Longer study in progress. Best on desktop in webkit browsers. Click here to interact.
Clicking a dot removes that dot and causes random remaining dot to reproduce. Reproducing dots spawn another dot with similar speed, size and color. If a player clicks all the big and slow dots then the dots will naturally evolve to be smaller, faster, and lighter—and harder to click.
The original (made in Flash way back when) was really quick to rough out, but little details have had a significant impact on how the work ‘reads’. It’s also reminded me of some larger questions, a couple of which I’ll note below.
60 min sketch. Click image to launch. Responds to click. Best in webkit browsers
Three thoughts:
one
I once had a nightmare of falling towards Jupiter, never arriving even as it grew larger than I could comprehend. It was terrifying and sublime and I don’t know how I’d ever capture the feeling. I wonder if this sketch touches it a little. It’s possible that the larger dark disk is mostly unapparent until a click, when the light circles draw attention to the edge and what was once the background becomes a figure of sorts. I wonder if that’s key to some sense of sublime—the ‘background’ (perceptually speaking) emerging as a singular entity.
~60 min sketch. Best in webkit browsers. Click here to interact.
This sketch allows a user to ‘reduce’ hate speech online by ‘limiting bandwidth’ with the obvious catch that the occurrences can’t be reduced in proportion to other kinds of speech, only speech overall can be limited. It presents the premise that hate speech is always in proportion to other kinds of speech and from this a kind of naïve argument that limiting one kind of speech is just to limit all kinds of speech. (This description is admittedly very imperfect though as there is nothing to indicate, procedurally or otherwise, that the purpose of the manipulable features is to affect the occurrences of “HATE”.)
90 min sketch. Click image to launch. Responds to click and drag. Best on desktop in webkit browsers.
This is a cheeky response to one too many recent developments in prototyping tools that show off—with high energy music urging breathless anticipation—the ability to create and organize rectangles.
As a web-framework the presentation of a React component is still accomplished via HTML and CSS; a set of mechanisms built to present text documents in different shaped windows. As such, any React-based WYSIWYGish editor, despite building on contemporary hotness, will have similar tool-design challenge as Dreamweaver did in the 90s— allowing designers with an objects-in-space mental model to create procedural layouts. (The complexity of the problem has only grown as web standards have included layout systems (flex-box, grid). )
So long as we need to accommodate variations in screen sizes and our underlying procedural layout technologies churn, we’re going to have new tools competing to address the same problem—organizing rectangles.
This sketch procedurally represents the phenomena of herd immunity. With this and any ‘interactive explanation’ or ‘explorable explanation’ I’m not entirely sure if (or what) they do compared to, say, an animation on the topic…
The sketch above can be accessed here. ~100 minutes. Responds to the cursor. Best on desktop in webkit browsers (Safari/Chrome).
An original rule for sketches on this blog was that they had to be ‘about something’. I’m not sure if the sketches in this post fit what I meant by this.
The sketch above is a quick response to Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Underwater”. It’s not really ‘about’ the song so much as it is an expression of sorts. I’m loathe to say it’s a “visualization” — something meant to be evocative of the experience of listening to whatever. If the music, or a part of the music, was a kind of inspiration, does that make the work ‘representative’?
Repetition with variation is a common aesthetic concern in many art forms (music, painting, dance, theater, film, etc.). Presuming interaction(s) include, involve, or are entirely constituted of actions, we can ask questions about how actions might repeat with variation. This would provide a fairly traditional question for analyzing an otherwise novel form (interaction). How then can actions repeat with variation? What is it to do the same thing but differently? Below is a start to exploring these questions.
