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

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.

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

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

Then I made some simple line drawings:

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:

by Li Li

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.

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)

Erik Natzke‘s generative drawing in Flash

Game Is Over from Erik Natzke on Vimeo.

manual mouse input + flash actionscript

Craig Mullins‘ digital painting

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.

Effective resizing of images should not only use geometric constraints, but consider the image content as well. A seam is an optimal 8-connected path of pixels on a single image from top to bottom, or left to right, where optimality is defined by an image energy function. By repeatedly carving out or inserting seams in one direction one can change the aspect ratio of an image. By applying these operators in both directions we can retarget the image to a new size. The selection and order of seams protect the content of the image, as defined by the energy function. Seam carving can also be used for image content enhancement and object removal. We support various visual saliency measures for defining the energy of an image, and can also include user input to guide the process. By storing the order of seams in an image we create multi-size images, that are able to continuously change in real time to fit a given size.

This technology/algorithm is presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

project page: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/SCWeb/imret/index.html
youtube demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg (algorithm explained at 1’12)

online demo: http://swieskowski.net/carve/
implementation by aviary: http://aviary.com/blog/woodpecker

improved seam carving for video retargeting

This one is pushing the algorithm to a new level by applying to realtime videos as well as improving the seam carving algorithm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJtE8afwJEg

DRAGON: in-scene video navigation
http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/download/DRAGON/1057-karrer.mov

Direct manipulation interaction technique for frame-accurate navigation in video scenes.
This technique benefits tasks such as professional and amateur video editing, review of sports footage, and forensic analysis of video scenes.

By directly dragging objects in the scene along their movement trajectory, DRAGON enables users to quickly and precisely navigate to a specific point in the video timeline where an object of interest is in a desired location. Examples include the specific frame where a sprinter crosses the finish line, or where a car passes a traffic light.

cross posted: http://itp.nyu.edu/RepresentingEarth/?p=519

Form Study:

We’re creating much more personal information than ever on the internet nowadays and what is going to happen to these data after we die? How much is it possible to restore partially or even a small piece of presence, that is visually, audibly or emotionally connected to ourselves?

One conceptual approach was “Cemetery 2.0” by Elliot Malkin. It works by keeping an active satellite Internet connection that keeps the gravestone in constant communication with the Web services.Visitors to the physical memorial can view related memorials on the device display, while visitors of any of the online memorials will recognize that their browsing is associated directly with the actual burial site. The Cemetery 2.0 device is connected to Hyman Victor’s GEDCOM file. The file includes The Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) to neutralize an inadvertent posthumous baptism.

Digital Remains is an art project by Michele Gauler, which is more closely connected to the topic of virtual presence. It assumes a world in which our data is stored on the network creating digital archives of generations of people. Personal access keys are used to remotely log on to the digital remains of a person and receive their data on our own digital devices. Based on data tags and meta data, search algorithms dig through a deceased person’s data, presenting us with content that is most likely relevant to us. For instance, a photograph from a holiday we spent with the person 10 years ago or the person’s favourite piece of music which they typically listened to while writing e-mails.

One interesting is the presentation of the concept: an over-head projection of hand and arm movements, which are in synch with the movements on the monitor screen. Placing one of the access keys on the table, starts the access key spinning and triggers the relevant scenario. The presentation itself is stunning however a little confusing too, it certainly conveys some emotional connection to the deceased friend.

There used to be demonstration videos online but I cannot find them anymore. An audio brief is still available on MOMA’s website.

A similar concept could also be seen in “Family Digital Shrine“. By using tea cups with trackable tags (as identity of viewer) it’s able to reveal different content for the views. It’s a great way of storytelling, and of encouraging storytelling, but it’s also a shortcoming in terms of usability. A youtube video is available online. I’m wondering how they collect their data and categorized them.

The most ambitious one might be the mission eternity. A person’s data is packed into a data package called ARCANUM CAPSULE, which is securely stored in a p2p network. Spec of the capsule content: pdf. The presentation mode is called BRIDGE, and they’re planning a mobile graveyard (called SARCOPHAGUS) which is a standard 20 foot cargo container equipped with an immersive LED screen of 17’000 pixels that cover the walls, ceiling and floor on which the visitors can walk.

I would like to finish with a purely emotional piece which has nothing to do with any specific human being however dramatically arouse my emotions, and it’s stunningly beautiful (and also bizarre too). Sometimes we feel more with eyes closed.

Funktionide by Stefan Ulrich

http://vimeo.com/5509560/

One last interesting fact: all above projects are from 2006.

cross posted: http://itp.nyu.edu/RepresentingEarth/?p=256