creative coding // assignment and closing thoughts

Our little group of fledgling coders are getting a gentle shove from the nest after only 2 weeks of learning, and now have to hand in our very first assignment. Having been a university student many, many moons ago, in a very different field, the fear associated with handing in an assignment is real. We were graded harshly and there was no turning back. The fact that we have the opportunity to refine our assignments before the summative submission is truly a gift which I personally appreciate, especially in situations such as this where I don't feel fully comfortable with the subject matter. Who knows, maybe my simple little sketches were enough and I'll be happy to move forward as is. As my mother always says, "less is more." Sometimes I listen to her, except when it comes to tattoos. Sorry, Ma.

Our final assignment called for three deliverables, which apparently is a word we will be hearing a lot of in the professional realm. Each one had to show that we how these things worked and had a desirable result at the end of it. We had our Review today, which wasn't nearly as intimidating as I had anticipated. I think one of the benefits of being a "mature" student is not having to worry about looking cool in front of my classmates or not making a fool of myself. Given that I'm old enough to be some of their mothers, I had no problem taking one for the team and going first today, despite still having nerves presenting in front of a group of people I still barely know, especially being out first Review. I was going to say, "to my surprise," but honestly I wasn't surprised by the outpouring of positivity from the group. It was a positive boost I didn't realize I needed.

One of the things that was most interesting were the final results. It truly is amazing when you give a group of people the very same instructions, and everyone puts their own spin on it. I guess that's the fun thing about art and human individuality, isn't it? Having the ability to take something that we all started the very same way and create really neat pieces based on our personalities, backgrounds, aesthetics, and really what makes us who we are as individuals. As I mentioned in pervious entries, I thrive in chaos. One of my favorite styles of tattooing is called trash polka. It was originally an anarchist art movement, and tattoo artists saw it and said, "dope, let's do THAT." The elements of it are a pieces or pieces of realism, text, and a limited color palette of black and red to varying degrees. Although it looks crazy from a distance, when you sit down and dissect it to its individual pieces, it really is a powerful style of art. One of the words that got thrown around a lot today was the idea of pieces "evoking" something within us as people. Trash polka, in all of its chaos, evokes a sense of a call to action, or a feeling of energy which is something I really appreciate about it. I tried to evoke a nostalgia of sorts to the 80s or 90s with the colors I chose for my first of the three final pieces, while harnessing the chaos within a contact sheet. One of these pieces alone are interesting to look at for sure, but when you add another 8, or 29, or 99 to that one, you get this really cool effect of structure within chaos, much like trash polka. And to add another layer of chaos, I let the frame rate run, initially for 100 frames, and then I brought it down to 30. So I left my fate to the will of the machine.

My second submission was a take on the random circle/bubbles from the third workshop. In the workshop example, we used a single color range, which appeared to be greens and blues. I wanted to add a little pizzazz to the code without changing it entirely, so I added 2 more color codes in order to randomize, essentially, all of the colors within the color wheel. The result was this really beautiful, kind of trippy, rainbow effect. What I liked so much about it is the effervescence, because of my personality. There is the hard edged, spiky, chaotic side that loves tattoos, adrenaline, and pit bulls, but there is also an, albeit, hidden softer side that likes glitter, simple pleasures like the smell of an old book or fresh rainfall, and unicorns. I never thought this deeply about it while creating these two pieces, but clearly my subconscious did. Its actually really intriguing how this played out that way, putting little pieces, little hints of what make me who I am, into these seemingly rudimentary pieces of digital art. But that's the thing, art has no rules, really. You don't have to recreate the Sistine Chapel in order to evoke a feeling from someone. Sometimes it really is just colors and lines on a screen analyzed on a psychological level. It also shows that although the compute randomizes the sketches, there is still a human bias when choosing the final results, which is what I did here. I clicked through until I found the frames that I liked the most, for whatever reason, whether it was the balance of color, the composition, or just the simple fact that I just liked it. I've gone a bit contact sheet mad; there is something so satisfying about seeing the fruits of your labor all in one place, in a nice grid. I also used a 3x3 grid because my tattoo artist brain was like, "odd numbers are more aesthetically pleasing," which is true.

This last piece made the cut for no other reason than how much effort went into making it and the things I learned from it. I hated this. Every second of it. I've never been so frustrated with symbols and numbers and letters on a screen. I started with a sketch we had done in one of the workshops and tried to put my own spin on it. I'm including the original code to show how absurd it was. It is literally labeled "rectsAndSquaresForLoopsMess" because its a train wreck of a code, and unlike other train wrecks that you can't look away from, this one makes me want to shut my eyes.

Like. What even is this. But, with the gracious help of Saint Paul, we figured out where I was going wrong. Basically, I was taking something that could be made very simply, and adding 10 extra steps. That's the thing about code, there is always a way to simplify complex codes. This is where our friend the for loop comes into play again. What I was initially trying to do was add three circles and three rectangles in varying color, size, and stroke weight. The issue was that, for starters, things were getting stuck, going off the canvas, just generally existing to make my life difficult. Part of my problem was the positioning of lines of code, for example I input the strokeWeight only once, right at the beginning, therefor each shape had the same stroke weight. We remedied that by putting stroke weight before each shape. We then condensed the whole thing by using floats and a for loop. To be totally honest, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the floats, for loops, and int, but I truly think its a case of we literally had two week of learning things that take people years to learn. Part of my problem, especially as an artist, is that I expect to immediately be good at something and if I'm not, it's clearly a fault in me that I can't create this complex, incredible piece of code. The rational side of my brain is saying, "right, but you've been doing this for two weeks, it's okay to not know everything, it's okay to learn." While the emotional side is calling me a failure; I think maybe this is more of an American curse of thought than anything else. One of the things I will take away from this first module is to be gentler with myself; I haven't been a student in 12 years, I'm learning something entirely new, and it's okay to ask questions, and admit when I need help.

So, once we got it down to a manageable size, I made yet another contact sheet. I did this by saving individual frames as opposed to computer chosen chaos. What is interesting about it is if you look at the sheet from afar, you can see a bit of a pattern, especially in the top right that looks like it's in rainbow order from red to blue. The other bias is the resounding amount of pink, which is another anomaly of my personality: I have three favorite colors - black, pink, and turquoise. As Paul pointed out earlier, this piece as a whole is really aesthetically pleasing and could be a nice print. When you look at the individual pieces though, it really shows the scope of randomizing these codes and what it can do to simple shapes on a screen.

Well. Now that I have provided nothing, surely, but pure entertainment, I'll leave you with some closing thoughts. As a former English/Publishing graduate who had one singular semester of coding 12 years ago, and was also too stubborn to have anything to do with digital artwork, coding was frankly intimidating. It still is, in a lot of respects, but the thing about art in all forms is it's a learn by doing type deal. The more I practice and play around with different codes, the more I'll understand. I will ask as many questions as I can, because that was my problem in past educational settings. I didn't want to ask questions for fear that the teacher might think I wasn't paying attention or that I wasn't smart enough to grasp the concept. But now, after 19 years of education, I have learned from my mistakes and am going to get the most out of all of this that I can. Coding went from being this entity that in many ways was like a unicorn to me, rare and misunderstood, to maybe a little bit more like a panther, hard to find but not impossible. My analogies are magical, I know. I am excited to see where the next four years takes me, and to see what aspects of my life I can apply to this degree, whether it's things I've learned from tattooing, various art classes over the years, or even my past degrees. It is all gained knowledge, and that is what's important here.