DesignPrologue
The subject matter for my
interests harks back to my undergraduate days between 1997 and 1999. Where my
very badly written dissertation explored the idea of Globalisation within
design. Something that I didn't feel had happened yet. The internet was still pretty
new ( to me and most 'normal' people anyway ) and we still received the
majority of our knowledge in a slightly time-lapsed and localised manner. This
was a time, not too long ago, when you actually had to pay for an email account
and the worlds biggest search engine was something called Alta Vista.
I believe the people at
Google were still thinking at this point.
The only access I had to
the Internet was in the lecturer’s office within the University. This is where
I learnt to code/ hack in a very basic manner. But it was this small amount of
access to that one machine - if memory serves me correctly it was an Apple
Performma 6300. A powerhouse of its time.
That led me in to a world
that as a design student was like alchemy. Programming and coding was practiced
by mathematicians and computer science geeks, not Graphic design students. I
felt like the lid had been taken off, inside was a big box of very confusing
wires, they don't like to make it easy for you, if you’re not already a member
of the genius club!
Not many people were
writing about the designer coder at the time, possibly Steven Heller being the
most aware. Other influences stemmed from Patrick Walker, my tutor at the time
and later to be colleague and friend. These people kept my interest and
encouraged what was a niche interest on a traditional design degree.
The thing
that hooked my attention were things like Ian Sinclair’s walks of discovery and
Italo Calvino’s musing on Marco Polo’s Invisible Cities - the idea that
someone, who supposedly never left Venice could imagine worlds far away. I
loved the idea of capturing a global moment in time from a single geographic
point.
Process
Leaping forward to the
present day via Macromedia Director, Flash and various text based code editors
and a load of commercial web projects. I find myself wanting to channel a small
part of what I have learned and bring it back in to design and illustration.
There are lots of interesting people and designers working in the field of
generative imagery and visualising data at the moment, all with good merit.
Particularly Matt Pike [ Universal Everything ]
and Karsten Schmidtt AKA Toxi. These are people writing proprietary code with
reasonable sized budgets with large gallery backing and commercial interest.
Their latest outing with Super Computer Romantics was something to behold.
My aim is to merge a load
of existing API's and code libraries and write a small compact program that
creates images about a single moment within a day. A document that references a
single moment in time. This may seem a bit pointless and arbitrary, but for me
the interest lies in the fact that after I've written the code and unleashed it
on the world. All of the image making will be done by other people’s actions
and random events, not controlled by me. My program will have some say on the
final output, but will have no control over the input. I'm interested to see,
if over the period of 365 days any of the images produced, somehow reflect the
events of the world on that day. Or in anyway reflect the headlines of the day
after.
(Much as Marco polo did with his time-lapsed version of the far reaches
of the globe). I'm also fascinated to see if they are beautiful objects, with
artistic merit. I am, after all approaching this with the sensibilities of a
Graphic Designer. But will my influences get lost amongst the random events?
I've demoed a much
smaller version of this experiment using a static dataset of the Fortune 1000
companies. The program runs through the dataset 1 by 1 until it reaches 1000.
Only leaving 1 image at the end. Every subsequent input obliterates part of the
original image, therefore creates a new deeper more interesting image. For me
this produced some really simple, interesting outcomes but the inputs were far
too predictable. I should at this point say that everything will be produced
using a combination of Php, MySQL and PHP GD libraries. Very old stuff in terms
of open source code.
In terms of timescales I'm looking at around 24 months
to complete the project.
..
/outputs
projectsomething.com
