[ITP: Feeling Patterns] Patterns in Practice - New Yuck

Inspiration

Throughout this class I’ve been primarily fixated with observing the patterns of New York. They are fast, loud, and exponential. For me, they can sometimes be sensory overload and leave me a bit anxious and overwhelmed. At the same time, they are inherently beautiful and offer so much variation and intricacy.

For this project I knew that p5 wasn’t the right medium for me to convey what I wanted to; it didn’t work for me in the last assignment. I work as a freelance illustrator, and have been missing painting recently, so I decided I wanted to paint some patterns. I also love experimenting with childhood crafts and I remembered that one of the easiest book-making techniques are accordion books. The fact that you can flip through an accordion or lay it flat and see it all at once makes it seem like it could possibly go on forever!

Drawings

Materials and Tools

• Watercolor paper

• Watercolors

• Tape

• Ruler

• Adobe Illustrator

• Cardboard, scissors, glue

Process

1. Watercolor painting

Create all the subway car number signs and alternate windows. I sprinkled these into the final composition using Illustrator.

2. Photograph the painting and create book pages in Adobe Illustrator.

3. Construct the book.

Printed pages and cardboard box

Cut out book covers from a cardboard box

Cut out pages

Cut tabs to attach the pages using glue

Accorion!

Final Product

Conclusion

I really loved getting my hands on this project. Although I love a good pun, yuck is sometimes how I feel in the city. There’s a lot to take in at any moment, it’s not always pleasant. But it really is a term of endearment like calling someone you love “Stinky”. It’s like 2% true 98% love; the yuck-factor is what makes NYC so special.

This was really a way for me to incorporate patterns into my art practice. Starting with observing patterns, illustrating patterns, digitizing patterns, and also book assembly forced me to execute many patterns.

It might be really interesting to continue this project with more New York patterns. Some other ideas I had written down in my notebook are elevators, streets/crosswalk, or something more natural like Central Park trees or flowers but I guess those aren’t really New York-y.

Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sMvTkoy1os

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjQPZPtDXX0

[ITP: Feeling Patterns] Pattern Observation Week 5

Here are some more very New York patterns I observed this week. I just love these crazy car-parking-vending machines. They kinda remind me of apartments for cars. They create such interesting visual patterns and they also speak to a larger pattern of too many cars/people in a city with too little space.

Notes for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Proposal

From Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Proposal

• Names of all those lost in chronological order

• “I had an impulse to cut open the earth”

• Visitors reflected in the shiny granite

• The beginning (1959) and end (1973) meet in the middle

• Ties together the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and itself

• Make it“personal, human, and focused on the individual experience”

[ITP: Feeling Patterns] Pattern Observation Week 4

Here are some photos I took on a flight from Ottawa. I was totally inspired by Chaski’s assignment of the superimposed videos of the airplane taking off. The leaves are changing in Canada right now and I thought it was interesting to see how the landscape changes as it becomes less agricultural and more rural.

Response to “A Letter to Dance”, by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

I really don’t know anything about dancing. I’ve got some rhythm because I grew up playing musical instruments but I definitely have two left feet. I don’t really ever think about choreography but this letter made me think about dancing differently. I like the idea of choreography being a way of “writing the people”, to dictate their movements, expressions, and feelings those movements evoke. The example about people moving through a subway station not being choreography makes sense to me as well. Though our bodies routinely exhibit patterns and the process of being “written” what makes something choreography is the conscious attempt to embody an idea and exhibit agency over our bodies. This kind of reminds me of Nun’s definition of pattern from last class: something that’s distinguished from the noise, what we choose to sense.

[ITP: Feeling Patterns] Assignment 1

Overview

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been observing a lot of visual and auditory patterns of the city. I am brand new to New York and find myself anxious and overwhelmed with the stimuli. At the same time, recognizing patterns is comforting and roots my observation in the familiar.

I really wanted to create a visual or animation in p5 that resembled the prominent patterns I experience every day (subway coming or leaving, windows on tall buildings) but I did not quite get there.

