Tristan's Media Blog

Reflection A3

During the process of these last three studies, I feel as if my creative process has grown rapidly since earlier in the semester. I have able to draw inspiration from exercises and activities and then practically implement them into my own work in there own way. Coming into these final studies, my ultimate goal was to create finished products that worked affectively and looked appealing to an audience or user. To an extent, I completed my goal with studies 4 and 5 being completed and polished as finalised art projects. However, it was study 6 that just didn’t make it as I wasn’t able to finish a few small touches inside the program, however i did manage to get some last minute help to create it functional so that suers could still participate with the program. What felt most important to me during this process were the smaller accomplishments I was able to complete. I spent a lot of time looking through tutorials to extend my own knowledge, and completing functional experiments proved to myself that I was getting better and developing more skills.

 

Once again, during this design process I have realised that by keeping it relatively simple for the audience it creates for a genuinely engaging interaction with the art. By this, I mean the presentation of the art should be simplistic enough for the user to understand the idea of the art and what it makes them feel. Behind the hood of the presentation however is a different story. Hiding the brain of the presentation is a key part of making the design more appealing to the user as they want to use something that is clear and not complicated. I found this is more important during the non tactile interaction as the user was focussed more so on the screen and what it displayed than their physical tactile interaction with the art. For example, in study 5 once we had refined it and displayed it in a way that was neat and simple, the user was able to engage with it with the ability to read and complete what the goal of the study was, without having to guess what to do or be distracted by the keyboard or mouse. I believe the physical design is vital in keeping a user engaged with the art for as long as possible, making it flow and having meaning behind it allows them to gain momentum whilst looking at the art creating a more thorough experience.

 

So far within Max, I feel as if my development and understanding has been on a steady incline. At the base of this incline I believe my ideas are what have driven me forward into learning and developing new skills. Coming into the final three studies, I stepped out of my comfort zones of ‘effects’ and keyboard controls and really stepped into the next level of creative art making through the use of facial recognition tools, voice tools and also live effects to video. Something that was helpful during the development with these new and more complicated functions was the ability to work in smalls groups and feed off each other’s knowledge and skill levels. It was very helpful knowing that we all brought something new to the table when we were brainstorming, and so straight away we had ideas that we hadn’t thought of before, which led to some investigations and experiments within the program. Up until now I still feel as if I’m in the early stages of my development with the program, as I like to continually develop my skills especially in things that I find interesting and engage with. I believe if I’m able to stick with the program and become more familiar with it that I can really take my skills to the next level, which would be something I’m willing to do.

 

Ultimately, I believe my work can be improved upon by taking it further through its development as there are still so many functions that I am unaware of in Max. To explore these abilities further, I’ve been trying to use the tutorials and reference tools in max as they provide some really good explanations and demonstrations of certain things. I am aware that I learn faster through seeing demonstrations come to life in front of me, and so they have been extremely helpful in aiding my learning. This has led to myself being more practical in my studies, developing goals that I know I can create and going forward and finishing those goals. It has been helpful looking at both tactile and non-tactile ways of interaction with Max, as it has allowed for more tools and functions to present themselves within the program, providing a good scope into what max can do. Now that the groundwork has been set out and I’m aware of the types of interactive presentations I can create, I look forward to exploring and playing around with the program and finding ways for it to connect with my other studies.

Study 6

MAJOR study 6:

Statement: For my last major study of the semester I wanted to implement all of the things I had learnt in Max. I started with the goal of making the user feel excited, as if they were working with the presentation, optimising the interaction with it. With this came my intellectual goal to use as many of the object functions and other tools that I could, making the patch more advanced and continually developing my own knowledge. I had the main goal of wanting to control the users attention for a certain amount of time, and so I created steps that followed after one another obtaining a different obstacle to pass. This would occur as a stop clock would time the user doing these obstacles encouraging them to complete them faster with the hope to reach the desired emotion of ‘excitement’. The challenging part of this study to make the presentation flow, linking it all together and keeping the audience engaged. Something that helped quite a bit relating to this was the presentation mode display, as I was able to create a physical flow in the design that kept momentum moving throughout the piece. I think this was quite a well finished piece to conclude my studies, if there was one thing I could improve on it would be to create and expand on more of the motion sensor abilities that the program has.

Study 5

Study 5:

Statement: In study five, the idea was to refine study 4 to make it more functional and presentable. My group and I decided it would be best to leave the functionalities of the actual patch and just rearrange it using the ‘presentation mode’ tool. This would create another layer of the work which could only be viewed in the presentation mode, hiding all the unnecessary tools and connections, and focusing on what’s most important. We landed on keeping it simple, only displaying the ‘pwindow’ and sound metre whilst filling in the gaps with comments to guide the user on what to do/how it works. The challenging part of this study was to create the design for the presentation mode in a way that would help resemble the emotion we tried to display which changed to happiness based on our findings on the last study. To do this, we made the presentation playful and straight forward to help guide the user into the idea of what we wanted to achieve. In the future I want to play around with the presentation mode tool, until this study I was only familiar with the patcher tool and completed assignments through that instead of making them look neat and complete. I believe that has been a successful part of this assignment, the more appealing the study looks the more likely it is to be tested and appreciated by an audience.

