Black Holes are fun. The fact that they are so dense that even light can’t escape from their gravitational pull is itself intriguing. In this project, I present you a chance to become a black hole, at least an imaginary one.
Ambition
- I started with an unrefined generative art idea and experimented with a few things that went terribly wrong and couldn’t scale on a giant screen.
- For me, the most important part of this project was collaborative interaction that I wanted to achieve. And trust me on this, it’s not that simple as I imagined it would be.
I started with an idea of combining screens to generate an art piece. Based on the movement of the screen, the art would change and scale.
But this posed a lot of issues.
- First, not all screens are of same width and height.
- Resolution difference of each device also affects the generated browser viewport.
- Finding exact position is not impossible but is hard to achieve given the timeframe of this project.
With numerous failed attempts to perfect device positioning and motion, I realized I can still use device movements for the project to be interactive. Why? While mouse and keyboard are fun, there are only one each for one machine. How would multiple users participate?
This led to the idea of using devices to detect movement and affecting the generated art.
Pivot
I wanted to use Cellular Automata, Flocking, or Fractals but the idea of movement was quite difficult to visualize (at least I wasn’t able to).
But hey! We have Autonomous Agents!
Based on what we had studied in class about autonomous agents and their behavior, I came up with the black hole idea. Why not give everyone an opportunity to control a black hole and attract things towards it? And with the trail paths, we generate a vibrant collaborative art piece.
Falling into a Black Hole
The concept of Arrival in autonomous agents is quite similar to how things fall into a black hole. When objects are near to the event horizon, time beyond the black hole moves fast for the objects falling in, but for an observer observing the falling object, it appears to fall quite slow.
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity!
This led to the following initial paper sketch:
And the final art piece to be the following:
In this piece, there are multiple targets (black holes) and many particles falling in (vehicles).
Interactivity
Here’s how interactivity occurs:
A screenshot of how the client device looks like:
Codebase
I can’t put the code as an online p5 sketch because it will interfere with the communication. That’s because every time it loads up it will send messages to the server.
Here’s a GitHub Repository of the codebase: https://github.com/ayushpandeynp/decoding-nature-final-project
IM Showcase
Here’s a picture from the IM Showcase:
