Week 5: Interactivity

Thursday, February 4th Overview

• Reading Discussion: 3:30-4:20

In Groups of 2, discuss your reactions to the videos.

1. Many of you mentioned the notion of instrumentality in your reflections, in regards to Levin's interviews as well as the specific work itself. Drawing from the video material as well as your personal experiences, what are some strengths of a good instrument? Consider affordances of the system as well as constraints in your discussion.

2. Another common theme in the reflections touched upon the difficulty in designing interactive systems for a broad range of users, as well as some trouble that users of Levin and Lieberman's system had in understanding the three different modes of the system and ways of interaction. What do these three different modes of the work have in common? How are they different? Consider the following in your discussion:

   1. types of user interaction

   2. aesthetic goals

   3. audiovisual output

Follow with a joint group review.

• Break: 4:20-4:30

• Introduction to basic interactive drawing functionality in Processsing

  • The process of drawing- gesture imparting a mark of some kind

    • Basic mouse and keyboard input in Processing

  • Limitations of drawing with digital interfaces

    • Quality of the mark

    • Expressiveness of the physical interface- i.e. mouse and keyboard vs physical media

• The Drawing Manager external processing Library

  • How to install an external contributed library

  • Drawing manager zip

  • Opportunities of drawing with computational systems

    • Drawing multiple marks simultaneously

    • Transforming the geometry of the marks being drawn

    • Mapping external input

    • Integrating manual drawing and automated drawing

    • Modality

• Interactive Drawing Application Inspiration

  • FugPaint by Ben Fry- a misbehaving paint application

  • Anti-drawing machine by So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi- an obstructionist drawing system

  • Yellowtail by Golan Levin- Audiovisual animation software

  • Singing Fingers by Eric Rosenbaum and Jay Silver- mapping microphone input to visual output

  • Drawing Operations by Sougwen Chung - drawing with an autonomous machine collaborator

  • Scribble Variations by JT Nimoy - a series of playful tools for drawing.

  • Sloppy Forgeries by Jonah Warren- a drawing game where players recreate famous works with simple tools

• Introduce week 5 assignment: 5:10-5:20

Assignment

• Create a program that expands, augments, hinders, or otherwise alters the process of drawing. You may approach this with the intent of creating a tool, a toy, a game, or a performance instrument. Your system must accept some form of human input that drives or shapes the drawing process, including mouse, keyboard, camera, etc. Demonstrate the properties of your system by creating three drawings with it.

• Upload your Processing code and screenshots to your GitHub repository in the week5 directory. Also upload a text or markdown document with your 1 paragraph description. Please upload this material by 6:00 PM Monday evening.