sowhenisnow

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^From the early stages of learning blender to the end of my project.

Bidding Adieu!

How nice it feels to be finished! This studio has been such an enjoyable class, thanks to Andy, Karen and my friendly classmates. Especially amidst a pandemic, it’s a real spirit lifter to be in this humorous, yet driven and passionate environment. (Fun fact: I sit across from my sister Jessie at a table where we both do work, and often listen in to each other’s classes. She’s also studying communication design but at Monash, and she’s absolutely loved listening in to this class and genuinely gets very excited when I tell her I have an AR class. She said it makes her really happy and is a big fan!)

As much as I loved attending class, there was a fair bit of frustrated grumbling and hair pulling whilst making the work for this class, thanks to learning Blender and Unity. Unity especially was the bane of my existence. Though of course, in the end, I would 100% do it again. The knowledge and skills I’ve learnt are worth the hours of distress, I suppose.

Finally being able to use 3D software is really exciting for me. I’m looking forward to making 3D renders for graphic design and illustration purposes as well as future AR projects. The capabilities of Blender truly extended beyond my initial preconceptions, and consequently, I feel really driven to continue learning and discovering its potential.

If I’m honest, I feel a little disappointed knowing I won’t be able to easily let friends and family experience the work I’ve made in this class for themselves, other than through a video. So I do hope that soon, we won’t have to download applications to access AR experiences. I am eagerly awaiting the growth of Augmented Reality. I want to see whether it will fulfil its potential, whether it will take another 10 years to be incorporated into everyday social platforms, whether it finally won’t be so difficult to experience AR creations. 

Anyway, I always write too much. Thank you Andy and Karen for being a part of design education and helping us be a part of pioneering this young medium, not only through teaching us the skills, but ways of observing, thinking and expressing. Jessie and I will miss this class! See you guys around.

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FINAL CAPTURE: WHEN IS NOW?

The official in-action video for this project.

‘When is Now?’ offers a typographic metaphor of the non linear nature of true time. The reader, for a moment, can escape the constructed framework of ‘time’. The letters fall downwards at different speeds, yet are all still part of the same shared existing ‘Now’, illustrating that it is really an ‘Any-All-Forever’ time. The music made to accompany this experience operates in the same way - elements moving freely at different speeds, yet sharing the same ‘pure duration’. Perhaps this is a small reminder that time is illusionary, perhaps it is a protest against our tick-tock world. Either way, we are still slaves to the clock.

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In the last class on Wednesday, I was finally able to fix my “lighting not exporting into assetbundle” problem, with help from Andy and Ray! Turns out that only ‘Directional Light’ can export, but the light I was using before (Point Light) doesn’t. It’s also important to have the ‘bulb’ button turned on. Yaaaaay!! So grateful to have generous people in the class to offer help :)

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This project was such a joy to make. After feeling a bit of pressure and frustration from my main project, it’s good to kind of sit back and remember how fun AR is, and how much faster it is now that I have a handle on how to use Unity! Though this is a really simple experience, I love the chaotic energy and I laugh every time I scan it. 

The ‘a’ just reminded me of the ‘AAAA’ war cry of a seagull. So I found a recording of a seagull’s war cry from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LivvQY65UU, and put it into this experience.

I really liked trying out ‘2.5D’, and I feel like it resonates a lot with me and reflects the AR work I find myself drawn to. I’d love to play more with it later in personal work!

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The process from 40% QCR to 100%QCR.

Wanted to add elements that would give off the same chaotic energy as the experience. Using one of my favourite typefaces from Velvetyne, Sporting Grotesque. I’m an absolute sucker for this a.

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Don’t mind me, just... putting some things together for the abcdearium. 

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PITCH AND TIME — Mystery of In Betweens

As I’ve been developing this AR experience, I’ve been thinking more about the similarities that musical pitch and time share, especially as I’ve chosen to use music in the background.

Since childhood I have been wondering about the segmentation of pitch, why notes are labelled C, D or E and what, possibly, is between them. I have hummed along the scale, sliding and stopping between a pair of notes such as F and F#, pondering what this obscure territory of pitch would be labelled as.

I’d say that one of my musical strengths is probably accuracy in pitch, and being able to quickly recognise notes as ‘flat’ (slightly below the required note) or ‘sharp’(slightly above). Saying this, I can hear that some parts of my cello music are flat. I wondered if I should fix it, but then I considered that there is such a thing as ‘microtones’, and perhaps keeping these ‘flat’ notes would be a testament to the ‘in betweens’.

All concepts considered to be continuums have something mysterious that lies in between the discrete measurements. What is between microtones? What is between one millisecond and the next? What is between frame 1 of a film and frame 2?

A musician and multi-instrumentalist I admire named Jacob Collier often describes music through the concept of an indefinite number of axis. There is an axis for pitch, harmony, rhythm (time), weight (light — heavy), energy, emotion, etc. Music is a multi-dimensional experience - what more can be said about time?

