one hand so that the tracking points disappear and the spiders automatically link themselves to the most recently drawn set of hand points.
This is a loop that uses rotations using millis and the animLoop library to increment the rotation. The modulo tool was also used to arrange the units in a checkerboard pattern offset in timing by rotation. There are also circles to squares in the midway points of the canvas. There is a slight visual glitch where the trails made by the rotating objects doesn’t exist when the rotation begins.
https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/6/216395/5219599/1-cindysuen_2.gif
This image is a great example of dynamic motion and morphing. The image is chaotic and has so much going on that its looping nature is hard to notice.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B7RKDllnJXU/
I am most interested in this piece because of its visual simplicity when compared to the rest of his body of work. Yet the change being made is super noticeable.
https://andreaswannerstedt.se/oddly-satisfying-vol4
I like this mainly for the materiality and what it shares with reality while being so distant from reality.
The 3 Truths- Maxwell Step
Still_Life_02-primerrender
Night Shift- Mason London
Elon Musk Collectible-ny
