I should be be sleeping as I write this but hey, it’s one less thing off my plate!
After many offices hours and staring glazed-eye at the screen many a late night, hoping the code will just will itself to on to the screen (or work for that matter), it is done!
So we all know my love of science and art and how I like to blend the two…so when we were doing weekly sketches I took it upon myself to draw one simple atom. Hydrogen to be exact. And everyone loved it. So since that piece it was bandied about that my final project could be some sort of data visualization program that draws these atoms, and lo and behold, finals comes around and guess what?
For me I just enjoy for what it is right now. a visual art piece that looks interesting, but also has some informative element. To see the world we don’t see illustrated in these beautiful designs that nature itself produced. Like fractals and snowflakes and animal shells, and billion other awesome little things people usually take for granted or don’t think about and consciously aware of, but I digress.
After some stylistic debate, and due to time and other facts, I did away with the orbit lines, meaning the sketch is just two “simple” objects– the electrons in their proper rings and the nuclei (because it felt silly to generate protons and neutron as their own thing.) And of course by “simple” I mean, there is a lot of code going on in the back end just to get this to be this way. So be careful at what you might consider simple or easy!
Here is the link to the code for anyone interested in checking out the code itself.
EDIT: Added a little more pizzaz to this– and really it’s just the mouse hover elements and adding 42 more elements to the JSON file…
As for my takeaway with ICM, I still have it in my head to what it can do and still have some problem figuring out how to do it in p5 IF it can be done, but I suppose that just comes with more and more practice with it. I’m so fried I’m lucky I remember what a for loop is at the moment. At any case, I came into this hating code, but honestly I still hate CSS and HTML. But I enjoy p5.js. Maybe because it’s just really cool at animating things.
I don’t know where I want to go with this. Actually I do, but it just goes against the popular opinion. The feedback I got wants an interactive element to it, I just want it to be a sort of two dimensional kinetic art, so really for me, finishing it would be just finishing parsing the JSON data and leaving it as is. As for this becoming my Thesis. I mean, I’ll definitely consider it. But it’s my first semester and I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with what I learn here, what I will be after ITP because of this. But it is a small stepping stone along the way for sure!
But thanks Dan for all your time and help in my first semester here, and for making me feel like I’m part of the team here. This semester, as it is for everyone, is a liminal time in my life. Just that someone like me has a slightly harder time adjusting to the change. But you and many other great professors here have certainly made it a little less daunting than it might have been elsewhere. I just only hope I’m able to keep up the expectations of being here for the next three semesters…