The following video illustrates my first basic experiments using Unity.
The final piece is nothing but process. It should be seen as nothing more.
Art Strategies /
Breaking the urban environment
Brings Chernobyl 27 years after into mind.
Nature begins to swallow human evidence.
3D printing as nature. Not to fix
Alternative: Pollution in our digital environments.
pollution:
[puh-loo-shuh n]
noun
The introduction of harmful substances or products into the environment.
What about our digital environments?
ICM final project proposal /
Stop Motion Animation /
For our fist Animation assignment we were tasked to explore the basics of the medium through a stop motion film. Immediately the low frame rate of security cameras came to mind. In a way the videos produced by this machines have already a stop motion feeling to them.
We also saw an opportunity to think about what it means to be constantly surveilled, specially without being aware of it.
insecure cameras /
Last summer I happened attend a coding meetup, there I actually met Leon Eckert who turns out to also be an ITP student (2nd year)! One of the presenters during the meetup was showing a project he did with insecure cameras pulled from insecam.org. At this point I became really intrigued by the concept and once in NYC, I started looking for cameras in the city.
Most of the cameras happen to be inside buildings. Aside of being a little creepy they are not very interesting to me, this lead me to focus in just a couple of cameras which pointed to the outdoors.
After going through the 100 or so cameras in nyc, I came across two that looked promising, the problem then was that not a lot of information is given about the location of the cameras, except for... well, the camera feed itself.
Tracking the locations
The first camera I found was actually the one with the cobblestone ground, this actually narrowed down the search significantly since only a couple of streets in ny have this type of pavement.
Looking through the internet, I came across this NYC Bike Maps website that lists all the streets in the city with cobblestone pavements.
http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/cobblestones/
After a long virtual walk I finally found that distinctive red building!
Time to go pay a personal visit!
Thinking forward, I am not exactly sure what do I want to do with this knowledge, the first thing that comes to mind is a video but there could be other things to explore. Perhaps distance the project from questions of privacy and surveillance and use the cameras a medium to explore something completely different.
In the mean time, here a quick video a couple of friends and I did:
New tab window to the sky /
This idea was inspired by spending too much time in front of the computer and not enough time looking at the moon.
I first started by looking at the Astronomical Applications Department website (aa.usno.navy.mill), in particular at their moon phase api.
Here I learned that the most basic api call I could make was something like this:
"http://api.usno.navy.mil/moon/phase?date=today&nump=1"
Which in tern returned a JSON string with well... todays moon.
{
"error": false,
"apiversion": "1.3.0",
"year": 2016,
"month": 10,
"day": 27,
"numphases": 1,
"datechanged": false,
"phasedata": [
{
"phase": "New Moon",
"date": "2016 Oct 30",
"time": "17:38"
}
]
}See how the date I entere (Oct, 27) doesn't match the date returned for the phase (Oct 30)? Thats because Oct 27 did not have a full phase and the next actual phase was Oct 30.
This was my first swing at using APIs but I realized that I could go much deeper still exploring this same API.
The sun
Using a couple of extra parameters, I could get not only the phase of the moon but also the time it would set and rise for a given location. The same was true for the sun which made me excited about doing a day animation.
{
"error":false,
"apiversion":"1.3.0",
"year":2016,
"month":10,
"day":26,
"dayofweek":"Wednesday",
"datechanged":false,
"state":"NY",
"city":"New York",
"lon":-73.92,
"lat":40.73,
"county":"",
"tz":-5,
"isdst":"yes",
"sundata":[
{"phen":"BC", "time":"6:52 a.m. DT"},
{"phen":"R", "time":"7:20 a.m. DT"},
{"phen":"U", "time":"12:40 p.m. DT"},
{"phen":"S", "time":"5:59 p.m. DT"},
{"phen":"EC", "time":"6:27 p.m. DT"}],
"moondata":[
{"phen":"R", "time":"3:17 a.m. DT"},
{"phen":"U", "time":"9:50 a.m. DT"},
{"phen":"S", "time":"4:16 p.m. DT"}],
"closestphase":{"phase":"Last Quarter","date":"October 22, 2016","time":"3:14 p.m. DT"},
"fracillum":"15%",
"curphase":"Waning Crescent"
}The structure is slightly different so it required a little tweaking but nothing crazy. What took a while to figure out is that for some days, the moon will set before it rises... WHAT??? This happens when the moon rises duing the evening and sets in the morning, as you would usually expect, the problem is that the moon is setting on the next different day. Which means that if you only look at one day, the moon will set before it rises. This kept causing all this problems in my animation where you would see the moon come out from the wrong side and set on the opposite time at the wrong time.
At the end I decided to include this little program as my default new tab in chrome, meaning that every time I open a new tab I see a subtle reminder that there is more than pixels in this world, and that perhaps it is worth going outside to explore it.