{"id":12750,"date":"2019-12-22T19:43:02","date_gmt":"2019-12-22T19:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=12750"},"modified":"2020-05-07T19:21:43","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T19:21:43","slug":"art-from-code-conference-stuck-in-a-loop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=12750","title":{"rendered":"Art from Code: Stuck in a Loop"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Snapshot from Brent: Stuck in a Loop<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For my Art From Code conference project, I wanted to create a looping, cinematic scene. I got the idea from the class skyline assignment, where we were to create a moving skyline, looping hopefully seamlessly from one end of the sketch to the other horizontally. In that assignment, we created different layers which moved with different speeds and together created a landscape, passing before us. My initial assignment looked like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed the way in which the photos succeeded in creating\nsomething cinematic, and immediately had the impulse to add music to it, in\norder to give the scene more of a mood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came up with the idea of a character called Brent. I\nwanted to create a scene which gave a sense of the mundane everyday, a gray\nlandscape and a melancholy person walking through it, desensitized to what was\nhappening around him, uncharmed by the small details of his environment. The\naesthetic is inspired by the idea of a young man who is a successful\nprofessional, but has found himself to be stuck in a loop, where every day\nseems to follow the same pattern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspirations for this character and scene came from a 2019\nvideo work by the digital artist Claudia Mat\u00e8, which depict men in suits walk\nin a stiff way through a sterile hallway, seen in the images on the right\nbelow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Another inspiration is the 2012 surrealist animation The Pub<\/em> by Joseph Pierce, which follows\nthe perspective of a young woman who works a mundane and miserable job at a\nLondon pub, and encounters drunk people who push her boundaries. The misery and\nisolation of her 9-5 job is a mood which I wanted to emulate in this scene.\nSnapshots can be seen in the black and white images below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I decided to use a generic 3d model of a man in a suit, and after I changed his posture for the worse and rigged him into a walking position, I rendered him into a static PNG with a transparent background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I took photos of the Fulton Street subway station in the\ncity and composited them into a panoramic image. I added my drawings to the\nimage, people inhabiting the station. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I divided this image into two separate images, in order to\nmake them run one after the other without a noticeable seam. To create a sense\nof depth in the scene, I had removed the poles from the initial image and made\nthem into a separate layer which would stand between the Brent in the\nforeground and the Brent on the platform seen above. The sense that the poles\nare closer to the viewer than the platform in the background creates the\nillusion that the two different Brents are on two different platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a final installation I set up for open studios, there was\nan option to interact with piece projected piece, and to further venture into\nBrent\u2019s world, by listening to his looped \u201csubway playlist\u201d in headphones\nconnected to a nearby computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The greatest challenge was to make the images run smoothly in order have an uninterrupted flow, so that the viewer can stand in front of the piece and notice more and more details as it goes on, noticing the different drawings every time they float by, without being aware of where the piece \u201cends\u201d or \u201cbegins\u201d. I might continue this project, making more environments for Brent and possibly animating him. For example him walking toward the subway in his own neighborhood. After the subway scene, his walking direction could change to be going in the opposite direction as he walks to work on Wall Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Brent: Stuck in a Loop<\/em>, I believe I succeeded in creating something cinematic in this code. People responded to Brent and the subway world in many different ways. I believe the use of the loop heightens the sense of the mundane and melancholic which I was trying to communicate, since Brent is stuck inside the subway forever. I could imagine using code in this way as scenes in films, to generate moving images which show a background moving and gives the impression that a person is going somewhere, even though the images used are still images.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my Art From Code conference project, I wanted to create a looping, cinematic scene. I got the idea from the class skyline assignment, where we were to create a moving skyline, looping hopefully seamlessly from one end of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":12760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[365],"tags":[39,257],"class_list":["post-12750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-genres-2","tag-conference-project","tag-art-from-code-2","wpcat-365-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12750"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14241,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12750\/revisions\/14241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}