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Sociable Objects: a nap doorbell

15-Feb-10 | 613 views

Nap doorbells are designed for nappers. They will not actually ring and wake you up unless it is a real emergency. This project is developed in collaboration with Adi and Asli.

Doorbell for insistent visitors from My Journey on Vimeo.

Switch Code

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int BUTTON = 2;
int GREEN = 12;
int RED = 13;

void setup()
{
 pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT);
 pinMode(GREEN, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(RED, OUTPUT);
 Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
 if (digitalRead(BUTTON) == HIGH)
 {
   Serial.print('D');
   delay(10);
 }

 if (Serial.available() > 0)
 {
   char r = Serial.read();
   if (r == 'G')
   {
     digitalWrite(GREEN, HIGH);
   }
   else if (r == 'R')
   {
     digitalWrite(RED, HIGH);
   }
 }
 else
 {
   digitalWrite(GREEN, LOW);
   digitalWrite(RED, LOW);
 }
}

Buzzer Code

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int BELL = 5;
long lastReleased = -1;
long lastPressed = -1;
int counter = 0;
int offcounter = 0;

boolean pressed = false;

void setup()
{
  pinMode (BELL, OUTPUT);
  Serial.begin(9600);  
}

void loop()
{
  if((Serial.available() > 0))  
  {
    if (Serial.read() == 'D') // look for a capital D over the serial port and ring the bell if found
    {
      //Serial.println("ON");
      if (!pressed)
      {
        lastPressed = millis();
        pressed = true;
        long interval = lastPressed - lastReleased;
       
        //Serial.print("+");
        //Serial.println(counter, DEC);
        //Serial.println(interval);

        if (interval < 1000) // if this one is pressed soon enough, increase the counter
        {
          counter++;
        }
        else
        {
          counter = 0;
        }
      }

      //send feedback that message was recieved
      if (counter >= 5)
      {
        Serial.print('G');
        //ring the bell briefly
        digitalWrite(BELL, HIGH);
        delay(10);
        digitalWrite(BELL, LOW);
      }
      else
      {
        Serial.print('R');
      }
     
      offcounter = 0;
    }

  }
  else
  {
    //Serial.println("OFF");
    offcounter++;
    if (pressed && offcounter > 5000)
    {
      pressed = false;
      Serial.print("-");
      lastReleased = millis();
      offcounter = 0;
    }
  }
}
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redefining privacy: a background research

14-Feb-10 | 385 views

Although I have not yet scoped down my thesis project to a specific and executable idea, it sits in the context where new technologies and innovations in communication tools have already changed a great deal in daily human-to-human interactions. However in such situation people are not yet ready for the much more significant social norm changes that are going to happen shortly. Are technologies like ubiquitous computing going to slow down to wait for the mainstream to catch up? Or will they just move on and embrace the new generation that grow with the new technologies and leave us behind?

In my project I would like to envision in a near future how would the re-definition and the relation of private and public evolves, in either of the following ways or their combinations:

a) a narrative animation that describes the imagined situation and how the transition is going to happen;
b) a tool that exposes one’s digital identity trace;
c) a data visualization focusing on realtime data exposure;
d) an installation that explores the new social norms under this imagined circumstances;
e) a collection of objects/installations that illustrates different aspects of possible social changes;

Related Projects:

Personas
Project website: http://personas.media.mit.edu/

Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath, as a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit in 2009. “It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

Personas visualizes the process of a machine making sense of your public data on the internet. It is not meant to be utilitarian, but more to be a critique on data mining process, which is in most cases happening behind the scene.

There are a few things that I like a lot about this project.

Firstly it is taking only public data on the internet as input. Data collection wise I would also (have to) take a very similar approach as data input for my project. Even I am predicting a future in which almost all digital information would be public and transparent (not necessarily to human beings, at some point we should be taking machines into account too), that would be a most efficient way of gathering information and it well illustrates the blurred borderline between public and private information online.

