LCC6310 Fall 2009 Exhibit Page
These are the highlights from the Fall 2009 session of LCC6310. Click on each person's name to see his or her project in action via a web Applet. Below the Applet are links to the programmer's source code in Processing.
Project 1
From the central heartbeat of the central processor, to the obsessive timestamping of files and blog entries, to ever present clock displays, time is a fundamental feature of computation. Display the progress of time in a non-traditional way. It is OK to consider large temporal scales (e.g. seasons), but smaller temporal scales should also be displayed (or be available to be displayed, perhaps as a function of user input). You may make use of mouse input if you wish.
Hertler, BrianQuitmeyer, Andrew
Schechter, Elizabeth
Swaminathan, Vignesh
Watson, Nicholas
Project 2
The contemporary computer scene is dominated by the graphical user interface (GUI). For almost every task, from manipulating text, imagery, sound or video to configuring a computer's operating system (e.g. control panels), from searching for and organizing information (e.g. the web) to the process of programming (e.g. integrated development environments), there are special purpose GUI tools supporting the task through analogies to embodied interaction with physical objects. But no tool is neutral; every tool bears the marks of the historical process of its creation, literally encoding the biases, dreams, and political realities of its creators, offering affordances for some interactions while making other interactions difficult or impossible to perform or even conceive.While the ability to program does not bring absolute freedom (you can never step outside of culture, and of course programming languages are themselves tools embedded in culture), it does open up a region of free play, allowing the artist to climb up and down the dizzying tower of abstraction and encode her own biases, dreams and political realities. What graphical tools would you create? Create your own drawing tool, emphasizing algorithmic generation/modification/manipulation. Explore the balance of control between the tool and the person using the tool. The tool should do something different when moving vs. dragging (moving with the mouse button down). The code for your tool should use at least one class.
Fiesler, CaseyGibes, Thomas
Gonzalez, Christopher
Hertler, Brian
Quitmeyer, Andrew
Watson, Nicholas
Project 3
Literary machines are potential literature, procedurally producing textual traces in response to interaction. Examples of literary machines include interactive fiction, nodal hypertexts, interactive poetry (often with animated typography) and chatterbots. Create a literary machine. The literary machine must include algorithmic elements, such as animated typography, generated text, conditional responses as a function of the previous interaction trace. It must respond to external inputs (e.g. user interaction). Your piece may include conjunctions of text and imagery.
Gonzalez, ChristopherHertler, Brian
Lee, Jason
Quitmeyer, Andrew
Watson, Nicholas
Project 4
Hypertext was conceived as a computer-aided form of reading and writing whose structure matches that of the human mind (a tangled web of association), thus enabling humans to make sense of the exponential growth of knowledge experienced in the 20th century. The World-Wide Web, while a rather anemic implementation of hypertext, makes up for these deficiencies by providing us a with a sneak preview of what it might be like to have a truly global repository of knowledge. But making sense of the world is not just a matter of structure but of process, of the dynamic construction of meaning. And as we've been discovering together, computation is fundamentally a process medium. What would you do to the web? Create an applet that dynamically does something to one or more web pages (e.g. collage, systematic distortion, re-layout, ironic superposition, etc.).
Asad, MariamFiesler, Casey
Fuller, Daniel
Jog, Jayraj
Lee, Jason
Manzoul, Waleed
Schechter, Elizabeth
Swaminathan, Vignesh
Watson, Nicholas
Project 5
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) builds computational systems that model the intelligent behavior of people and animals. AI architectures can be extremely generative, able to produce complex responses to environmental changes, including user interaction. In computational art, AI approaches have been used to build work ranging from robotic sculpture, to drawing and painting generators, from generative interactive stories to music composition. In the popular art form of computer games, AI approaches are used extensively to build tactical and strategic opponents, non-player characters and player modeling systems. In this project, build a collection of simple AI agents that interact with the user, each other and their ecosystem to give the illusion of life. You can build upon the provided framework of Braitenberg vehicles, which can produce complex agent behaviors, or code your own simulation.
Fiesler, CaseyGibes, Thomas
Hertler, Brian
Hwang, Jee Yeon
Quitmeyer, Andrew
Project 6
While computer-based interactive games (a.k.a. video games) have been a pop-cultural force since the arcade scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in recent years video games have been recognized as a major emerging art form, poised to have as much cultural impact on the 21st century as cinema did on the 20th. The game industry is making Hollywood-sized amounts of money, with designers of the most popular games achieving a geeky sort of celebrity. Museums and galleries are offering exhibitions of "art games," computer-scientists are beginning to treat games as technical objects worthy of serious attention and, in humanities departments around the world, games studies is a hot new topic. What kind of game would you create? Create a simple game. Your game should be a regular Processing applet (but you may create a pure Java applet if you like).
Cheng, AmyFiesler, Casey
Gibes, Thomas
Hertler, Brian
Quitmeyer, Andrew