Get Tangled
Get Tangled is a projection mapping project on pyramid cubes. It is about playing with dots and lines throughout the piece, and color transformations alongside.
produced by: Whitney Hung
Introduction
Life gets tangled in many ways. I wanted to show the clean form of tangle and leading to more chaotic forms as time passes. The first scene, black and white lines is drawn smoothly and creates a perfect clean, satisfying effect. The second scene, rainbow, is chaotic lines drawn with altering colors, in the middle of the square there is a circle that signals breathing under chaos. The final scene is a dark laser scene where lines are not filling in the whole picture, and is less colorful, which shows the last stage of chaotic. The whole piece follows "dots and lines" to create effects.
Concept and background research
Originally I wanted to create some lines between the dots and set the width to a thin line, inspired by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/introspector/5709396891/in/pool-1515493@N25/lightbox/
And close organized lines that make into shapes: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/393853929885451858/
I remembered the magnetic grids Theo had taught in class and used that as a starting point to draw the dots and later to connect them in experimental ways.
Technical
I used Openframeworks, ofxJSON, ofxPimapper, ofXmlSettings to code. Some challenges included the fluency of the first scene to be drawn and the exact portion to fill in the square, I had to do some math for it and thanks to Giacomo for introducing me to "polylines" to achieve this.
Originally, the lines couldn't draw smoothly. This however was achieved by writing a clean function to make the codes clean and run faster. Before, there would always be a lag for the drawn pixel and also I had to create a vector to run a for loop to draw the squares, otherwise the squares really gets "tangled" with each other, and a undesired diagonal line would be drawn between the squares. So this was some challenges I faced with the technicals.
Future development
I would love to be able to achieve a higher level of delicacy for this piece and a nicer controlled flow. And also a more linear effect not only in drawing the lines but also altering the colors within the lines smoothly. As well as the transformations between the shapes. I believe more could be done in playing with the piece and altering the lines to see different effects.
Self evaluation
Looking at the actual projected piece, the black and white lines worked better than I had imagined, and also the color changing of the rainbos scene is satisfying, but the last scene I feel is lacking some some sort of elements. I think I should have created a stronger effect for the lines and contrast.