Tag: Sarah van Sonsbeeck

Week 142

I am sat on the couch at home typing this. iTunes is on shuffle (some Burial at the moment). I’ve just had a Bi-Fi snack sausage (a guilty pleasure) and some ice tea. I was kind of hungry, but now I’m ok.

Last week wasn’t as crazy as many recent ones have been. Still pretty busy, with some work in the evenings etc. But the pace is lower. That’s a nice change.

Today I sort of wrapped up project Tako. Sort of, because although I’ve delivered what was this project’s aim, it is part of something much larger. So we’re already making plans for phase two. Anyway, I’ve published an annotated deck of slides to the project’s participants weighing in at 100+. It describes concepts for playful stuff that can be added to the programs of ten of Utrecht’s major cultural events. It also describes a metagame that can be used to tie it all together. The response to it has been good so now the next step is to actually produce a selection of these concepts, which is super exciting.

I started the week with a long drive to the Westland for a slightly overdue evaluation of Mega Monster Battle Arena. Dario Fo, Daniël and myself agree it would be awesome to put on an improved version of the show at other venues because it really is something special, more people should see it. If you have suggestions for a suitable event or venue, let me know.

On wednesday I made a last minute decision to drop by the great TrouwAmsterdam again for an evening on maps as art and new cartography techniques. Amongst other’s Sarah van Sonsbeeck was there to talk about her work. She mentioned the project Alper and I did with her, which I found flattering. The evening’s program contained a lovely range of the super-artistic to the very applied and the hyper-analog to the purely digital. Good stuff. It reminds me of the fact that I want to do Hubbub games that involve maps in some way.

In between, I’ve been banging away at designs for Layar. It’s interesting to experience the rhythm of idea divergence and convergence in a project. It’s like ebb and flow. This week was definitely characterized by a new wave of divergence, which means scrambling to capture all that emerges. Next week we’ll need to bring it all together again and focus things. Ebb and flow.

iTunes has started playing an Interpol song now. I think I might grab some crisps after I’ve posted this.

A landscape generated from silence

So a few weeks ago, before he went surfing in Morocco, m’colleague Alper reported in an elaborate fashion on the project he and I did for the artist Sarah van Sonsbeeck. If you’re into data visualization and information design and you haven’t read it already, I encourage you to do so right now. I thought I’d post some additions and comments to Alper’s post here, going into some details related to working with 3D graphics in Processing, aesthetic considerations, and some other bits.

Final rendering of the silence landscape

Dealing with 3D in Processing

As Alper writes, part of what we were doing involved generating a 3D landscape from the sound volume and location data Sarah had gathered. What I found was that working with 3D in Processing can be cumbersome, especially with regards to camera controls. I had a hard time getting a sense of the 3D model we were generating, since the camera controls I had at my disposal were limited and a hassle to use. I can imagine that if you do this kind of work a lot, you have a kind of container Processing sketch that has all the camera controls in place. I didn’t, so ultimately I decided to go to a tool that had all the camera controls already: Google SketchUp. I could have gone to a more professional tool such as 3ds Max or Maya, but SketchUp is freely available and suited me fine. Using Marius Watz’s unlekkerLib, I exported the geometry of our landscape to a DXF file and imported it to SketchUp and that was that.

An early Processing sketch attempting to generate a shape from the data

Rendering

SketchUp is fine for manipulating and exploring a 3D model, but its rendering left something to be desired. It had been a while since I dabbled in 3D graphics (back in art school, making games) but I did recall that global illumination rendering yields pretty pictures. Sarah had told us from the outset that above everything else, it was important for the output of our exercise to be aesthetically pleasing. According to her, in the art world, beauty is paramount. So I did some Googling (as one does) and bumped into Sunflow. Karsten Schmidt had experimented with using Sunflow as a renderer directly from Processing, but this library turned out to be outdated for the current version of Processing. There is however, a Sunflow exporter for Sketchup. So I used Sketchup to set up the basics of the scene I wanted to render (camera angle and such) exported and then manually edited the resulting Sunflow file. The Sunflow wiki was a great help for understanding the anatomy of the Sunflow file format. In addition, this page, which shows examples of many shader settings, was very helpful when it came to figuring out the materials we ended up using. A snow-like material with a “sun sky” light, which makes the whole thing look like Antarctica, seemed like a good fit for the subject; silence.

An intermediate rendering of the landscape done with SketchUp

Aesthetics

Alper rightly points out neither of us is a graphic designer. But this does not mean certain aesthetic considerations came into play during this project. For instance, towards the end, we had renderings of the landscape floating above an infinite plane, as if it’s an object of sorts. I felt this did not do justice to the concept we were pursuing, so we eventually decided to merge the mesh with the underlying plane. We achieved this by simply adding a band of average noise level around the datascape and regenerating it. Optically, thanks to the nice illumination in Sunflow, there is no border between the landscape and the plane that recedes to the horizon.

A Sunflow rendering of the landscape, still floating above the ground

There’s more to be said about this project but I feel like wrapping up. A few final words with regards to the utility of this piece as data visualization then. I think from this perspective it is practically useless. As a piece of graphic art that provides a visceral sense of the data gathered by Sarah during her walks however, I think it is quite successful. Keep in mind she’s used this as part of another publication, where a set of annotations is overlaid on it.

I would also love to do an interactive version of this, allowing for free movement through the 3D space, as well as additional information layers with annotations by the artist and geographic context. Who knows, we might come around to this some time.

But for now, this is it: a picture of a landscape, generated from silence.