Secondly it is not aiming to be a useful tool but to expose a completely automated process. This could easily be misinterpreted given its presentation online. I also find it hard to build something that 1) looks useful/practical and 2) runs in a browser to be properly interpreted in its intended context. I got it wrong at first glance too, not a lot of people will actually read the long background description. Given that it was designed originally for a museum exhibition, it is probably facing a completely different situation while being shown separately online. If an online interaction piece is the direction I would be pursuing, I should be very careful with the presentation, and try to make it looks less utilitarian.

Also worth noting is the clean elegant interface of the project. The very limited input and interaction might have a positive effect on driving people to find out more about the underlying idea.

The personas project inspires me in a sense of the possibility of tracing online identity, and it provides an interesting presentation of showing a process but not bothering the user by too much technical details.

Master Plan
Project website: http://masterplanthemovie.com/

Master Plan is a short animation directed and produced by Ozan Halici and Jürgen Mayer in 2007. The script is based on the book “What Barry Says” by Simon Robson and “The Google Story” by David A. Wise.

Master Plan is a clear alert of the seldom noticed online privacy issue back at time, and sent a very strong message through the narrative. This project is inspiring as it was the first beautifully crafted info-graphic video project I had ever seen. Not only the presentation is great, the topic is also very close to the issue that I am interested in.

While Master Plan is mostly summarizing what already happened and proposed a very open question that it did not intend to answer, I would like to predict the future that tries to answer a few questions that have been on my mind for a while. What information we considered private but is actually widely accessible thus being pseudo private? What information is pseudo public because of misinterpretation and loss of context? How will machine make sense of the mass amount of data we have been accumulating once they get smart enough to decode them? Are we human beings going to be still in control of those data by then?

If I could get a fairly clear picture through my research in next couple weeks, and if I would be able to put together a narrative that is strong enough to support a visual conversation, I would like to borrow the form of storytelling from Master Plan to be at least part of my project to tell the story.

We Feel Fine
Project website: http://wefeelfine.org

We Feel Fine is created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar in May 2006.

As far as I know, We Feel Fine remains a lot of people’s favorite ever since its launch. It is a best example of how utilizing publicly available but usually invisible information can create a powerful art project. I am not exactly enthusiastic about the technical details behind the scene, but the idea of combining their subject interest together with the user profile information of the source makes a huge change to the nature of the project. For We Feel Fine it enables the features like filtering and clustering, but for me it means that it made possible to monitor any specific person/profile and connect that to the statements they made. Any data can become sensitive while accumulating through time, it makes a big difference to people emotionally. Any web services that holds user data for a long period of time should all realize the strong attachment of these data to their originators, no matter how boring it is.

There are so much I can take from this project, not only the visuals and interactions, but also the important emotional component that an art project should feature. The method they use for data collection will also work for my case if I would like to create an interactive tool for visualizing aggregated statistics, unlike Personas’ personal perspective, I will probably need to build some infrastructure like We Feel Fine does, to support this kind of data mining.

We Feel Fine does not trace down to personal details, but they have all the data available to do so. This could also be an extra point that I would like o address in my project, is the easiness of data replication. Once the information is out there, there is no way back. You can take back one of your blog posts that you regret that you posted from your site, but there is no way to take it back from all kinds of crawlers all over the internet. People are not allowed to make mistakes anymore, and not a lot of people are aware of this. That changes the rule of sharing information and you probably would like to think twice before posting anything intimate to the internet. This is not to say people should be paranoid about data collection agents/devices/softwares, it is part of the mind change that I foresee in a near future, and I would like to explicitly explain in my project.

Ten Thousand Cents
Project website: http://www.tenthousandcents.com/

Ten Thousand Cents is created by Aaron Koblin in collaboration with Takashi Kawashima in 2008. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as an interactive/video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.

Bicycle Built For 2000
Project website: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/

Bicycle Build For 2000 is created by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey in 2009. It is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.

I am putting these two projects in the same category not just because they are from the same author but they both feature crowd-sourcing to create the final product, and the workers were not even told what exactly they are working on. There are two things that I am especially interested in, involving a large group of people, and this unconsciousness in the creation process.

