Tuesday, September 20, 2011

It's Moving!

Here's the "Barf Monster" that I made using Processing to code the drawing and then to animate it. Part of me feels like I'm going backwards because my illustration medium is Adobe Illustrator, and I've dabbled in Flash and Adobe After Effects, so it's funny to have spent hours putting this drawing together when I could probably have done it within minutes using the aforementioned programs.

Still, the reason why I'm taking this course is because I want to know "how" things work. Why is it that when I put my stylus onto the tablet that a mark is made on the monitor? Curiosity is an important quality that I want to retain in my studio practice because it makes things go forward. However, the word forward makes me nervous because part of me is working on staying in the present, so flinging my thoughts and intentions too far into the future makes me wonder if I'm being dismissive of where I am right now; if I'm staving off the present to exist in some place that hasn't even formed yet.
This is where fantasies are created.
Or, it maybe it's goal setting?
I've wondered if it could also be equivalent to creative block; trying to do too many things at once, instead of focusing on one task at a time.
This seems almost counter intuitive in the age of multi-tasking, but I'd be lying to you if this never crossed my mind.
One of my favourite episodes of Ira Glass' "This American Life" is the one called "New Beginnings," that features Kevin Kelly who is the former executive editor of "Wired" magazine. He recounts his story as a young photo journalist who gets locked out of the place where he is staying in Jerusalem, and so he decides to sleep on the alleged spot where Jesus was crucified. Without getting too much into the details of it, he has a revelation which inspires him to create a type of experiment in which he is the sole participant. It's not a chemistry experiment where there are liquids, and beakers, and bunsen burners, rather it's more of a psychological one in which he strives to live only in the present for several months.

For most of my adult life, I've struggled to exist in the present.
Maybe it's because I come from a family where being in the present always seemed like a struggle, not because my parents didn't love us, they did very much, but it was trying to create a new beginning in a new place, and then to fight to exist on a level amongst our neighbours who always seemed to have
more.
It's no wonder why Alice crossed over through the looking glass.
Social and economic classes aside, I understand how easily it is to become enamoured, or glamoured in a true-blood sort of way, by the shiny exterior to make you want to hurl yourself into its interior.

* You can see more of what my classmates and I have done in our Intro to Interactive Multimedia class at openprocessing.org. You can view the source code by clicking on the "Source Code" text to the right of the image. By the way, if you click on the animation you can make the water rise and the barf disappear. I know, I know... it's crudely done, but hey, save me the grief, I'm only at the beginning.

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