Spray Dots

We explore painting things that move with dots that follow. We use placement and motion in the plane to represent abstract concepts rather than precise motion in the domain.

We'll present this material in a two hour workshop sponsored by hackoregon and techfest northwest on Saturday August 21, 2015. See tfnw

History and inspiration for this work.

Course Design for small and maybe large audiences.

Github Repo working through an example.

We produce the visual/computational elements that could be for a website documenting some aspect of, say, a political process, but stop short of that visualization. Our interest here is in the elements, the authoring process, and the tools available to authors.

This project proceeds by small steps through phases.

* assembling a workplace * exploring specific artistic material * considering the artistic process

At each step we have a working program and the means to manipulate it. This short video shows the artistic material as we begin to consider its creative application.

VIMEO 136532178 The test application while still in development. At this point the test data generation and the animated rendering has been factored into their own abstractions.

We have enjoyed every step. When we add five lines we take the time to explore each one. Would four lines do? When we add a numeric constant we take the time to explore possible values. Would a larger number work differently? In what way?

We present a beautiful material, d3 force layout, made for us by a genius and a master, Mike Bostock. We need not be genius ourselves to follow in his footsteps. But we do need intense curiosity if we are to master these techniques. We also need a plan that works and a tidy studio. You will find these here.