The Tower Gone to Space
The Tower Gone to Space is an interactive, generative piece. Built using the Processing IDE and painted using mouse input TTGS is visually reminiscent of slit-scanning and conceptions of an object travelling at speeds and across over distances unknown. Current trajectories of our future technological development scream from within these dark, forboding buildings. Imagined here in a deep space the tower is pulsating, shuffling and rotating.
That the object is a building, a skyscraper, housing a financial institution is no coincidence. The self-similarity between architecture and device screens coalsce to give the piece its aesthetic and form. The starting point of the piece is a series of boxes. These shuffle through different sizes and colours, with the colour choice dictated by the RGB of pixels.
Using PeasyCam allowed interactive painting to occur. Zooming in and out changes the scale of the object interactively. This layered effect is produced by using no background() call in draw(), so with each run through of the code nothing is overwritten, except by itself. This method purposefully prevents fully agency in controlling the tower.
Conceptually this a lack of control and choice represents feelings of anomie and suppression. Black boxes and decisions beyond our control prevent total control, which is relinquished to 'inside' the tower.
The slight pixelation, or blockiness, is an artistic choice linking this work to early computer art efforts and a reaction to the current cutting edge of ultra-smooth computer graphics. TTGS does not sit on the floor of the Uncanny Valley, it has climbed to previous points defined by many including Adam Flynn, James Svard and to a certain part of meme culture.
In the spirit of open source and Free Software code was read, recycled and implemented. Thanks to Lior Ben Gai for his teaching on Programming for Artists 01 and code samples which were formative in this piece. Also QueasyCam developer jrc03c for his box example which formed the basis of the tower.