THE CREATIVE CODING START

My Final Piece for the first semester will be a project on PURE DATA.

This page is where you can find my whole process of research and the final outcome.

Particles is what I will be mainly working with, but I had to do a research on all basics so that I can understand the pure data program to an extend and apply it to my piece. Here are a few things I looked at:

- YouTube tutorials
- Color values
- A list of gem features
- Images, videos and 3d objects, which I could not interpret into my project
- Artists and other inspiration from “The New Medium”
- A screenshot of the moving image and a screenshot of the “behind the scene”

This is just a basic page about Gem and its properties with which I started my research and understanding of pure data.

The information above is taken from the following website. I would like to mention that I tried most of these particle properties and only stuck to a few of them because they had a bigger impact on movement and presentation.

Here on the left there is a YouTube link which shows an example of a Pure Data particle system and helped me to develop my task further.

I looked for information about images being inserted into pure data and it seemed quite simple,yet when I tried to do it multiple times, errors kept on coming up. Therefore these websites are very good on an explanatory level for understanding, but I personally could not put them into practice as a beginner user on pure data. And here are the two links:

Continuing my research I though that learning to insert 3D object might be useful to my presentation and would help to distribute the message I will try to send with it. For this one I also received a lot of error messages. I looked through the pd-help browser and through some blogs and the only questions coming up in relation to the errors I was receiving were:
"Does the file exist"
"Did you make a typo in the filename?"
"Is the file in the search path?"
Furthermore according from the information i get from my laptop the answer will be: YES,YES and YES. Yet I the errors kept on coming up so I continued to expand on my idea of particles and an assemble.

This is how the chain of a 3D model should look like, despite the fact that I did not manage to include that in my final piece, I really enjoyed trying it out and researching into moving image and sound too. Firstly I looked into some free websites with 3D objects such as:

-free3d.com

-turbosquid.com

Here are 2 more youtube tutorials which helped me with my research:

The one above shows how to open an external sound file and it is very useful because when you are opening a video on pure data, the sound is usually opened separately.

A piece which initially inspired me was by Howard Cornwell and is a particle based music visualisation. The first youtube video is of his wrk for BSc(hows) in Music Tech. As my project is only 30 sec and Pure Data is still new to me, there was no way I could accomplish his level of brilliance but I just created different patches of particles with different attributes and will me manually moving them on my presentation. However the whole idea behind the piece I have created is to pay extra attention to movement and flow of image and the different directions, sizes and colours. In a way these few simple properties can create a musical assemble. Therefore the sound attached to the particle movement is more like a secondary factor, for the audiences, in this composition.There is also a Vimeo video attached which Karolina Adamska takes part in but is actually uploaded onto Vimeo by Radoslaw Janicki. The Vimeo video is of a life performance with life music, which develops even further from the way Howard Cornwell has used pure data

Finally I also used this website in the link above to calculate the colour values which are used in pure data. This website shows you the RGB values and I purely had to divide each value by the number "255" in order to get the final values, which I have used in Pure Data. You can see two screenshots of the website on the right hand side of this box and below. I am showing these screenshots so that anyone can get an idea of what the website looks like and how it works. You simply select a colour from the chart or from the colour wheel and the values are displayed.

image above:
http://minchee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/4556521354_ca5b5f61a5.jpg

credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZeSLJkmycE

credits for above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgxwkAsNjYw
credits for below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoZF_wxMRAA

credits for above:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1k44Tr0pu4
credits for below:https://vimeo.com/130415742

The author explores how “the computer became an expressive medium” and this is exactly what I am demonstrating in my final piece on pure data. As previously mentioned the piece I have created is very simple and it represents visualisation of sound. Meaning its use is purely for gaining information like you would in a library as this is what the computer was primarily used for - scientific and military purposes.


In the “Inventing the Medium” the readers are informed about Borges & Bush, who are the two people who started writing about technology as a global culture. Borges’s fiction mentions an “individual consciousness constantly reforming itself”. This phrase can be linked to my piece I did on pure data in a metaphorical and literal way. As I have made my piece based on particles, yet they all start at the same point but develop further and the process is just in an infinite loop just like the “consciousness” described in “Inventing the Medium”.


Both Borges & Bush create “fantasy information structures” which shows “a change in how our minds are working”. For instance in Borges experiment, time doesn’t move forward, but outward, in possibilities of creation and destruction. Ultimately this is what coding is in my perception. I really could relate to the idea of creation and destruction throughout all 3 programming languages I covered in the past month, but specifically to pure data. As it is a program based on sound and image, these two

have “alienated” me from the “real world” for a certain amount of time. However if the picture I am hypothetically drawing is looked at on a bigger scale it can be seen that in a longer frame of time, if this knowledge of code were to be expanded, it could potentially have social and cultural values. I have shared a video of Howard Cornwell a bit further up on this page, and have mentioned his piece to be my inspiration. It is clear that he has much more knowledge of pure data and its properties. In turn this knowledge has led to the realisation of these cultural and social values I previously mentioned, being input into visuals. More simply said, it is a musical performance with pure data visuals, which follow the sound patterns and all this contributes to the human cognition, more specifically in relation to culture in music.

words are very relevant for the functioning and the outcome of the project. Just as my piece of particles when we look at the coding side of it and concentrate on its parts such as “object, message, number” and etc. It is seen how all these parts give you the possibilities of the creation of something new or developed and the destruction of something not needed anymore.A very specific example can be the object of “part_killold” which allows you to control the “age” at which the particles will simply vanish (destruct).

In the “Inventing the Medium” they also talk about “enveloping digital environment rather than just looking at it”, which is closely related to my project too. I believe what they are exploring is the interaction with the creation physically rather than its own being. In my pure data project, the manual handling of the presentation is the way one can engage with the piece and so multiple variations of the presentation can be created based on how and in what order the functions are being used.


They talk about “acknowledging the threatening as well as the thrilling aspects” of technology the text concentrate on the threatening aspects being destructive power of TV, for instance, “alienating people from the “real” world”. This brings me to the purpose of the piece I have created. It is simple and some may even call it useless, but at the end of the day I spent an enormous amount of time, just trying to understand pure data and the way it works, in its most basic features, to finally create a 30 sec manually directed moving image. Consequently these hours spent in front of the computer could be considered to

What you can see below is the code and the canvas/window of the piece I have created and talked about throughout this webpage on the topic of pure data:

Relating to the “Inventing


the Medium” Jaret H Murray:

Here on the left side we can see two examples of the chains I created in order to insert a 3D object I had downloaded trough a free3D website. There was constantly an error coming up that the image can not be found, whilst clearly on the left screenshot it can be seen that open panel has attempted to open the file, yet has not succeeded. Furthermore as these try outs were unsuccessful, I continued my research in a different direction and decided to further expand on the idea of particles and their fascinating multiplicity.