Animation for Projection Mapping
Luke Dash
Projection mapping is a process I had never considered using in my work before, and I also don't tend to gravitate toward animation. So it was a really nice challenge to make something out of my comfort zone in that sense. Seeing generative work I'd made occupying physical space more tangibly was quite rewarding, and I'm glad that the programming approach I chose for this project worked the way I hoped.
Since we were to work with openFrameworks(c++), which has a lot of potential for procedural and chaotic processes, I made the work about that type of sensitivity to initial condition. Instead of sequencing a series of 'hand-coded' scenes, I wanted to try and make a simple system which generates new but similar mandala-like structures dynamically. After a lot of experimentation, I ended up with a c++ object which made several new moving layers within its' designated shape every five seconds. I would have liked to spend more time tweaking the recipe book of conditions available to the algorithm. Some of the glitchier accidents that I actually liked were lost to the advancement of the work since I had opted to write one small dynamic system. So some happy accidents were lost to more organized motion patterns along the way.
I learned a lot about making my digital work both more tangible and varied during this project. Also, I feel I strengthened my understanding of object-oriented programming. I got to explore aspects of chaos and logical thinking which, in practice, overlap in ways I hadn't previously considered.