Animals Final

For my final Animals, People project, I decided to address the role of anthropomorphism in children’s literature and learning materials. Animal characters are often personified to the point that their human-like attributes overwhelm their animal features and needs. As a result, children grow up to view animals as human-like, misinterpreting their actions and attributing human desires to their behavior.
I set about designing an “edutainment”-style book to teach kids about ocean reef life. The story revolves around cleaner shrimp, chosen because their cleaner stations act as a hub for reef activity.  Here are a few parameters for myself to avoid overly anthropomorphizing the creatures:
1. no names (animals will be referred to by their common names only)
2. no talking
3. no interactions that would not occur in nature
Here is the result:

I’m pretty satisfied with the overall look and feel of the text/images, though they definitely could use some refinement. But! I realized post-crit that while the late-1970’s academic look of the book might be appealing to me, it probably doesn’t strike a 10 year old as thrilling. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

Nature of Code Midterm

A continuation on the slug motif (I promise, I’ll be done with it after this). I created system of slow moving slugs that is inhabited by a swarm of flies. Each slug moves about the screen unaware of the others, while the flies subtly try to move toward the mouse without traveling over the slugs. I’m somewhat happy with the final sketch–I’d like to add something more to motivate the slug’s movements.

The motivational slug: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87F82nh6GtQ

Animal House

For the last part of our first Animal’s People unit, Aly, Alex, and I designed an apartment building that is inhabited by Riley, an amazon parrot, Sebastian, a loggerhead turtle, and Imke, a pygme hedgehog. Each animal lives on his or her own floor; however, the habits and habitats of each creature effects the lifestyles of the others. The final project takes the form of a pdf generated in Adobe Illustrator.

My floor of the final apartment bulding. Click to view the entire finished product.

I think our project was fairly successful. Our world is visually rich, and the three team members spend quite a bit of time together sorting through its ins and outs. Regardless, we had a very difficult time creating a plausible world that could be inhabited by all three of our creatures. By “plausible,” I don’t mean realistic–there was no way that we could create a traditionally realistic habitat for the animals. Even without confining ourselves to the realm of the real, we struggled to come up depth and richness in the relationships among our animals. Our final product, with its list of tit-for-tat interdependencies, feels somewhat restrained and superficial.
In the next iteration, I would like to add a little bit of explanatory and educational narrative.  I think a second phase of this product most likely take the form of an illustrated children’s book, in which interdependencies gain depth through narrative interaction among the characters.
Additionally, I would adapt my floor of the apartment to the style of the other two group members. Their graphic, bold style seemed to overwhelm Imke’s area. While the top two floors could be read from a few feet away, mine seemed to require a magnifying glass to fully observe the habitat’s detail.

Animals/People character studies

Can you tell how the hedgehog is feeling in each of the sketches above? For this week’s Animals, People assignment, we were supposed to make character studies of our animal in various emotional states. Some of mine are definitely more successful than others. Click here for the key.

imke is a pygmy hedgehog.

For someone covered in spikes, Imke is pretty nervous. He is alarmed by loud sounds, fast movements, and threatening looks. He spends more time than has to with his quills up, and frequently hides under furniture or in corners. When he feels threatened he makes a puffing noise and makes his body as large, spiky, and round as possible; when he is scared he curls into a ball, sending his quills out at ninety-degree angles.

Imke likes being around large enclosed spaces, sunlight, and happy people. When he does feel safe, Imke is very active. He prances about hunting for small bugs, smelling and licking anything that he finds interesting.  When he gets tired, he often sits on my head as I work. He fastidiously cleans his quills, and likes to be scratched and tickled on his soft underbelly.

Age: 6
Gender: Male
Goals: Warn his owner about danger; find delicious bugs.
Attributes: Alert, spiky, quick to react.
Weaknesses: Overly cautious, small.

Slug sketch

The first Nature of Code assignment was to experiment with customized randomness (gaussian, monte carlo, perlin noise) to create a natural-feeling processing sketch. The slug above (whom I have affectionately nicknamed Slugger) slowly moves upward via a random walk as his tentacles drift back and forth in a pattern generated by perlin noise. I got a bit lazy with the code–his slime should be stored in an array, rather than simply left on screen–but I can play around with it a bit if I choose to use him in other projects. Potential next steps: make his body move more naturally; turn him into a drawing tool.

As usual, click on the picture to view the sketch.

grunt, snuffle, squeal (the hedgehog’s dillemma)

The first assignment for Animals, People was to make a spirit animal self-portrait. After much internal debate, I decided on a hedgehog.

