Digital Studio – Week 12

This is the wrap up. Well, normally it would be, but Digital Studio is just the first half of what is essentially a year-long subject. So instead of presenting something complete, this is where I’ll consolidate my work from this semester (it’s being presented in portfolio-form for class, but there’s nothing there that I haven’t already posted on this blog).

The interactive, projection work – which I have given the working title of All Is Domain – is on track to be completed for the November COFA exhibition. Currently at the stage of small-scale model testing, both the software and hardware technologies I have been exploring (Max/MSP, Quartz Composer, Ableton Live, infrared camera tracking and DMX lighting) are showing promise of working well for this piece.

I don’t think I realised how much I’d done for this project until I started pulling it together for the portfolio. I did spend a lot of time jumping between technologies and going off on tangents to learn more software/hardware/code/whatever, yet it all seems to be lurching along in the same direction.

Fortunately, over the mid-year break, I’ll be working on what will become the first angryPixel collaborative project (more news on this when we’re allowed to go public), which neatly fits into the world of coding, interaction and projection that I will continue with next semester in Professional Portfolio. This will give me an excuse (did I ever need one?) to persevere with learning C++ and OpenGL, and hopefully arrive at next semester with better knowledge for how to render 3D shapes in Quartz and Max/MSP.

Also bound to help me with next semester, is the arrival of my new Danger Shield for Arduino. Once I get my hands on a soldering iron, I’ll be putting it together and start a Pachube feed – maybe measuring the frequency of cats that feel the need to crap in my vegetable garden. These little side-projects will dovetail into one of my second semester electives, Electronic Technologies.

It does feel odd finishing a subject without actually finishing anything, but I’m still extremely positive about the direction things are headed in. The reality is that there are only five short months until this project will see the light of day (or the darkness of night, as the case may be), so there’s no time to stop now.