Aaron Dore
This work engages with the ephemeral and momentary existence of human movement, by rendering forms inspired by fabric, the brief context of the memory of displacement is intentionally foregrounded.
"Draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being" - Aldous Huxley
Concept
In order to address the process of migration, the memory of movement and how it relates to the literal fluidity of borders amidst the sea, developing an animated piece seemed the most appropriate. Conceptualising the abstract nature of being part of the so-called 'Windrush' generation neccesitates an understanding of isolation - the fear of deporation due to 'illegal' statuses of migratory workers in Britain, complicated and often underrepresented relationships with the sea as both passage and graveyard; and figuring ways of moving on both individudally and as part of a community.
Utilising art as a framework for exploring contemporary political issues in context of deep hisotrical violence could potentially become both exploratory and representative, though issues of delegation remain of upmost concern.
Implementation
With an x, y of origin and an x, y of destination, the space between these two coordinates will be filled with black points that use random transparency values.
The positions of these x and y co-ordinates will increment by the value of a variable that generates a Perlin noise value. Each of the four values have different offset values so the noise output value is distinctive.
The resulting appearence when generated as a static image resembles the following:
As the fabric reaches a certain point from the bottom of the canvas, the image begins re-rendering from the initial point. The transparency values of the points eventually overlay to become black, this is where the text from the twitter stream comes in, overlaying the image in white to act as a means of continually erasing parts of the underlying image. The resultant generative component of the work is a continual negotiation between the noise variations and the twitter feed.
After unsuccessfully attempting to utilise the ofxTwitter addon as a means of directly incorporating the twitter API into my OpenFrameworks project, I found success by means of using a Javascript twitter bot that runs on node.js and communicates to OpenFrameworks using ofxOsc. While developing I ran this locally, however in light of further development the twitter bot could be run from a VPS server in order to be more practical in an installation based environment.