A few facts:
-hedgehogs are born with no spines at all. they first poke through the skin 36 hours after birth.
-their teeth are small, sharp, and suited for impaling invertebrate prey.
-they have tiny (and useless) vestigial tails.
-unlike porcupines, their spines are not removable. they fall out in patches when the animal becomes weak and sick.
-they create semi-permanent burrows or nests. if they become too cold, they enter a state of hibernation, taking breaks every few weeks to forage for food.

4-in-4 Day 4: Tessellation Art

For the last day of 4-in-4, I opted to make an Escher-inspired tessellation pattern. It involved a lot of rotating, flipping, copying and pasting in illustrator. The images are vectors, so I can resize, repeat, and recolor as much as I like. I’m fairly happy with the result, although some of the positioning could use a little work.

4-in-4 Day 3: Futuristic Makeup application

Have you ever seen The Fifth Element? No? Well, no excuses. it’s available on Hulu.

My inspiration for today’s project came from a scene 53 minutes and 3 seconds into the movie. Leeloo, the supreme being, is in the priest’s apartment. She’s just survived a spaceship crash landing, was regenerated from a few living cells, and endured a car chase. Needless to say, she needs some make-up. Now.

David, the priest’s apprentice, hands Leeloo a box. She may be the supreme being, but nobody’s perfect. She looks at it quizzically, turns it around in her hands, and holds it up to her face. When she removes it, a miracle! She’s been beautifully done-up in less than 5 seconds. (Here’s a poor quality Japanese version of the scene )

Ladies, wouldn’t you love to simplify your daily ritual? I know I hate to leave my room without a thick coat of mascara. At last, a quick and easy solution to all your makeup application needs! Space/Face will have you looking your best before you even get out of bed.

To be fair, the actual product is a bit less elegant than my advertisement suggests. I began by making a mold of my face using ArtMolds SloSet mold gel. After standing, blind and alone, for 20 minutes in the basement bathroom of Tisch, I emerged with an accurate impression of my eyelids in hand. Next, I started to coat the cast with layers of liquid latex. I was hoping to make a 1/4 inch, flexible mask, but 6+ hours later, I still hadn’t built up enough thickness for the mask to maintain shape on it’s own. I ditched the flexible idea and decided to use the original impression itself.

I mixed up a few garish makeup colors from eyeshadow and Vaseline and used them to paint the petroleum jelly-coated impression. I held the mask to my face, removed it, and voila! My eyes were coated in color.

4-in-4 Day 2: Storage Necklace

My idea for today was to make a necklace that stores medicine. The drawing above is my original (and completely unrealistic) design: a modular, waterproof necklace or bracelet made of flexible rubber or plastic that stores pills in pouches similar to the air pockets in seaweed.  Of course, I had to adapt the design to something that I could make–the original plan is something that needs to be manufactured. I searched far and wide for tiny plastic containers but, lo and behold, I could not find anything as small or as pill-shaped as I would have liked. I ended up ordering some miniature vials with screw caps and round snap-top containers from a pharmaceutical supplier; it is important to me that the medicine is stored in a water and air-tight vessel.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to make the plastic containers less antiseptic looking. My first attempt was to create a shiny top for them using yarn embedded in resin. Our workspace at ITP isn’t well ventilated, so I had to (once again!) venture outside to work on the project. In my haste to get out of the cold, I didn’t give the resin enough time to set. Several hours later, the yarn/resin combo was still a little mushy, and I decided to try something else.

I opted to wrap the plastic vials and their in green yarn (perhaps a subconscious reference to the seaweed idea). Three vials are strung together end-to-end, and connected to the long string that serves as the long part of the necklace. I’m not completely thrilled with the end result–I would have preferred something a bit less messy–but it does serve the original purpose of the project.

4-in-4 Day 1: Homing Device

The Homing Device is an arrow that always points towards home.

For my first 4-in-4 project, I decided to create a compass-like tool that always points toward a pre-determined longitude and latitude. The device uses parallax GPS module with built-in compass functionality to figure out the user’s current position and heading (the angle the device is pointing to relative to N) from NIMEA data. Next, it calculates the distance and bearing (angle that the device needs to point relative to N to get to a certain place) between the current longitude and latitude and the desired coordinates. Finally, the device pulses a continuous rotation servomotor for the interval necessary to move the arrow from the current position to the desired position.

The GPS doesn’t work indoors (it requires a connection with 3 satellites for the data to be considered valid), so I had to test outside in the cold. Aside from occasional gaps in the NIMEA GPS data coming in through the receiver, the homing device seems to work!

The Device:

What’s Inside:

A few problems:

The continuous rotation servo does not have an internal potentiometer, so (1) it requires manual positioning when it is turned on so that it has the same heading as the GPS’s, and (2) the pulses are not completely accurate so the arrow needs to be redirected to the GPS’s heading to recalibrate after ~20 uses.

Click here for the code.