To view the artwork visit http://artworkprocess.net/influence/
Influence
Paper, plastic, projection,
javascript, laptop
In the digital era we are all
connected. Friendships are formed and destroyed with the click of a
button. What has not changed is the effect that social interaction
has on us. You are the average of the closest people you spend time
with.
Tristan Griffin 2015
press F11 to fullscreen then click here to play http://artworkprocess.net/influence/game.html
click here to calibrate sculpures http://artworkprocess.net/influence/calibrate.html
click here for the written statement http://artworkprocess.net/influence/written%20statement.html
For project 1 the outline was to
produce an artgame, with a minimum of 4 scenes/levels, a start screen
that explains the work, gives it a title and lets you move to the
artwork.
My arts practice
focuses on the relationship of religion, contemporary society and the
human condition. With this in mind my intention with the artgame was
to explore the transcendental effect of social influence on social
networks in contemporary society.
To realise the
artgame I wrote a basic HTML game engine with javascript controlling
the HTML/CSS elements, the code has notes through out it so feel free
to browse game.html ( I recommend using Sublime text editor). The
game is run on a standard web browser by opening index.html and made
fullscreen (f11 on the crome browser). The device running the game
should be a laptop that has video output capabilities. This output
is run through a projector, which projects onto the figure sculptures
(as seen in the video).
Display of work:The artgame is intended
to be displayed in an art gallery or dedicated space, for this
assessment a miniturised set of human figures are being used but
ideally life sized figures should be used so viewers can walk around
them. The ideal installation is for the sculptures/figures being life
size, allowing viewers to walk inside the game and the “player”
facing away from the installation with the projector above/near them.
The artgame essentially is a game
board, consisting of 12(3 x 4) places for pieces to sit, both in
physical(sculptures) and digital space(pseudo 3D/isometric). So when
the 'player' moves a piece on the digital game board the move is then
projected onto the physical game board.
To
interact with the artwork: Once loaded click on the human
figures, you will see small white dots appear, this is where you can
move the selected human figure to. The figures will change once there
is more of one type of figure around it, ie if there are two blue
figures and one paper figure next to each other, the paper figure
will turn into a blue figure. Once all of the figures are the same
type the next set of figures is loaded.
There are 5 levels and one demo level
which begins if there is no human interaction after 30 seconds, the
demo level can be exited at any time by clicking on a figure. As the
levels increase players will experience a loss of control as pieces
begin to move on their own.
Level 1: Basic piece movement
Level 2: as above
Level 3: a piece moves by itself every
X seconds
Level 4: a piece teleports by itself
every X seconds
Level 5: a piece teleports and a piece
moves every X seconds
Rationale and research
Too
many people take for granted the effect that those around them have.
I have become very aware of the effect people have on each other,
teachers (you can only ever be as good as your teacher), friendships,
family etc. Success coaches and inspirational speakers often say to
surround yourself with people who are successful and to be aware of
the negativity that can come from people.
Family
members, including spouses, children, parents and in-laws, can be an
ongoing source of discouragement and frustration.
During
the holiday break I noticed that I started to take on the anger of
those people around me. I ended up having to distance myself from
them to find my peace once more. Since coming to Brisbane to study I
have noticed the difference in the education level of my "social
circle" which is changing the way that I approach my study and
life. In particular when joining the PASS group the comment was made
that the people around you right now are the ones you are going to
want to be around because they are dedicated to study.
The late Jim Rohn, a contemporary
motivational speaker, is credited with saying “You are the average
of the five people that you spend the most time with,”
Some other quotes are:
- “Birds of a feather flock together”
- “Positive relationships support positive behaviors .”
- “If you lie down with dogs you'll wake up with fleas”
- “You can know a man by the company that he keeps”
- “Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person, do not associate with one easily angered or you may learn their ways” proverbs 22:24
- “Bad company corrupts good character.” 1 Corinthians 15:33
Social effect on who we are and its
importance is not a new concept, the last saying is from over 2000
years ago.
Keeping
this in mind I wanted to explore this concept of social effect and I
wanted to extend it to include the effects of social media.
Technology has become an important part of our culture, and has
changed the way that we interact socially on a daily basis. We now
have the ability to form and destroy friendships with the click of a
button with people all over the world. But what effect is this
apparent illusion of control and detachment really having on us.
