Play and abstraction: APD Week 9

There's something calm and restorative about being a passenger. I have memories etched in my mind of the journey up the sunshine coast of Queensland. My childish passenger self esconsed in the backseat of my parent's kingswood watching the landscape passby, agricultured fields of pinetrees and pineapples watched over by matriarch Mt Beerwah. 

This week I've tackled a second iteration of my 3-dimensional zoetrope engine. Inspired by Miyazaki's relative movement of sliding planes (Lamarre, 2009) the zoetrope is double-layered, with a slower outer layer of large spheres and a faster inner layer of smaller spheres. The landscape shapes abstracted into spheres, has taken me far, far, far from my comfort zone, with the hope the movement gives us clues to the objective shapes of the landscape of the sunshine coast hinterland.

Similar to Lye's techniques informed by the constraints of the high cost of film (Turner, 2008), these spinning, sliding panels is designed to be stingy with the processing power needed for this 3d animated landscape. The fixed camera position using the grammar of abstract animation.

The spherical shapes are inspired by Kandinsky's fascination with the circle shape (Whitford, 1968). The fabric texture of the shapes comes from my personal fascination with the comfort and joy of textile designs and the tactile beauty of textile art in quilt form. This was a chance to spend some time with the very basics of shader design to give the sphere's the textured weft and warp of a linen-like fabric. 

This week's exercise pre-empts the stillness theme, possibly due to my own love of calm technology and interest in technology mediated reflection (Konrad, Isaacs & Whittaker, 2016) and my fascination with the potential for contemplative games for pain management through distraction (Subnis, Starkweather, & Menzies, 2016).

On reflection, this week has precipitated a positive shift in my practice. Deliberately focussing on the materiality of Unity and th eagency of the engineered zoetrope has relieved me of the frustration of not being able to translate my inexperienced designs into a workable artefact. This has permeated my work practice as well, I am undertaking my visualisation designs are the product of a conversation with the more docile technologies of python and powerpoint, a stark comparison to the interactions and stormoffs with the truculent Unity and it's typed language C#. Thank-you Matt.

Over the christmas study break, I hope to continue to engage with this zoetrope engine to work on building a 'leaning back' (Bogost, 2007) restorative development practice and conversation with Unity. In practice, sitting and leaning forward exacerbates my chronic pain condition, a source of struggle, setbacks and small steps forward this year as I adapt to working at a desk again. My search for a sustainable way of working has a new, hopeful, path to follow for the next while.

References

Bogost, I 2007, Videogame Zen, blog, viewed 9 October 2020, <http://bogost.com/writing/videogame_zen/>

Konrad, A, Isaacs, E, & Whittaker, S, 2016, Technology-Mediated Memory: Is Technology Altering Our Memories And Interfering With Well-Being? ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 23(4), 1-29.

Lamarre, T 2009, Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Subnis, Starkweather, & Menzies, 2016, A current review of distraction-based interventions for chronic pain management, European Journal of Integrative Medicine, 8(5), 715-722.

Turner, P 2003, Content and Meaning in Abstract Animation, VCU Scholars Compass, viewed 23 Oct 2020, <http://www.people.vcu.edu/~ptturner/sources/Turner%20Course%20Notes-Color1.pdf>

Whitford, F 1967, Kandinsky, The Colour library of art. Hamlyn, London.