3. Space: Star Trail

Star trail

Claudia Agustini, Arianna Freni and Francesca Savoldelli

"I don't think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years, unless we spread into space.

There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.

But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars"

Stephen Hawking

Interview, the Daily Telegraph, October 2001

Motivation

For this project we interpreted the concept of space not as a physical matter, consisting in distances, positions and dimensions, but rather, as something without boundaries, in in continuous evolution, such as the universe. The first thing that came up to our mind when discussing about space was the typical darkness feature that characterizes the cosmos. What we perceive as silence, a feature that pervades space, is in fact known as galactic noise and it is generated outside the earth’s atmosphere. Across that totally black environment, stars are the main visual element which can be detected clearly from any point.

Our star trail has an ephemeral nature, since, once it has been created, it does not last for a long period of time; in fact, it dissolves into a million of minuscule particles by gradually fading into the black space. However, the star dust does not simply disappear, considering that, when something is moving in front of the project’s input, a new trail is formed. This is a perpetual circle of nature itself: our stars are meant to “die” by dissolving into the universe, and the old one are going to be replaced by a new set of stars. The French philosopher and chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier stated: “In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes.” In a few words, we applied the thought embodied in this quote - that the matter is capable of transforming itself into new shapes in a continuous development - in a Openframework visualization. The energy in the universe is always constant, and, in our black space, we can be the actors behind this perfectly unceasing process.

Implementation

Before writing the necessary code for the project, we downloaded “OfxFlowTools” (https://github.com/moostrik/ofxFlowTools). This Openframework addon allows to develop 2D fluid simulation and optical flow.  This tool came with three examples and we decided to go through them to see if they had some of the elements we wanted in our project. We selected the second example, called example_extended, because among the various elements it had particles that reacted to the movement detected by the webcam. In order to obtain a star trail effect we had to modify the parameters of the particles by reducing their lifespan, mass, size spread, mass spread and increasing their size and twinkle speed. In addition, we had to add lines of code so that the background stayed black since otherwise there would be swirls of colors picked up from the scene captured by the webcam. Furthermore, since sound was a relevant element planned in our project, we decided to set a cosmic noise at a low volume as the background sound of our project. After our changes our final project consists of a screen showing a star trail that is activated by the movement detected by the live webcam. At first the white points are more defined and subsequently they dissolve into a finer sparkling star dust that falls into the lower part of the screen.

Source code and video can be found here: 2.1 Space: Star Trail