Europe and Africa (Part One)

This summer my partner, Louisa, and I spent just under a month traversing Europe and northern Africa.  I decided to highlight some of our experiences here on my blog!  We are pictured above on a famous bridge in Frankfurt, Germany - the city where we began our adventure.

While staying in Frankfurt, we decided to make a day trip to Amsterdam.  Pictured above in one of the tens of thousands of the city's cruiser-style bicycles. Unlike in the bicycle scene in Milwaukee, we spotted only a handful of road bikes.

A random art installation in a store window, tucked inside an alley way we happened to cut through. Not the most subtle of messages in this piece...

Another random art installation in Amsterdam...



Our next destination was Marrakesh, Morocco - a fortified trade city tucked between the Atlas Mountains in the Northwest part of Africa. We spent our first day there traversing its seemingly endless markets...

In Marrakesh, it is hard to walk five steps without running into street cats...

Most of the cats we met seemed relatively happy and healthy. The people who live and work in this area believe them to be good luck - and we saw many feeding and petting them as we traversed the city.

On day two, we embarked on a group excursion through the atlas mountains to the Sahara desert.  Pictured above is the van in which we spent over 24 hours as we traversed the stunning landscape of northern Africa.




I've been to various mountainous regions of the united states, but none compare to the majesty of the Atlas mountains - with its winding roads, Berber villages and rich, colorful geological formations.

A typical desert excursion snack.

Pictured above is a slice of granite from a nearby quarry - the stone here is famous for the vast number of fossils inside.

We stopped for a few hours at Aït Benhaddou - a fortified city along the former caravan route between Marakech and the Sahara Desert. 

We were particularly excited about this, as it was a shooting location for the HBO series Game of Thrones.  That's right, I've been to Yuncai.

Pictured above is the group we traveled with - ten of the friendliest Europeans, Canadians, Mexicans and Chileans I've ever met!

We stopped at a Berber village that was settled along a large oasis - where a small water spring has been irrigated to accommodate a population of farmers and artisans.

Just as we approached the Sahara, the van suddenly came to a stop as a Shepard guided his flock across the road.  Here, Louisa managed to snap one of the best photos of our entire trip:

And as we reached the desert, we saw, in the distance, Berbers bringing our next mode of transportation.

We'd spend the next two hours traveling, by camel, deep into the desert dunes.  There, we'd stay the night in a traditional Berber desert camp.

Photos courtesy of Loushanti

Continued in Part Two...

Remediation

I am working on a new series of prints, videos and lightboxes, tentatively titled Remediation.  Each work will utilize 3D imaging tools and processes, but will manifest as two-dimensional works. The motivation behind this series is to explore main-stream media, its technologies, its politics, and its saturation in contemporary society.

To create these images and animations, I am primarily utilizing 3D scans I take with an Xbox Kinect Sensor, and am using a combination of the following software platforms: Meshlab (for editing and manipulating 3D meshes), Processing (for mesh manipulation and animation), Photoshop and Illustrator (for generating digital image processing) and Adobe Premier (for video editing and animation.)

Here's a low res video demonstrating a simple program I created in Processing for layering 3D models.  I use functions for generating noise to dictate the size, placement and color of the models, resulting in beautiful and unique collages.

Below are more sample images and video clips - working concepts for the series.  Enjoy!

Creative Coding

It's been a minute since I've posted here... I have some new projects underway - but for now I will just share what I've been working on for the past four months.

I recently re-wrote a course at my university - formerly titled "Principles of Interactive Media" - to accommodate an influx of students who are pursuing interdisciplinary study between art, computer science and education.  The new course, tentatively titled "Intro to Creative Coding", now centers around the Processing environment and programming language.

I decided, since I'd be teaching it, I would dive deep into Processing myself.  So I've spent the last few months buffing my programming skills - and in turn getting really excited about visual programming and front-end development.

Processing is a great platform for this - Not only is the language identical to that of Arduino (which all of my robotics and installation work is written in) - but it is an excellent primer for Java, Javascript, and C++.  All incredibly useful languages to know if you like making stuff (and I sorta do...)

Anyway, over the course of the semester, I created over 40 original Processing sketches from scratch.  Most of them (the ones that work inside the Processing.js java script wrapper) are hosted online at openprocessing.com.  Here are some of my favorites:

Fly Kitty - my first attempt at a "2.5-D" interactive animation.  This sketch also utilizes a simple custom particle class in the cat's tail.

Hypno Kitty - another exploration of a particle class for creating dynamic curves.  A lot of these sketches are cat themed...

Sid the Squid - An interactive animation.  Sid's tentacles are uniquely generated each time the sketch is ran - and utilize once again a particle class.  Mostly an exercise in drawing more complex designs in processing.

Fishy - an array of interactive objects. Each instance of my fish class in born with a unique size and color.

Baller - My first attempt at a realistic physics system.  I also incorporated inheritance in this sketch (as practice for a lecture I gave the next day) but the sub-classes weren't working properly in Java Script, so I ended up rewriting this sketch so each ball is it's own class.

Cat Generator - This really was a demonstration of Processing's ArrayList class. A simple UI which allows you to set a few variables with sliders, then generate new cat objects with those properties by pressing the green button. 

Vortex - Playing with the sine() and cosine() functions. Click to move the vortex on the y-axis.

Walking Doodle - My attempt at creating a class for walking limbs.

Red Button - a bit of fun with the noCursor() function.

Bezier Noodle - My first look at the bezier() functions.  An interactive "drag-able" bezier curve!

Whoa wow wow! - My tribute to "The Dress" viral phenomenon.  Is it blue and black, or white and gold??

Noise() Pong - Play a Pong-like game against the noise() function.

Vector Snake - My first look at the PVector class. Also around the time I started reading The Nature of Code by Dan Shiffman - an awesome book on creating "natural" systems in Processing.

Car - I had a lot of fun with this sketch.  Here I used the PVector class to create a mouse-driven interactive car.

Sky Writer - My first look at utilizing the PShape class for drawing separate "layers" in Processing.

Infinite Scrolling Landscape - An infinite scrolling landscape.  A (very) buggy sketch that utilizes one of my favorite 2.5-D tricks, found in lots of classic side-scrollers like Super Mario World.

Bean in Space - My first look at the P3D engine for 3D graphics.

Voxel Ship - Another exploration in 3D graphics.  Processing.js does not yet support imported 3D models, so I decided to build one with simple cubes instead.

And that's pretty much where I stopped uploading sketches, mainly because everything I've created since uses functions, classes and libraries that are not yet supported in the Processing.js wrapper.  Keep your eyes peeled for more updates to my openprocessing.org portfolio!