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Been trying really hard to get this lighting to show up on my assetbundle, but it just won’t!!! Ahhhh the frustration is real

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White Cube’s online exhibition ‘About Time’ that Karen linked me. Highly informative, with multiple artistic philosophies revolving around time.

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GOOD NEWS I made some progress! 

I animated each letter so that they can fall at different speeds, illustrating our individually, uniquely perceived flux of ‘duration’ as opposed to tick-tock time. I tried doing this with rigidbodies on Unity and blender but it didn’t end up export into my assetbundle for some reason. I scoured the internet for solutions (that didn’t involve code) but no luck. It was actually much easier to do it using animation on Unity.

I learnt how to put looping audio into the experience! That was probably the simplest thing I’ve had to learn on Unity so far hahaha. Very exciting to finally see it with the music :)

It’s unfortunate that I have to use the 2018 version of Unity, as the 2019 version crashes each time I try to use it on my laptop. Maybe that might have solved some of my weird problems, but I guess thanks to those problems I made some choices I wouldn’t otherwise have thought of!

This progress is pretty successful and I’m really happy! Just some final tweaks to go before I stop touching this project.

Something I really want to fix is the colour - it looks quite desaturated compared to the gradient adjacent to it, and compared to the scene shown in unity. I’m not sure exactly how to do this, but I’m thinking I can try add some coloured lighting or play around with the gradient material. Fingers crossed.

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Trying out this still version of my AR experience - I put this cutout material on the sphere but it didn’t really have any purpose so definitely changing that back to a normal gradient.

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Another idea I made on blender, but never used! I might use this for something else one day - was super fun to make, and really wanted to put sound effects with it. I liked the fact that it was like a seemingly rigid box breaking/flopping apart. (Sorry for my dirty screen!) It reminds me of the Chinese phrase  纸老虎, meaning ‘paper tiger’ (not sure if it’s also used in western language now). Something that is seemingly ferocious, sturdy and strong, but really is weak and easily defeated.

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Henri Bergson - Time and Freewill

Time and Freewill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness is Henri Bergson’s Doctoral thesis (1889), arguing that time is a psychological concept dependent on consciousness. Though I haven’t read it yet, there are some poignant quotes within that illustrate his idea of the nature of time. (side note: Bergson’s writings have had major influence on Olafur Eliasson’s work, who I made another post about previously!)

‘[…] when we speak of time, we generally think of a homogenous medium in which our conscious states are ranged alongside one another as in space, so as to form a discrete multiplicity. Would not time, thus understood, be to multiplicity of our psychic states which intensity is to certain of them – a sign, a symbol, absolutely distinct from true duration.’

Here Bergson states that because we view time upon such a linear, spatial model, it has become a symbol and a sign - disparate from ‘true duration’. 

‘[…] the idea of a homogenised measurable time is shown to be an artificial concept, formed by the intrusion of the idea of space into the realm of pure duration.’ 

This makes me wonder what ‘pure duration’ is defined as.

“[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state.”

The general conflict arises when we impose clock time onto what Bergson calls duration. The question I pose is: For you, is time a system and a framework, or is it our perceived experience of the ‘true duration’?

Bergson’s ideas both highlights and challenges what I have been thinking. My initial idea that we must not think of time as a line, but rather as a sphere. But Bergson claims that we misconceive time as spatial. This means that we have been thinking of time as lines, curves, points, atoms, grains, but never have we thought of it as something non-spatial. 

Bergson’s concept of dureé (duration) snuffs out my proposal of thinking of time as a sphere. Why must it be a shape, anyway?

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Distorted typography on blender, and transferred onto Unity. Looks a bit too chaotic and confusing, will be simplifying this for sure.

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‘I spent a week in a VR headset’

My friend sent me this video by a while ago. After I watched it, I began to fervently ponder what we really consider ‘reality’.

It especially hit me when Jak Wilmot began to dream in VR. Our brains will really deem anything as our ‘reality’ as long as we are immersed in it for long enough. It reminded me of an article I had read about Jon Rafman, called ‘Jon Rafman: If we spend as much time on the internet as we do off it, where do we actually live?’:

“Our digital lives and lived experience are so intertwined that it is hard to formulate that question: what are the sources of our being, our lived experience, what comes from where, where or who are we? The dichotomy between digital and real life has collapsed in large parts of the world. [...]

Sometimes I wonder, do we even have shared experiences anymore given the differences in the media we consume and the different virtual lives we all lead? Do we have a single reality to which we all refer? The algorithms that recreate or define our world, the digital content void of any ethical base, enters our very being, our very body and can refer us back to a world without a social contract. What will happen to our humanity? When digital content created by those whose agenda is problematic is constantly present, what is governing our actions, do we even have any control becomes very puzzling. Where is the human being in all this?” —Jon Rafman

Source: https://flaunt.com/content/art/jon-rafman

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Final Target Image

After receiving feedback, I knew I didn’t want to change too much, but I kept the typography away from the edges to allow space for bleed.

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The animation with my music playing in the background. This was not able to be exported as an .fbx file :(