If I could find a proper form of involving people to help revealing the ideas of privacy redefinition, meaning that I can find a minimized task that help me get a clue of what is on people’s mind, distributing these tasks through mechanical turk seems a great idea, and this unconsciousness will also help reinforce the idea of people creating a future without having the big picture in mind.

Track Me Not
Project website: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines, created by Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum in August 2006. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view.

This is a utility tool, that actually deals with the identity issue directly. It relates to my subject of interest because it is providing an answer with an effort of not changing social norms and presumptions and trying to solve a specific identity exposure case. I am not against the attempt but I see this approach as a passive way to look at our issues. My biggest problem is not with large corporates collecting data, I am more worried about not a lot of people care or even know about it.

Resources

Boyd, D. (2007, May 22). Social network sites: public, private, or what?. Retrieved from http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/edition-13/social-network-sites-public-private-or-what/

Boyd, D. (2010, January 16). Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms. Retrieved from http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/01/16/facebooks_move.html

Zimmer, M. (2010, January 12). Zuckerberg’s remarks aren’t surprising, nor new, nor true. Retrieved from http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/01/12/zuckerbergs-remarks-arent-surprising-nor-new-nor-true/

Kirkpatrick, M. (2010, January 18). The Facebook privacy debate: what you need to know. Retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_privacy_explanation_debate.php

Hill, D. (2008, Feburary 11). The City as a platform. Retrieved from http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/02/the-street-as-p.html

Kerr, Ian, Steeves, Valerie, & Lucock, Carole. (2009).Lessons from the identity trail. Oxford University Press, USA.

Work Plan

I have not yet got to a stage where I can work on a detailed work plan. I have several milestone points that I would like to keep. Unfortunately it is not making a lot of sense to me to go more detailed than that at this point.

If I have to switch my thesis idea, I would like to turn in another research paper and work plan by next week (Feb 17) together with new assignments.

Week 5 (Feb 17)

Finish background research, at least get to one narrowed-down but still exciting idea to work on. This is prerequisite to all other components of this project, and I have already spent a great amount of time on research. If I will not be able to nail down anything specific to work on, I would like to keep the research open but switch my thesis project to a practical idea that will fit in the timeline.

At the same time, keep working on background research of another project which I already had a firm idea and a clear vision with, so that

Week 8 (March 10)

Build a bare-bone prototype that complete the structure of the project, leaving details for polishing or working out. If it is an animation, I should have script, storyboard and graphical elements settled. If I will be working on an installation, I should have the algorithm ready, and a bare-bone software program running.

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Thesis abstract draft

03-Feb-10 | 375 views

I have always been paranoid keeping my different online identities separate. It has been a while since I found it easy enough to put up several google searches and get a pretty complete profile of a person, if he or she does have an active online identity. It is not to say I think keeping a clear online identity is a bad thing. On one hand it is inevitable to maintain an active and valid identity either for clearer public recognition or promotion, just like in real life, on the other hand it is also a safer approach to have separate identity and sometimes anonymity for different online tasks, especially under circumstances where online surveillance and censorships happen a lot. However with any currently available web browser and the current way most modern websites are built, to keep a clear separation of different identities is extremely difficult and effortful. Using same username or email address leaves a clear and accurate trail of one’s online activities.

There are several different approaches out there trying to either simplify or solve the identity mess online, such as OpenID protocol, integrated user profile management in web browsers and also ongoing research on privacy models that could apply to computer programs for them to classify private information. Yet in reality there is always a balance between security and usability, and at this point most of the approaches are still geek toys that require a more advanced/simplified interface to gain wider acceptance. My personal take is just to use different browser for separate profile settings, more or less a hack on the loose cookie systems.

Nevertheless, even those approaches all successfully get to general acceptance and accomplish their goals, a wider exposure of private information remains unchanged and I do not have any problem with that. You get better control on the information online, but they are still (and should be) trackable.

One concern I really have regarding this trend, along with the very slow semantic web movement, is that while the internet is getting better and better understanding of human activity and the collective intelligence would actually gain consciousness of its own presence. I am seeing this issue not as science fiction but a practical matter and would like to see while surrendering too much information about themselves how would human beings deal with the intellectual machine(s). That would be a too broad future to predict so that I would like to start my research from how would the transition start, before this really big change actually happens.

