uncanny valley: the prototyping machines

October 25, 2008 at 3:20 pm · Filed under design

Whenever I have had some time in the past months away from the more classical research-oriented work, I have been catching up with some of the latest developments in Machinima and other virtual reality and/or game-engine methods for art and design.  While for some more purists, this admittedly sounds geeky and probably as exciting as a can of tuna, I have found that there is quite a lot that can be done and said using these “machines.”  With the usual reservations, of course.

The primary problem I have with more classical animation, drawing and painting (and 3D) is that it is very time-consuming.  Being sometimes peripatetically cross-displine and cross-media, I am interested in doing things in almost every possible format that I get my hands on.  But, say, if I wanted to create a digital character with some facial expressions and mix it with some photography or video to get some idea across, doing these with the old ways would take days to complete.  A simple expressive character, in the end, is rather difficult and laborious to create properly and with style.

Now take a game engine such as Spore.  What these virtual reality and/or game engines allow one to do is quickly create a prototype of some idea or another — develop an “element” that can be used to explore an idea at its initial stages.  It is not perfect by any means; you do not get full control of what you get.  You get instead a rather rich set of parameters to play around with but this is still not the quasi-complete freedom you get with doing things analogically. However, what you do is get possibilities do things that would not have been available before unless you wanted to spend days and days creating every little element yourself from beginning.

So a part of the Uncanny Valley experiment is to develop a workflow that allows the quick production of such “mixules” and / or sketches that can be later worked with to develop more complete projects and designs.  I have played around with Spore mostly here as its the most recent of these games but will probably do my rounds around Sims, Second Life etc and whatever will be useful.  Each of these sketches have taken — on average — about 30 minutes to complete.  Most of that to try to work shadows etc (though in some pictures I have not spend enough time on this admittedly…)

The theory here could perhaps broadly be said a play around “locative media” and “ubiquituos computing” where the overlap of virtual and non-virtual reality is predicted to be the next evolution of the Internet. I am especially interested in conceptualizing the blurry notion of reality between the virtual and non-virtual as an experiment in both content and form.  Something close to evolutionary art but not quite.  I will do a series based on this eventually when the idea crystallizes but meanwhile just working out some of the techniques here — also thinking how some of these engines could be perhaps used to do short videos etc.

I will also post a tutorial up soon about how such “rapid prototyping machines” can be used …

[Tools used: Pentax K20D, Spore, Photoshop Cs3, San Miquel]

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initial experiments with Olympus E520

October 23, 2008 at 11:37 pm · Filed under design

After my entire camera kit was stolen in Shanghai from a famous live jazz club there (situated, of course, in the middle of the french expat community), I was waiting for the next purchase. Wanted something that is light enough to fit with my travel gear, and yet offered near-pro capabilities… and most importantly, doesn’t give me a heart attack if stolen, lost, damaged again (yes, I have heard of insurance… thank you… but the hassle… the hassle…). So, finally have settled for a Olympus E520 for the meantime, until the DSLR market stabilizes with the next upcoming series of 20 MP+ cams, post-summer next year perhaps? Can’t be that far, since Canon pretty much opened up the market there with their new Canon EOS 5D Mark II (brilliant… absolutely brilliant! — check out the video here). I mean, ISO 25,000 capabilities + HD Video capture…?!!!

However, Olympus E520 serves my purpose for the moment – inbuilt image stabilization + four-thirds mount tremendously expands the line-up of lens that it can handle. The kit lens is one of the best in the range, and I love the controls (over my previous Nikon series of cams).

These are very first HDR experiments (literally amongst the first twenty photographs captured with the cam). Both have been shot near fountain, VT station, Mumbai. Yet to work on the style, as these are just thematic samples at the moment.

An another…

My friend / bcg partner Matti has perfected his approach (his kit: Pentax K20D) with HDR and has done an outstanding series on Mumbai, where is signature style is very visible. Check it out here.

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random recursions

October 16, 2008 at 2:42 pm · Filed under design

Every time I get back to my amateurish coding and learning the potential of Processing, I am always surprised and fascinated how just a few lines of even bad code provide complex and occasionally pleasing results.  And this is even before I have gone properly into more complex ideas of emergence, dynamic systems and other theories I want to explore visually.  Theory w/out words?  I suppose being rather visual in orientation, it helps me think when I can directly see the outcome of what I am doing emerge in front of me.  So while playing around with recursive functions today and I came up with this by writing about 20 lines of quite messy code using mostly simple random equations.  Thought it would be nice to show the screenshot here as a starter to my long road to mastering the interface of aesthetics and underlying code — the plan eventually is to develop a database of “palettes” that can be used for various projects.  But meanwhile, here is a quick example (with just a little color correction post-factotum):

And a detail of this:

[Tools used: Processing, CS3)

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Tricks and technicks: the ‘-dividual’ city

