Creative projects year 1 

By: Amraz Hussain

Introduction 

Amraz Hussain, (B.1997) is a creative visual artist, who is inspired by his surroundings and takes in current trends to then express it throughout his artwork. His theme of artwork is always changing as he likes to endower onto different projects but always portrays his work in a contemporary setting. 

The project was my own portrayal of two very similar generative art pieces, what I have done is made it my own by creating my own take on spin generating cos and sin values and using various colours, creating a colourful spiral which appears on the screen, working in the background of the sketch are the lines which are aligned with the spiral of colours. 

intended audience / intended outcomes / background research.

The chosen audience was not specific as there was none, the reason why is because my piece is made for anyone who appreciates the arts and the computing aspects to it as it’s a piece being projected onto a canvas people are welcomed to view and have their own meaning or opinions behind it.

The intended outcome of my project was initially meant to be my own version/translation of Pascal Dombis spin series, as I coded two generative art sketches very similar in style but using different algorithms and shapes, the intended outcome of the projected work itself was not really specific as it was just there as a pieces which people could view and form their own opinion on how it was created and what they think about the pieces as well as the research behind it.

I did background research originally on how to create generative art using lines, shapes, algorithms, also books on internet art (Rachel Greene). What I then came onto was an artist called Pascal Dombis who is a digital artist who uses computers and algorithms to produce an excessive repetition of simple processes. Once I did further research on Pascal I realized I wanted to create my own take on a spin to create something simple and build into a colorful work of art using my own knowledge and what I had previously learned about generative art.

The creative process that I went through was I started off thoroughly doing research on starting points and how I could create a base of what I wanted to work on. I already knew that it was going to be a projected installation onto a canvas. Slowly I found myself drifting to coding using cos and sin values

 because it was a simple way to generative random patterns and was an easier approach to doing what I wanted. I wanted the piece to be simple in aesthetics but very colorful, but there was no real outline I was following. The thought behind this was that I wanted to create two parallel pieces of code and portray them one after the other onto the canvas which was hung from the steel frame which we had to do ourselves.

problems you encountered and how you solved them.

The biggest problem I encountered was the night before the exhibition itself as part of my original plan of creating my project was that it was going to be two different takes on generative art played one after another but as I was combining the two separate sketches together and started editing the code it was clear that I have done too much and the code as actually broke which led to me not being able to present my project ultimately the next day. Once I had added the second sketch in I deleted the original sketch not realizing I would need it later to document. the problem was not solved on until after the exhibition in which what I had decided to do was just to delete the second sketch out of the code and had to choose the first sketch to use to present myself in the documentation.

Another problem I faced was aligning the actual projector to the canvas was it would display the project onto, because the projector was not also hung from the frame which the canvas was it was hard to get the right aspect ratio for the canvas, I solved this by putting pieces of wood underneath the project at a tilt so it would project onto the canvas perfectly.

An evaluation of your project.

Overall I was not happy with my project as I was not able to present on the day of the exhibition which was the whole point of the project, but I have learned from my mistakes as it is a part of the experience. The research I had done was beneficial for my project also as I had a direction in what I wanted to do which I was happy with.

For next year, my project will be completely different as a projection piece is not what I want to do, I believe that by doing this project has given me enough insight on how to progress with my creative work. Working on my time management will play a big part next year also 

References;

exploring the beauty of algorithms with generative art - talk

Internet art- Rachel Greene

A programme handbook for visual designers and artists – Casey Reas, Ben Fry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_Dombis