Thesis Abstract

We are producing much more information online than ever. Ubiquitous computing is practical enough to blend the borderline between physical world and the internet. The revolution of user interface is around the corner, much more user-friendly screen-based and tangible interfaces encourage people to get connected. Whatever interface they are collected through, the data are not going nowhere. All information are stored together with trails enough to reveal people’s identity. Furthermore, the moment they are public on the internet, even just for a short period of time, they get replicated by crawlers from all kinds of search engines, aggregators and other software agents. Information could be removed from their original source, but practically they will be public on the internet, however difficult to reveal, for good. Another category of information are less publicized yet as important is the transactional data created through people’s interaction, most service providers keep these information which could be extremely valuable for marketing purposes. These information, due to the channels they are collected through, are usually much more sensitive and much easier to leak identity.

Corporates and service providers normally provide unilateral privacy policies that keep highly sensitive data out of public accessibility, organizations such as Electronic Privacy Information Center are also working hard to drive digital privacy protection through legitimate methods, technically there is still very little effective ways to prevent private information from getting into public attention, given the surprising pace how computing technology evolves. I would like to look at this problem under a slightly broader presumption that eventually much more of our personal information would reach the public, and we would have to adapt the new situation where we have to redefine what “privacy” really is.

The final product of this project would be an interactive software/installation or animation that drives awareness of this social change on privacy. At this point I am not exactly sure about the presentation of the project, but preferably I would be able to foresee the new situation and how the transition is going to happen, therefore create a convincible narrative on this topic. I would like to define the new boundary of privacy by a) studying what categories of information the majority of current online service providers are collecting, b) examining behavioral changes those services cause on people’s daily life and whether those changes are temporal or permanent, and c) creating a practical scenario in which there maintains a new balance after people are used to publicizing information that they considered private before.

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Kicking off my thesis journal

02-Feb-10 | 543 views

it’s time.

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Kalpa

16-Jan-10 | 807 views

kalpa-1 kalpa

THE STORY

Kalpa is the creature of stillness. There is a large amount of them existing but rarely seen. Their bodies are too small to be noticed by human eyes but they have an extremely strong sense of any kind of movement around them.

They gather and reproduce only in a still environment. A slightest change can stop them from reproducing and kill them very quickly. Therefore, even though they reproduce surprisingly fast, the ever changing nature of the world makes them ephemeral and become extinct.

Fortunately, except for having a still environment there is another way to keep kalpa alive.

The first person who discovered this was Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo was born in a noble family in India. He went to London for education at seven. Being always passionate about politics, he dropped out of school when he was 20, went back to India to join national independence movement. By late 18th century when the revolution was suppressed by the government, downhearted Aurobindo ended his 17-year political life and started seclusion. During the seclusion, he read a lot ancient Indian, Syrian and European manuscripts and became interested in the Absolute Stillness Theory in alchemistry.

During an austerity practicing at the age of 58, he claimed that he felt the mysterious creature that had written records only in ancient manuscripts. He then named it “Kalpa” and implied in his book On Bhagavad Gita that the ancient Hindu prophets achieved immortality through concentration and having kalpa gather around their bodies. In the following 80 years, Aurobindo practiced four times. The last one lasted for 40 years without him eating anything. Just when others believed he was dead, he walked out his chamber and peacefully passed away in the sun.

When Aurobindo’s book spread to Japan, it was treated as The Criterion of Immortality by local monks. Combined with Tao Theurgy of ancient China, they created a new sensational approach. The devoted ones must do the following steps. The first step is to become empty in three years. They should exercise everyday to burn out all the body fat first and then eat only nuts and seeds to minimize the movements of their stomachs and to slow down the metabolism. The second step takes another three years. They eat only tree barks and grass roots and drink only a thimbleful of water. They meditate instead of exercise to become sweeny in order to maximize the reduction of metabolism.

