This is what my Frosti video ended up as. An experiment done in an afternoon has turned out to have a decent pair of legs on it. FutureDeluxe are the folk responsible for turning my austere little sketch into something so sexy.
The original Frosti (see here) is also now one of two films I have in competition at the Alys Beach Digital Graffiti festival next month.
I share the mathematics and methodology behind Frosti in the book, which I’ve now finished (first draft anyway). Hopefully I’ll be able to share with you a release date for this very soon.
I usually delight in creating unpredictability and disorder in code, setting off processes that are never the same twice, making them as surprising to me as they may be any other observer. But with this one I opted to try creating something perfectly deterministic instead, which I did by ensuring that anything that changes over time has it’s variation calculated relative to the frame number.
This means, unless I change the variables before I kick it off, the animation will be the same every time I generate it. It might be argued that this means it isn’t quite as “generative” as an unpredictable algorithm (as far as you can say any logical process is unpredictable). But it makes my life easier by enabling me to use tricks like edit points, and looping.
Frosti, above, has no edits, but loops at the 1m15s point.
Rudy, my four year old, is a huge fan of “daddy’s patterns“, so naturally he was the person I most wanted to accompany me on my visit to Decode, the V&A/onedotzero “Digital Design Sensations” exhibition.
Rudy, as part of the resident savvy child collective in our house, acts as my personal futurologist. The way he interacts with the world is the way the world will be when his generation is running it. Rudy fails to understand why all content isn’t on demand, why every screen is not a touchscreen, why his favourite media is not available on every device. And seeing him, after lapping up Decode, attempt to prod, wave at or talk to other inanimate exhibits around the rest of the V&A, I suspect he will now be questioning the relevance of any artwork that doesn’t involve, reflect or interact with the viewer.
Interaction; with our machines, objects, materials, environments, and each other, will soon become something that is simply expected. And anything that we can’t communicate with will have decreasing relevance over the coming decades. Those who snobbishly dismiss interactive art as being “something for kids” should remember that soon it will be these very same kids who will be making the decisions as to what is and isn’t art.
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