Slit Scan Experiments

I was really inspired by this video that was shown in class so I wanted to start off my assignment with seeing what slit scan images I could generate from some of my observations.

I didn’t anticipate this exploration to take as long as it did because I got really stuck on how to reference the Vimeo video in the p5.js examples. My videos were also way too large to upload to the p5 editor so I tried my best to recreate the slit scan code in Processing. I got this to work eventually.

Since I wrote the code myself I knew how to manipulate different configurations of the capture. I tried vertical vs. horizontal slit scan. I also scanned from different positions in the video, in different directions. It’s crazy how many different images you can generate from a single video.

Window Animation

Here’s my initial attempt at creating some NYC window patterns. Being pretty new here, I find myself looking up a lot and being captivated by the patterns of the buildings. How many windows are there in Manhattan?!

Originally, I had envisioned a sketch that started with a single window that exponentially multiplied to an uncomfortable number on the canvas, then the windows would disappear one at a time until we’re left with a single window. On future iterations, I’d like to make the “lighting” functions interactive with the mouse position.

Conclusion

I would have really liked to get to trying the frame differencing code as well. I’m not quite sure what outcomes I would get because the three videos I used here don’t have a distinct background. I could also try filming with a tripod and not using any extra zoom to get a stable clip. I feel like videos like that create the most clear and interesting frame difference images.

Also, I’d like to continue with some of the basic geometric animations. It would be cool to see how much real life experience I can evoke with simple shapes/images/sounds in p5.js. Could I simulate the bustle of people on the street? Can a code snippet make you feel like you’re in the subway? It could be interesting to experiment with.

Reference

https://processing.org/reference/

https://p5js.org/reference/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJWV7X7df9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCJM9WIoudI

[ITP: Feeling Patterns] Pattern Observation Week 2

Below are two patterns I observed this week around 370 Jay St.

The sounds of rain is one of the most well-loved patterns. This example has both auditory and visual patterns. I guess the rain falls under both auditory and visual pattern. The thunder and the beeping of the crosswalk are also consistent patterns. The cars passing and people walking by happen at regular intervals as well.

We know that I was standing in front of an NYU building in Brooklyn, but even without the context it is apparent that the people are walking with a purpose, some in a hurry even. For me it evokes the pattern of the day, or even life. People in NYC are always busy, with places to go, things to do, but what is it good for? What’s the larger purpose? I think the rain kind of reinforces this dark and gloomy concept.

On one of my breaks between class I watched this construction crew transport a stack of wooden planks up to what looks like the eighth floor. It was a repetitive process of loading the plank, signaling ready, lifting, grabbing plank, signaling ready, and dropping down the line. What I like about this pattern is that from the ITP herb garden it was barely perceptible. I often like to look over the balcony but generally there is pattern overload; I’m glad I caught this!

This pattern specifically makes me feel excited, on the edge of my seat. I’ve never seen construction materials transported like this before. There was a lot of anticipation for me: will the board make it? Will it fall down? Will the guy at the top be ready? There’s a lot of communication needed for this pattern to be repeated correctly and there could be large consequences if the pattern breaks. I also really love this lifting contraption, it reminds me of one of my favorite works by Trey Duvall.

[ITP: Feeling Patterns] Pattern Observation Week 1

NYC is bustling! There are so many people, so much is going on, and so many patterns. I think all this business really highlights the use of patterns and their importance to keep systems functioning and organized. I know I was supposed to pick one pattern, but once I started looking, I couldn’t stop seeing them.

For me, the repetition and fast-paced-ness of the patterns of NYC is incredibly overwhelming. Too much to look at, too much wizzing by, and too much to process. But on the other hand there is something comforting about seeing patterns you recognize from home or have seen somewhere else.

Of the patterns I observed this week, some are perfect and 100% predictable. Others are more organic, have variance, or are man-made/man-manipulated.

Example Sketches

The code for these sketches come from my class and live on my p5 profile.

Image tiling and rotation

Frame differencing

Slit scan