October 12, 2008 at 3:14 pm · Filed under design

I just returned from Bombay a month back where I was doing a photo shoot (or should we call this pixelography nowadays?) of the city. The aim here was to create a portrait of global cities in terms of what I call ‘-dividualism’ — that which precedes the individual.  We have seen too many picture of smiling faces, or more specifically, too much photography of teeth. Of individuals and teeth; of the National Geography imaginary of smiley faces of the exotic world that we grew up on. But for anybody who stays in a giant city such as Bombay for more than a few days will know that in such an enormous metropolis, most of the people we never can or will experience as individuals. Rather, it is the non-linear mass of collective movement, flows, moorings, accelerations, trans- and interactions that we experience. This is what I call the “-dividual city.” (See a wider theoretical history of the dividual at the P2P Foundation.) (FLICKR has the full series if you click on the image):

So instead of looking at the the individual as the primary means of representing the urban experience — as has been again and again — I was more interested in seeing the city as a wider assemblage of different spaces and speeds through which people have to navigate in their daily existence. Therefore, instead of taking pictures of people, I was more interested in seeing a kind of an a-anthropocentric vision of the world: not seeing frozen moments, but seeing fluctuating frame-rates, seeing different timescales of existence from cars to people to buildings to nature bubbling in-between.

What was interesting as I was showing the first “sketches” of this series around friends and other professional photographers, the most common question was: how did I do this? How was I able to achieve such a frame-rate/time-based effect? Did I use a special camera?  How did I achieve the multiple-exposure and ghosting effect?  So while this technique is still in development, I decided to start off here with a brief tutorial of how to do such time- and/or framerate-based photography and the possible techniques that can be used for further projects.

Here are the steps explained below for the first time:

1)  MULTIPLE EXPOSURES / AUTO-BRACKETING: First of all, I developed here a customized technique of photography that combines multiple exposure-photography with high-dynamic-range-imaging (HDRI) and digital painting to give the pictures a time-based feeling and movement to them. So to understand how this works, you have to understand some of the principles of HDRI photography. When you HDRI photography, you basically take multiple shots and exposures of the same scene instead of one that you do in normal photography.  So when you take a picture of a scene, instead of doing one picture, you take, for instance, the following five exposures: -4/ -2/ 0 /+2 /+4.  What we therefore get is a full dynamic range of the dark areas and highlights of the picture which is not possible through normal photograpghy.  HDRI photographic techniques are explained more carefully HERE.

2)  HDR MERGE: Once you have done the different different exposure of the scene, you need to somehow combine the images.  To do this, I then used a HDR software called Photomatix.  Photomatix allows you to take multiples pictures and it automatically merges and created a composite of the 5 different pictures with the maximum dynamic range between lights and shadows.

3)  RANDOM MOVEMENT / COMPOSITE: The thing about HDRI photography is that it does not work really well with movement — at least that is what we are supposed to believe.  The software cannot calculate the dynamic range for moving objects as they come in 5 different places.  Normally you need to use a tripod to get as static images as possible. There are certain ways to avoid this problem such as auto-aligning images but they seldom work and people and crowds are notoriously difficult to capture because of this problem of time.   However, here is also the trick!  If we do not even try to get rid of the multiple exposures when you create a HDR composite, the software calculates a value for all these different exposures. Specifically this happens when you get rid of the software’s own “auto-alignment functions” and “reduce ghosting options”. So when there is movement, this creates a ghosting effect that we see above.  This process, as far as I have experimented so far, is quite random.  You get some degree of control to the exposures of these images but the different shapes and forms that emerge are quite unpredictable. You can see some of some of the effects below from close-ups of the pictures where figures and forms break into each other and into occasional noise.

4)  DUOTONE: The rest is pretty simple. I wanted this series to be in duotone so the next thing I did was move the image to Photoshop and used a set of filters to achieve the effect I wanted.  Specifically, I did the following pretty standard Photoshop CS3 adjustments across the different images to get the desired effect:

–> duplicate layer
–> soft light, opacity 20-30%)
–> gaussian blur 20px
–> adjustments – black and white – with green filter
–> greyscale to duotone (light brown tone) to rgb color
–> adjust master saturation -30%

5) DODGING AND BURNING:  Finally, I used a Wacom graphics pad to paint over the original images to exaggerate some of the ghosting effects of the images and overall give it the surreal slightly dark atmosphere.  Specifically, what I did here was to us “Dodge – Highlights” and “Burn – Shadows” to get the specific effects that I wanted.  No major strategy here: this is building on a technique I have been developing for years of painting with light on images which can give rather interesting effects such as in this in one of my earlier series below.

Anyway, much more I could and will write here.  Things such as time of day, light conditions etc affect how this effect works.  Also we could use neutral density filters that also would allow you to further control light and exposure times with more precision.  There are multiple variables here that can still be experimented with and I am probably going to do the part II of this experiment in London when the weather gets dreary and colors grey.  Meanwhile, hoping to get this series exhibited soon — either solo or together with my crazy photographer friend from Northeast India in a joint exhibition about people caught up in spaces not of their own making.  He works with tribal borderlands and fragile border spaces; this series is about urban spatiality — somehow the contrast and the overlaps, we feel, would be a great mix.

This, I believe, is a good example of how classical photography, creatiuve use of software and a little bit of randomness can create effects that were perhaps not possible before through classical methods and can be rather effective to achive the artistic effect you are after.

[Tools used: Pentax k20d, Photomatix, Photoshop CS3 and a fair amount of Old Monk]

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