THE ROBOTO PROJECTO VII

I edited some of the light art photos.. had a play around...   had some ideas...  I've decided i quite like posterizing light art. just because it has such interesting color and light gradients.. and it naturally looks so smooth..   i like taking that away and looking at it in a different light. (ba dum boom)..   I also had a bit of fun trying to change the styles of the lines and the photos on the whole
here are some examples: 

here are some examples

THE ROBOTO PROJECTO VI

I made a video of our guy working...    First assignment in over 2 years and its the first time I've see the blue screen of death since windows 95... followed by Premier crashing twice and after effects crashing i should have expected it..   although its not the finished product i wanted, it at least conveys what i wanted to do.

THE ROBOTO PROJECTO V

Days ##(the last bit)

The last few days were spent tweaking and fixing Frank... and then we presented. I think the presentation went reasonably well. Our finished product had a lot of thought behind it.. but i think it was hard to convey that in a presentation without sounding like a narcissist. the light art we produced was nice. but due to the limitations of the NXT i still walked away feeling slightly disappointed that we couldn't have created something on a grander scale. 

 

THE ROBOTO PROJECTO IV

Day 5-6'ISH'

well we decided we couldn't do the algorithm i designed. we had decided that it would be very high risk as we would have to program it in python, which we would have to learn. although we thought it was possible, the chances of us coming across a problem that we would not be experienced enough to solve was too high..   in the end we super simplified it to the degree we could do it in the NXT software.

THE ROBOTO PROJECTO III

Day 3-4 ( the weekend)

Over the weekend i attempted to create an algorithm that would translate colours into movement.. the colours had no meanings at this stage because i had no idea what the movement would look like. we had planned to be able to use python to code the algorithm as you can easily get a free plug-in that allow the NXT to use python.  The hard part of the algorithm was starting. I didn't care at that stage what the colours meant we could tweak that once we could see it running. What was hard was trying to decide what meant what. Was i to use the sequence of colours, or the position, or the ratios of different colours..  eventually i wrapped my mind around how it would work. I decided to  have a six position input with 5 different colours:

• the first position would directly effect the vertical movement
  the second position would modify the vertical movement           
  the third position would directly effect the horizontal movement / spin
  the fourth position would modify the horizontal movement / spin          
  the fifth position would directly effect the tilt movement
  the sixth position would modify the tilt movement         
   

there is a full map of my algorithm in my journal.

THE ROBOTO PROJECTO II

Day 2-'ISH'

we decided to create a robot designed to create light art...   Light art always looks good, you could tie a L.E.D to a cat and it would look amazing, so the aesthetics of the end result won't be a problem. Giving the art context was going to be harder.

we wanted to use colored balls as our input, the group was set on that. so with our input and output decided on we needed to choose 'processing' that would give the project meaning...   HARDER THAN IT SOUNDS!    one of our ideas was to have the movements of the sculpture relate to the wave lengths of the colored balls...   but the NXT has far too much error for it to produce anything that precise.     Another idea was that the project could be a very scaled down version of a greater concept. For example i had the idea for a large art inhalation that translated a scanned image into the motion of a kinetic sculpture every pixel on the image would be considered on its own and then in the greater context of the art. the human connotations we have for colors, and combinations of colors would be given suitable styles of movement, and the end result would be a bunch of movement that had the same "feeling" as the photo.   So we had to develop a nxt program that at a far far far more basic level translated colors into a mood which could be conveyed through motion and then turned into a still photo.

Reflective Blog

THE ROBOTO PROJECTO

I need to get on top of this bogging thing...   I'm sure it would seem far less daunting if I did it throughout the creative process rather than on the last day.  Even though this is retrospective I will try present my thinking ain chronological order.

DAY 1-'ISH' 

When we first started the project i was pretty keen to get going, although i didn't... don't like Lego nxt. the project seemed interesting, and instantly i had a huge number of ideas...  

We formed a group and started working. we decided that we could spend a day brain storming what to do, go home and think about it by ourselves and then decide on a direction the following day. I decided to break the project into three aspects. The input, the processing and the output. reasonably obvious, but by braking up all of the groups different ideas into these three categories i could mix and match the different aspects.

The perils of Gephi

Had a group exercise, made a large visual map linking common responses to random questions. Used the data to have a play around with a 'gephi' beta, definitely still a beta. Still an interesting tool, just riddled with minor user interface issues... and i cant find a way to export my work in the format i want.  

Is this what a blog looks like?