Extirpation

The Video

puddle — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 02:29:35 +0000

Oh dear, it has been a long time, but here is the video from the exhibition

Feedback

puddle — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 08:52:15 +0000

For those of you who have come and seen the work, thank you and also please feel free to write any thoughts/comments feedback you may have thought of on this blog.

Jason and Adam.

Report as of Saturday

puddle — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 08:51:25 +0000

We’ve been getting great feedback from people. Its been really gratifying to have people come, interact and really engage with the work. I think that people have really enjoyed it, momentum has been building as people bring friends and partners to come play.
Its been fascinating to hear peoples thoughts on what it’s about, and also about where it could go, what would be nice to change.
I think we need to look at making the relationships more obvious – some sort of ‘hook’ for people to initially engage with. A lot of people tend to be in a gallery modality and stand back to observer, rather than enter the space – perhaps some sort of initial interaction would encourage people to engage a bit more.
An interesting thought was the politic behind our message. We honestly hadn’t considered the politics behind it, more focusing on the relationships and parallels with ecological concerns.
People do like seeing their faces on the leaves, and for the most part appreciate the circularity of it, and also the subtle blending of face and leaf, rather then being more overt about it.
We got some great documentation footage thanks to Sascha’s filming, which will be great to pitch to various conferences, festivals and galleries. ANAT, one of our supporters, came along and I think were very pleased with what we had done.
Something we will look at immediately is getting in touch with a group at Sydney University who develop software and programs for ecological accounting – by area, by industry etc. It will be very interesting to feed in more real world data to the mix.
Though from an artistic standpoint, we have to be careful that it doesn’t become so big and monumental that it loses the personal story that this version has. I quite like the small immediacy of this version, it seems a bit more empowering to the individual, rather than deluging them with the vastness of the ecological problems the planet is facing. We hope that the work sparks an interest in the issues and that they will investigate further. We have resolved to upgrade this website, and put a lot more information and links to scientific data on it, hopefully becoming a mini-portal.
Some people were wondering about a more photo-real sort of look for the piece, which we had certainly considered, but rejected because we didn’t think a/ we could do the natural world justice and b/ its not a real representation of the environment, it is a parallel, an interpretation . It parallels the manmade with the natural. Though we are interested in varying the system – more creatures, more varieties of plants and also putting in the primary producers, which are amongst the first to be affected in any given system.

puddle — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:42:03 +0000

Its up and running! It was a very tough setup, due to various snafus in our supply lines, but all good. We’ve been up 2 days, its been a little slow but hoping that the weekend will bring more people to the festival
Met some fantastic people already and have a lot of food for thought for mk2 of this project.
More soon.
here is the gallery info sheet
extirpationflyer.pdf

Poetry

puddle — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 16:55:53 +0000

We just recorded some hauntingly beautiful poetry written and read by Gareth Sion Jenkins. Its awesome, its going to go great with the soundscape. I”ll leave Adam to say more sound-wise

Milliseconds pt 2

puddle — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 16:54:45 +0000

HAHA. another 32ms gone! All by changing a variable name. Somehow. Booya.
i have crawled back to 30fps+ without overclocking.

Smooth Growth

puddle — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:24:55 +0000

Smoothly growing L-systems are hard. Especially with all the crazy dynamical things that extirpation seeks to achieve. I’ve found that its relatively easy to get a shape you want, but much harder to make it grow in a pleasing way. Its even harder to make it go the way you want in a natural seeming way.

On another note, with the success of the logo image, I’ve decided to render the trees in a much starker, graphic way, so its a bright white silhouette rather than attempting to be ‘barkish’. Animations of growing and whatnot will come. Or you’ll just have to come to the show.

RSI

puddle — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:12:53 +0000

I think I’m getting RSI in my hand.
That is all.

Milliseconds

puddle — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:52:32 +0000

I shaved off 20ms, adding 60% to my frame rate!!!

Obviously I need to get out more, and possibly get a girlfriend….

Progress 2

puddle — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 10:47:59 +0000

So in a valiant attempt to solve the face problem, I worked on using a totally realtime solution, a complicated, dynamical L-system. The other bonus of this is that it wont repeat – the trees can grow differently each time, the leaves fall differently each time, its much better.
Check it
There is of course a downside and that is, it doesn’t look quite as buttery smooth as the prerendered one, simply because I can’t afford 90000 polygons per tree nor run the stunningly complex nCloth simulation. But I think its a fair trade.

edit – apparently the quicktime plugin seems to throw a fit with this file, so try right clicking and save target as. You need the latest quicktime. Blah

in the interests of nerdiness here is the algorithm. I’d love to take credit, but its derived from CMIFX’s Lsystems DVD. If you’re into lsystems, Dig it

premise F+-
FX(40)
X(h): (t X(h):(t=d) = J