bounce
bounce is a playful exploration of how a critter might journey through connected electronics. It follows the journey of a creature just trying to find its way home, searching through various television sets to find it. At points its journey becomes a bit surreal--and ultimately, it's up to you to interpret whether our hero was successful in its journey.
produced by: Jamie Sichel
Introduction
bounce follows the journey of a creature trying to find its way home. It's found itself stuck in these television sets and journeys between them to find out where it is. As the channels change, so does our hero's environment, sometimes becoming surreal and difficult to navigate.
Concept and background research
Although generative, I wanted this piece to tell a story with a distinct narrative. Influenced by media like Wreck It Ralph and Tron, I wanted to tell the story of a creature lost in a strange and connected terrain like electronics. The opening scene is that of the television turning on, followed by a blob appearing and bouncing from screen to screen--but its precense on these screens changes them, breaking them. When the channel changes, the blob finds itself in a strange and surreal underwater world, where there are many instances of itself and left can become right.
Eventually, instead of resolving this journey, the televisions all turn off. Whether our hero was successful or not depends on your own interpretation.
Technical
This projection mapping project was created using openFrameworks in Visual Studio. One of the more difficult challenges in this assignment was designing something compelling off-site, without the final product even constructed yet. It's interesting to create a projection mapping and leave room for error, since you aren't sure what the final product will even look like in a pop-up exhibition. Our group ended up moving our shape within our space several times and found it difficult to properly position the projector. A project like this presented me with unexpected and interesting challenges.
Future development
For future development I would like to create more surreal scenarios our creature finds himself in. I would also like to make the creature as a character a little more compelling than just a circle. Ultimately, I think it would be really fun to create a lot of these scenarios, but have the viewer be able to change the channel and start a new scene whenever they want. I also found the reflection of the projection from the TVs onto the floor to be very compelling (as shown in my preview image)--in a future project like this, I would find a way to make that play even more obvious.
Self evaluation
I believe that telling a more narrative story worked well in this format--if I had the opportunity to do this project over, I would have tried to code even more, but simpler to accomplish, scenes with many moving parts. I would have also varied what was shown on the TVs a bit more--not every one with the same scene. I think my project was fun and whimsical, if a bit boring / not kinetic enough, but ultimately a good beginning and first attempt at what I set out to do. I will definitely be revisiting this idea in the future.
References
Some code was adapted from the following sources:
https://processing.org/examples/bouncingball.html