Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

Initially this script replicated some drawings I have been working on in my sketchbook. Although it’s very meditative to create such drawings I feel the interesting aspect is the form and texture that emerges from the repetition of the simple process. Creating a script to replicate this system allows the work to be detached from a particular composition and focus on these aspects which interest me. It also allows for the image to be animated.

The script is written in Processing. Each circle buds new circles at random angles. The new circles grow until the hit they collide with another. The color of each is a slight variation of it’s parent.

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In my quest to master the web I’ve redesigned my site a few times. Unfortunately I keep coming across new things to learn and after finishing each re-design i find something wrong with it. So here it is for the eighth (give or take) time. My goal was to make the site a little more professional and show off my work a little better. The results not so bad, so maybe I’ll give it a rest for a few months.

This is the same script as my last video. Each particle on the sphere has a curve drawn to all nearby particles with an extra point in the middle scaled toward the center. This creates a spike at each point. Again the height is determined by the density of particles in a particular area on the sphere. The script uses the OpenGL 3d environment and the video library to capture the rendering. The OpenGL library has some issues working with the video library but renders many layers of transparent objects better.

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This Processing script generates a randomized particle system over a sphere. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days and, although the script has gotten a little messy, I’ve come up with a few interesting things. Each particle is generated from two random rotations and a set radius and contains a second point based on another radius. Initially I was using these points to create curves radiating from each particle, but got a little distracted. In this video the second radius of each point is dynamically calculated based on the density of particles it’s proximity. Lines are drawn between nearby points to create the web effect.

A few snapshots of my dog and some new friends playing by the river. There are a few more on my flickr.

The next step in my Wikipedia project is to create a static map of the entire site (more than 2.5 million pages). I’m not entirely sure how large the image will be, but judging by small scale renders the vector file should be no more than a two or three hundred megabytes. This is huge, but to be honest not as large as I expected. I’m building a new script which will not render any of the pages on the screen and will run autonomously, first getting the data, then organizing it, modifying placement to prevent overlapping text, and finally exporting a PDF file. Hopefully I can build the script to sacrifice time for a lack of power so I can use computers currently available to me.

WikiWeb is a piece created in Processing which creates a live, interactive visualization of Wikipedia. I’ve rescripted aspects of the code to make it run a little better and also added a better user interface, hopefully making it easier to use. The new version includes a toolbar of possible actions and a help and reset button. Any feedback on the changes or the project in general is very much appreciated.

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