Study 4

Statement: In my forth study for the course, the key focus was to use a non tactile way of interaction with the audience. The aim of this particular study was to make the audience feel a certain emotion. Originally, my group and I came up with the idea of making the audience feel a sense of anger. This would be carried about by having a sound metre build up to hit a certain point and ultimately reflect something, which would imitate someone raising their voice and getting angry. We created this by using a premade facial detector, that used the camera to recognise the face and make it the key subject. From this, we were able to use the sound metre to show a certain image (which would soon be the angry face) if the sound would hit a certain level. We also found a new tool (thanks Camille), the gswitch2 enabled the sound metres level to allow the face to appear when it hit the level of the equation and then disappear when it did not meet the noise level. In the early stages of this study, the class tested this, looking at themselves in the camera and growling into microphone to make the angry face appear. Did it make them angry though? Not really, it seemed to make them laugh. This meant our attached emotion wasn’t correctly meeting the audience and so we decided to make the emotion happy, as it was more suitable. Looking forward, small tests would have been a good idea to test certain emotions so that we could nail one particular type, instead of having to guess and check.

A2 statement 2

Statement: In my second study, my group and I aimed high with quite a difficult job of making a fluent Donald Trump censored twitter feed, that captured live tweets by trump and censored out a series of his words to make the tweets more pleasant. The theme in this study was to eliminate the controversy of his texts. Whilst developing the study, it became apparent that we were creating something that wasn’t fully tactile, as the computer was doing most of the work by capturing the live tweets and reformulating them. At this point in time, it was too late to change ideas so we had to create a tactile interaction by having the ability to press a button for the programming to then go ahead and capture the tweets. It would have been ideal to have more of an interaction between the art and the user. I would like to revisit this study later on In the semester and create a greater interaction with it, for example, being able to type in certain words live that you would like to censor and then have related tweets pop up and have those words censored. This would evidentially create a greater interaction with the study, instead of just having pressed a single button. There were many challenges that we faced in this study, including a range that had to be done outside of the program to capture the tweets. Credit to team member Ziggy who was exceptional at bringing together the most part of this study. On a personal level, this study definitely pushed my abilities with the program, however gave me a good insight to the things it is capable of.

Reflection

Altogether, the creative process of developing my three studies was challenging, yet engaging. I found myself often searching for inspiration to funnel my work in the right direction. However, I discovered that aiming to complete projects or ideas that pushed my limits on the program became the most helpful experience in developing my knowledge of MAX. This has led me to believe that it is always a good idea to try tackle the ‘big picture’ ideas as the journey to completing them will always benefit my knowledge and in this instance, tactile skills in MAX. Although I may not have completed the three studies all by myself, or to the best working abilities the program can function with, I have been able to use a wider ranger of functions and ultimately become better at the program with a great understanding of why things work and how to make them work. Discovering new tools and abilities was quite eye opening to see how many different ways there are for an artist to create interactive art. This was my first time using a program like MAX, before this I didn’t realise it was possible to create things in coding or visual coding programs, so it has been a really good experience to experiment with different artistic materials and media.

Whilst dealing with interactive art, I’ve realised that being simplistic in the design process can cause surprisingly entertaining experiences. Never would I have thought the idea of pressing a button to appear a smiley face could be so addicting, and so its provided a good insight into the world of art and how humans function with it. Using Max has also allowed myself to realise how many different possibilities there are surrounding interactive art, and using the program and its code like functionalities, has showed a whole new side to the world of interactive art. Having a tactile based assignment, its also been good to develop an understanding of how humans physically interact with art. The value of humans being able connect with art through a physical presence creates a whole new dynamic into how powerful an art piece can be. For example, in study 2 I found that we weren’t using a strong enough tactile approach and therefor it felt as if the computer was completing the art instead of ourselves, however moving onto study 3 I decided to make sure it was apparent that the humans were creating the art. That is when I made it only possible to interact with the art through the keyboard, which can only be pressed by humans and therefor making it a more inclusive experience. I believe when it came to this project, that using the keyboard or mouse was on of the best ways to make an audience feel included in the art, and whilst these functions are only a portion of what the program is capable of, they are still effective enough to create a substantial piece of interactive art.

So far in my development with MAX, I think I have been quite successful in coming up with ideas that the program is capable of carrying out in an entertaining style. I started study one focusing on ‘effects’ which, I now know only scratched the surface of what the program is capable of. This has leaded me to expand my skills to and explore other functionalities. For study 2 especially, working in a small group allowed us to combine ideas and attempt to create something quite difficult, however if pulled off, very cool. This was almost the case, as we managed to get extremely close to a functioning Donald Trump censored twitter feed, however we faced many implications along the way. Although we got to the final stage of the study, we still had a problem with making it work fluently, however the study itself taught all of us a lot about the program and made a funny idea into an almost hilarious success.

I believe my work can be improved by more experience within the program. I am aware that my work is still on a very amateur level, and that is a good thing knowing there is a lot more to MAX that I can achieve with developing my knowledge further. In aiding this development, I have used the comment tool a lot to guide myself step by step of what I’m doing and also to remind myself of why I’m doing those things. The use of the help and reference windows has also been extremely useful and guiding. The exploration of these windows will definitely be a faction in improving my work in the future, as I get more comfortable with the program. The key thing I could improve on however is finishing and working towards the final idea that I had, instead of having unfinished projects that are close to being completed. I would have preferred study 3 of my project to be completed in the state I originally wanted it to be, however I intend to revisit this and complete the study when I have to skills needed for it. Another key thing that I would improve upon my three studies is to explore how tactile I can be with the art and making it as interactive as I can. I’m aware there are other visual elements that can be worked with on the program such as motion movements that we will look at later in the semester, however I would still be interested in researching other ways to interact with the program whilst being hands on.