Before the last step, they need to drink a kind of tea that is specially made of sumach extracts to extrude body water and so to minimize fluid movements inside their bodies. Then they go into a small basement to practice austerities. According to master Yentao, this brutal and suicidal approach can help the gathering of kalpa around their bodies so for them to achieve immortality. It was banned by the government in late 19th century.

Sociologist David Philips from University of California San Diego (UCSD) was the first one who associated kalpa with time. In his 1970 doctoral thesis paper Death as a Form of Social Activism he pointed out that “to defer death by controlling body movement is actually a common phenomenon although the amount of time earned is limited…”. The cases he collected suggested that in a lot of areas, dying elderly people were able to defer their deaths until after major festivals merely by reducing the amount of food they eat, body movements and using a lot of will powers.

Inspired by Aurobindo, Philips proposed his new theory about time in the Annual North America Psychology Conference (ANAPC) in 1991. He believed that not only physical stillness but also concentration can increase the reproduction speed of kalpa and what is more important is that at the same time the gathering of kalpa can also help reinforce the stillness, meaning when they reach a certain amount, they could actually stop time. But unfortunately there was no evidence to prove the existence of kalpa so the theory was called ridiculous, and Philips was considered a lunatic. Philips was not able to get any funding and had to stop the research on kalpa. In 2005, he spent his last days in a nursing home in Connecticut and did not leave behind any empirical record on kalpa.

A couple of years later, almost when everyone has forgotten about this academic farce, two young art students claimed that they managed to capture kalpa. They made a wood box, in which they placed a specially made clock. They brought the box into a quiet room, stared at it for 10 minutes and then quickly sealed it with plaster. So they have a living sample of kalpa trapped in the box. Nobody would believe it was so easy to capture this legendary creature until after they stare at the box for a while, they were all surprised to see the time slow down. This specimen was later brought to NASA and became the first cornerstone in the making of time machines.

Kalpa is my collaborative project with Li Li and was shown at ITP Winter Show 2009. More information at http://j.mp/kalpa-project

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Automating The Brush Stroke

20-Nov-09 | 589 views

Here’s a rough diagram of the drawing machine architecture that I have in mind. I’m building the components from bottom to top.

Drawing Machine

I moved on from the brush stroke and started to work on a set of drawing functions that incorporate the stroke.

Currently coverage:

  • moveTo,
  • lineTo,
  • rect,
  • circle

the moveTo function is necessary since the dynamics of the brush motion would depend on the last stroke, both position and speed.

currently i’m working on the curve function, it’s quite a challenge to get the brush movement natural enough and calculation is also dependent on the stroke length and brush size too. once this is done I think all basic drawing functions are covered for now and I will move onto the composition stage.

this is a simple test:

stroke update from Liangjie Xia on Vimeo.

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A Passive Drawing Machine

12-Nov-09 | 512 views

worked on this simple drawing machine a couple of month ago but never got it posted.

R0011389

The machine draws with dripping ink, which is loaded into the cup and slowed down by the sponge.

R0011392

The machine draws while the movable paper holder is pushed, leaving passive trails on the paper.

R0011397

drawing_machine_watercolor

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Update on my brush stroke

05-Nov-09 | 773 views

following up my drawing machine project proposal, I built a brush stroke in the first week to simulate what a brush should behave in my imagination. Basically I built it with the idea of simulating chinese calligraphy (without the splashing ink part) so first it should be used for writing, and it came out pretty much as what I expected.

gintama

Then I made some simple line drawings:

Screen shot 2009-10-28 at 上午02.17.01 Screen shot 2009-10-27 at 下午10.23.58 humon brush-2 brush-1

The goal of the brush I think is to give computer generated line drawing a human feeling, even they are just coming from a series of drawing instructions. It is a little bit different than vector graphics + brush shapes, because in this case the speed of the moving brush tip does affect the look. No pressure input is required, because it is not designed to be used with a wacom tablet or anything, but purely computer generated lines. By playing with the thickness and shades of the lines, it is possible also to get depth and lighting, but that should be left for the composition stage, and I will see if it’s necessary to build more brush types for it.