(I
try to keep in mind that my role as an artist is to propose questions
to the view not answers)
The
use of physical space in the artgame is to support the concept of
influence and social interaction. The two forms of interaction the
physical and digital allude to our uses of social media and every day
interaction and play on our perceived sense of control over our
social interaction and that it does effect the real world. Having the
'player' orientated away from the sculptures is to strengthen that
sense of detachment from the effect that they are having.
Production of the art
assets
Imagery:
The Game logo and figures used in the
game are photos of sculptures that I created.
The aesthetic appearance and materials
used in their production were chosen to support the concept of
transcendental change. I wanted to represent the spiritual and the
worldly. ( These are both concepts and terms used regularly in the
church community. Worldy referring to someone who partakes and is
often consumed by the daily barrage of the rat race,advertising,
stresses ( financial,sexual etc) ) I chose to use newspaper clippings
from the tweed daily, mostly advertising and headline articles for
the worldy figure. For the spiritual figure I chose to use sticky
tape, for its transparent and binding materiality.
Newspaper clippings
used on the "worldy" figure
Creation of the human
figure:
Step 1: wire armature
Step 2: build up form with fabric
Step 3: complete form with plasticine
step 3
Step 1
Step 2
Creation of Clear Figure:
Step 1 : cover plasticine figure in
glad wrap ( to prevent color bleeding )
Step 2 : layer tape over entire figure,
starting with One layer sticky side up then two layers sticky side
down
Step 3 : Cut the sticky tape free of
the plasticine figure and layer the entire figure in One more layer
of sticky tape, sticky side down
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Final step is to get that glow. This
was achieved by filling the chest of the figure with blue cellophane
and shining a small LED torch through it. See pictured the torch is
attached to the sculptors stand.
Working photo of game
logo
The second (worldy ) figure was made by
layering the cutouts of text over the top of the plasticine figure,
but it is NOT released from the plasticine. The next step was to
import the photographs into Photoshop, cut out the figures in
photoshop and save them with transparencies ( .PNG )
Creation and placement
of the projection
To achieve the projection onto the
figures, a set of paper cutouts were setup in the 3 x 3 grid and the
projector attached to a laptop (a 4x4 grid was later established to
maximise screen and projection usage) . This positioning was to
minimise the distance of the object from the projector, the head of
the front figures are as close as possible to the feet of the figures
behind them. With Paintshop.exe open I proceeded to draw the outline
of the figures.
This then enabled me to size the
figures for projection in the actual game, the below image was used
to calibrate the positioning of the game board.
Early projection test
Creation of Sound
files:
There are two sound files used in the
game. One is a ticking clock the other is very softly spoken
“tongues”.
'Glossolalia,
often understood among Protestant Christians as speaking
in tongues,
is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any
readily comprehended meaning, in some cases as part of religious
practice. Some consider it as a part of a sacred
language.
It is a common practice amongst Pentecostal and Charismatic
Christianity.
' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia
)
The ticking clock is to represent the
Ecclesiastical concerns with life, that no matter how hard you try
you cannot escape time and that it is all pointless. You just need to
look around and you see people running out of time, rushing around,
often at the cost of others safety ( traffic in the tweed region is a
classic example ). To get this sound I took the back off one of my
desk clocks and held my phones microphone next to the gearing. I also
used my phone for the Tongues recording.
There was a lot of background static
in the audio recordings which I tried to minimise using Audacity
software through the noise canceling filter. Its important to note
that when recording on an android phone the file format is
.3GPP which needs to be converted for
use on the windows platform. The website http://media.io
provided a free online service for converting the file into .mp3 and
.OGG which can then be imported into Audacity.
Changes made to the audio files:
- Clock tick speed increased by 40% and tone decreased by 30% ( so that it wasn’t too high pitched )
- Clock tick recorded in Left and Right channels
- Clock tick Right's time is staggered half a second from the left
- Prayer voice is recorded in Left and Right channels
- Prayer voice Left is staggered and shortened by 6 seconds
- both prayer voice and clock tick have had noise canceling audio filter run on them
- both prayer voice and clock tick, Left and Right are saved in .mp3 and .OOG file type for browser compatibility.
