My name is Max Severin Rodenkirchen.
I currently live in Aachen, Germany,
where I study communication design.
Beside my design projects I am producing
electronic music and learn about modular
synthesis. My goal is to know as many tools
as possible. This allows me to always implement
my ideas in the most appropriate format.
In this project, creative coding with the
JavaScript library P5
really inspired me. I had some basic
understanding of Java and some other
visual programming softwares which helped
me a lot. Generative design is one of
my next topics I will dive deeper into.
This semester I have taken a course about infographic
visualization with my professor Eva Vitting, FH Aachen.
We had to choose a topic and find interesting
informations which we could picture.
It was a lot of conceptional work to find
something that would be interesting and new to people.
But also finding the right medium and way of implementation
was a tough exercise. Besides that we were told to think
about how we and others interpret certain (audio-)visual
elements and parameters and how we could use them to
achieve specific effects.
I chose the topic emotions and senses because
it's something I am generally interested in.
Years ago I had the idea of a chill out party
where everything is targeted to address your senses.
The partys I am visiting are often just focusing on
the acoustics and sometimes on visuals and your
sense of taste in terms of special drinks.
The rest of your emotional journey on such partys
often comes through drug consumption.
What if there would be a place that influences
all of your senses in such an intensive way that
it would exceed every emotion you had before
on a party? Definitely there are things on earth
that are highly influencing our perception.
The goal behind the project is to find these
things and combine them into one natural
emotional journey.
You may wonder what this has to do with the final project
and I will come to it now. But to tell you how it came about
I need to go through my concepts which I developed throughout
the course.
The project I had in mind was obviously way too
big for a third semester project and wasn't really
visualizing any informations. But now it was the topic
I chose, so I had to figure out a concept which would
combine some of my ideas with the thoughts behind the course.
Generally I am interested in making an installation.
That's why the medium was pretty clear to me in the beginning.
My first concept was to make an installation where the visitor
hears certain audio waveforms in certain frequencies and has
to give an input about his current feeling by using a controller. These inputs
would then be visualized in some way, e.g. with a light installation
or video projection. There were two major problems. The first was that I
was scared of the technical implementation. I didn't have a clue how
to translate hardware inputs into digital signals and how to use
them at that point. The second problem was that my concept wouldn't
display enough interesting information.
I switched to a completely analog concept where people would
tighten strings in a circle. They would still hear the same
acoustic installation but now walk from one rod to another and place
the string according to their feelings in a different height.
This would then lead to a in a circle taut spider web which
could showcase the differences in people's feelings at certain
moments in the audio playback. I made an online test and drew
the results by hand in a diagram. Unfortunately the results for
each person were pretty much the same and this wouldn't lead
to an interesting visualization.
My professor then told us that we didn't need to implement the project
if the concept works. Also the covid situation would have caused
a lot of trouble at that point. This was the moment I decided
to make a more complex concept and only implement parts of it.
I went back to my first idea of the party where people's
senses get influenced specifically. But how can I get a lot of
different informations and how can I visualize them in a way that
people can translate without knowing the actual information.
Imagine there are five people in my installation. Person A would
only concentrate on the visual influences, person B on the acoustic
influences, person C on what they smell, person D on the taste and
person E on the haptics. Each of them would control certain
parameters of an (analog)
visual synthesizer
which gets
projected into the room. Each parameter of the video synthesis
could stand for a certain emotion. What shape would you choose
if you hear something that makes you feel excited?
Now it's your turn. Imagine you are person A and focus on the
acoustics. What would you draw with the synthesizer? Which colors and
shapes would you pick? Would you animate it or would you create
interesting patterns manually?
Hop over to the
Zense program, play around and save an image or a video.
Once I had my final concept my professor motivated me to do some implementation in processing which is a creative coding language based on JavaScript used by designers. We got taught some basics from her auxiliary student Miguel and I was anyway interested in diving deeper into it. I learned how P5.js works, which is a further developed version of Processing that functions as a library for JavaScript rather than a standalone software. My goal was to create a program that functions similar to a visual synthesizer. But a key difference to an analog controller is that you can only tweak one parameter at a time with your mouse. Therefore it is possible to automate nearly every parameter in my user interface. Through the save image and video functions it is possible to compare different outcomes. Have a look at the example section where you can see many results and guess which emotion they should represent.