Some ITP folks contributed some drawings too:

Screen shot 2009-11-02 at 下午09.45.23

by Li Li

Screen shot 2009-11-02 at 下午08.27.29

by Matt Richard

My next step would be building a set of (helper) api that uses this brush to draw, and to certain extent automate a drawing process. I’ve been experiencing some performance issue trying to isolate the drawing with PGraphics in processing from directly drawing to the screen. Not sure if I should learn a bit more OpenGL or go directly to openFrameworks for future development.

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More on 3D Modeling Techniques

05-Nov-09 | 734 views

Generative 3D Modeling

paper: http://www.scribd.com/doc/279861/Generative-3D-Models

Wikipedia entry of Generative Modeling Language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_Modelling_Language

Usual 3D file formats describe a virtual world in terms of geometric primitives. These may be cubes and spheres in a CSG tree, NURBS patches, a set of implicit functions, a consommé of triangles, or just a cloud of points. The term “generative 3D modelling” describes a different paradigm for describing shape. The main idea is to replace 3D objects by object-generating operations: A shape is described by a sequence of processing steps, rather than the triangles which are the end result of applying these operations. Shape design becomes rule design. The approach can be generally applied to any shape representation that provides a basic set of generating functions, called in this context ‘elementary shape operators’. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated, e.g., in the field of procedural mesh generation, with Euler operators as complete and closed set of invertible shape generating functions for meshes, operating on the half-edge level.

Generative modelling gains efficiency through the possibility of creating high-level shape operators from low-level shape operators. Any sequence of processing steps can be grouped together to create a new combined operator. It may use elementary operators as well as other combined operators. Concrete values can easily be replaced by parameters, which makes it possible to separate data from operations: The same processing sequence can be applied to different input data sets. The same data can be used to produce different shapes by applying different combined operators from, e.g., a library of domain-dependent modelling operators. This makes it possible to create very complex objects from only a few high-level input parameters, such as for instance a style library.

With procedural models, the model complexity is no longer directly (i.e., linearly) related with the file size. The Procedural Cathedral, a basic model of the Cologne Cathedral, contains 70 tracery windows, and a single window in highest resolution contains about 7 million triangles. These are “unfolded” from only 126 KB of GML code (18 KB zipped).

Application: Grasshopper for Rhino

working env video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBrZoQm_Ln8

showcase: http://vimeo.com/6519204

Freehand Drawing 3D Modeling: Rhonda

project website: http://rhondaforever.com/

Apparently this is still a project just released its private beta, and given the fact that I’m not really crazy about 3D, the best thing I like about it is the freehand feel it can achieve in the process of creation, almost a direct opposite to the generative modeling technique (maybe not always).

(cross posted at: http://itp.nyu.edu/RepresentingEarth/?p=717)

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Drawing Machine Project Proposal

26-Oct-09 | 1,951 views

inspiration

Erik Natzke‘s generative drawing in Flash

Game Is Over from Erik Natzke on Vimeo.

manual mouse input + flash actionscript

Craig Mullins‘ digital painting

Goodbrush.com-1

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo.

proposal

I would like to create a generative piece that would be able to compose something similar to Natzke’s gesture drawing but with limited manual input. The goal is not to imitate traditional drawing in textures and strokes, but I do think I can learn from the lighting technique we see in a lot of Mullins’ works. It has to be apparently digital however I would like to try coding emotions into the piece. It would be a too ambitious project for one semester, but I have some smaller starting points to work from.

The final form of the machine should be an automated computer program living on the web. It feeds on its own observation and produces one drawing everyday and publishes it to the web. This process is not to mimick evolution nor to develop artificial intelligence, it would be just another representation of myself, since I would code it not to be a general purpose drawing machine that draws everything perfectly, but to draw in a style similar to myself.

It contains apparently a lot of different components requiring totally different background knowledge. I guess I will starting with building a custom stroke module that is more responsive to the gesture, the ink ad could be a nice example of such behavior. I’m not crazy about this ink effect, but it serves a good reference for the fine controls that I would probably need to build into the system.

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