Game engine
Initially I explored the gamesalad game
engine to see if it would be suitable to use. But as I intended this
artwork to use projection, full screen and to have greater
flexibility by having access to the code and I am developing on
windows I chose not to make the artgame with Gamesalad. The second
option I explored was the torque 2D game engine, this was a better
option as it had the code flexibility and was windows based. Still I
needed to consider ease of use for either gallery staff, online
environment and further use for future artgame projects. I chose to
write my own game engine which is HTML based using javascript and CSS
to control the HTML elements. It is important to note I had very
limited knowledge of javascript before attempting to create the game
engine, but I did have knowledge in several other programming
languages. This meant that Google and w3 schools became my most
visited pages during the 4 days it took to write it, as most of the
issues I faced were syntax based.
By writing my own engine I will be able
to adapt the game engine for future use on mobile phones, tablets,
mac and PC desktops without major rewrites of the code. Essentially
the current variables (which are written in camel code) will just
need to be changed to percentages for responsiveness on the various
platforms ( due to time constraint this could not be implemented for
this project). Again feel free to browse through the code (game.html)
, there is far too much to cover in this document without it becoming
overly bloated. In short this is how it works.
- The game board pieces, buttons and sounds are defined in HTML code
- The CSS provides the initial positioning and size of the buttons and pieces
- The javascript controls everything else
The game engine is launched when the
game.html is accessed this is done with
HTML code:
<body onload="startgameEngine()">
this calls the javascript function
start game engine
Javascript code:
function startgameEngine()
{
// declare all global variables here
// create arrays for data blocks
// load a level into the data blocks
// start the game loop, this is only
called once
}
function gameloop() {
// this function is the most important
as everything time based happens here
updateBehaviours(); //
behaviors -- this is used to run the idle demo and to add extra
functionality to the gameplay ie teleport
updateObjects(); //
update objects
updatepositionbuttons();
updateAudio();
drawObjects();// draw
objects on game board
updateCamera(); //
camera
alignmentCheck();//
check to see if still red or blue
checkVictoryCondition();
}
setTimeout(function(){gameloop()},50);
}
When the player clicks on the
transparent buttons the javascript changes the images of the game
board icons. There are also two types of sound, Clock tick Loop and
Prayer voice Loop, they are both controlled by javascript. If the
player is idle for too long the demo game plays automatically, on end
of demo game the game reloads level 1. The demo is ended by the
player clicking on a game piece. Loading animation is called on load
level and pauses the gameloop function till loaded. The game has 5
levels, as the game progresses the player will have less control over
the board pieces as they begin to move and teleport and vanish by
themselves, this is done in the updateBehaviours function . The
victoryCondition variable is set in the audioControl function which,
as the name suggests, changes the volume of the sound files depending
on the dominance of the figure colors .
There are many other function but the
gameloop and startgameEngine essentially make the game work. Things
like the animation for load level sequences ( the figures dropping
into the ground and coming up again once loaded ) can be seen in the
code file as they are long, but they are important. As are the
sequences for loading the actual levels and moving the game pieces
and the proximity checking of game piece.
Finally due to the nature of
javascript, being that a ; being a : would mean that the program
would not run I had to create a code console 'function echo(text)' to
assist me with code errors and to check that if/else/while statements
were functioning correctly.
Conclusion
The process of making this artgame has
enabled me to seriously entertain the possibility of integrating
digital work into every aspect of my current arts practice. I am
currently studying Interactive media as my arts
minor(Interdisciplinary drawing is my current major which I intend to
supplement with sculpture) . But if it was offered I would study
Interactive media it as my major field. I truly feel that digital
arts should be offered as a primary medium not just as supplement to
the current art studios especially as the digital is a dominant
presence in our culture. From my research there are many artists who
are dabbling in digital, experimenting with its potential but not
really allowing the medium to support the concepts that they are
exploring. Many treat digital in the same way a painter treats the
canvas, just as a surface to work on ie the many video
artists(projecting into a space but not considering the space,
perhaps that is just the sculptor in me).
For me contemporary art thrives on the
questioning of current ideas and trends, primarily focusing on
philosophical concepts. Materiality, form, process and technique are
secondary concerns, but all need to be justified as being relevant to
the artwork.
The potential for the digital medium
to create art that is performative, sculptural, ephemeral,
interactive, globally accessible, self running, adaptive,
voyeuristic, experiential/emersive artworks excites and inspires me.
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