Andy Li's Blog

The installation art I have been working on since last month have been installed. You can now see it in action in Hong Kong Book Fair from 20-26 July at Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Centre, inside the booth of CityU Press (1D-A28).

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=7506253&id=96844704488&fbid=10150280671979489

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=7506266&id=96844704488&fbid=10150280672364489

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=7506261&id=96844704488&fbid=10150280672209489

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=7506250&id=96844704488&fbid=10150280671884489

Kinect(OpenNI) is used for motion tracking, running a program I wrote in C++ with openFrameworks. Collision and softbody simulation is done by Bullet.

Artist statement

“Between the lines/書中” is an interactive installation that visualizes the famous Chinese proverb “書中自有黃金屋”, which literally means “A book holds a house of gold”.

Viewers can go into a 3D virtual space where Chinese literature sentences suspended all over the place. By waving and touching, the Chinese characters will be transformed into gold. And with enough golden characters, a house of gold will be constructed.

The Chinese sentences are extracted from The Four Books(四書), which are the authoritative texts of Confucianism(儒家) in China written two thousand years ago. They are displayed in both traditional Chinese calligraphy and modern fonts, in the meaning of those classic texts are relevant to society independent of time.

The interaction is a visual representation of the joyful and rewarding experience of reading books. There can be multiple viewers interact with the installation at the same time, which aligned to the fact that book reading can be a social process, where readers can share thoughts, recommend books to each other.

Chinese sentences that hang inside the screen.

The house of gold appears when there is enough golden sentences.

Viewers can touch the sentences and turn them into gold.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=255107494499599

The generative arts are going to be shown in Playful Media, which is the showcase of BScCM, the Bachelor degree program I graduated last year. This is going to be my 4th year joining the exhibition(2010, 2009, 2008)! If you are in Hong Kong and have time, come to have a look!

It’s almost half a year, coding a piece of generative art everyday using haXe and openFrameworks. It was certainly fun and educational to me, as I had to keep reading, trying and mixing all those generating methods, brainstorming new algorithm, looking for best programming approach etc. Doing all those things everyday sharpen my skill a lot, and I’m really excited when people tweet about them, leave comment here or over Flickr. Thanks guys!

However, I decided to stop continuing the journey (at least for a while). Occurring to me often in the last few weeks, I either spent too much time on one piece, affecting my school works, or because I have to finish some urgent things, I tweaked only a little on the previous code, resulted in producing an unsatisfactory piece. I was sick and had a fever last week, which became a good time to close the project.

I now have more time to play with other interesting ideas, and finishing the works that queued up. hxOpenFrameworks will continue be developed, of course. Let’s expect some OpenCV, Kinect (OpenNI) and other goodness

Finally here are the selected pieces I made in June:

Kept the fractal circles idea going.

Some more saturated color with complementary color scheme.

Reduced opacity, the circles merged nicely to each other.

Simplified but surprisely eye-catching vector-style flower.

I ported Eugene Zatepyakin(in-spirit)’s AS3 FluidSolver to haXe and started to play with it.

Here I put several rotating color sources in the center and push out dark red colors. Pretty horror looking.

More sources, larger radius. It looks like an eclipse, does it?

An eye-catching fire ring. The key is to add color and force periodically other than continuously.

Simulating the diffusion of ink on paper.

A cup of generative latte. Think I can build an app for making coffee art.

Another color, another pattern.

The fifth month of doing a piece of generative art everyday using haXe and openframeworks. As a reminder, all the pieces can be viewed from my Flickr set. Also the haXe source code for generating those images can be found in the description in the corresponding Flickr page. Here below are the selected pieces made in this month:

Drawing only part of the lines generated by midpoint displacement algorithm can give out some interesting unknown creature contours, looking into each other’s eyes.

Another arrangement. It now looks like an island.

Used a algorithm that I read from somewhere, that start with a point with some color, for each iteration the color spread to the neighbors with a little variation. I really love its oil-painting texture.

Increased the spread’s random factor, allowing it to spread a little bit backward.

Keeped changing the spread implementation. This one keep increasing its hue from the center with a probability of reseting itself (to red).

Made the spread much more unstable and let there be more than one starting point. Resetting the lightness to 0 periodically gave out interesting organic layers.

Well, a beautiful rainbow color cup water mark on tablecloth…?

Played with fractal patterns. Full of circles in different sizes and positions in ratio.

Used only small circles. Pretty cyber-looking.

Used solid-filled circles. Colorful snowflakes.

Simpler smaller patterns.