data>art transformations

Hi guys, here are my slides from today’s lecture. You can find more info about all the projects I talked about in the references on the last slide of the deck. It was great meeting all of you today. I had lots of fun. Good luck with your final projects – they all sound awesome! Cheers, Uta

Here are examples from class 11.

These include the xlmDemo made object oriented that we worked on together in class.

The following items are due next week, for your final project. From now on, your only assignment is to work on your final project. You will be expected to show progress each week. There’s not much time left! Less than 4 weeks!

1. YOUR IDEA. Write at least three paragraphs, not more than a page and a half, on the idea or concept you want to express. This should be clear and concise. Remember to clearly define your terms, and any  assumptions you’re making– for example, if you want to make a piece about the “destruction” of data, what do you mean by “destruction”— do you mean altering, erasing, corrupting, transforming, decaying, deleting, etc? How are each of these different? I want to know your core idea and WHY it interests you.
2. YOUR DATA SOURCE. Where will you get the data you’re working with? Will you collect it, pull it from the internet, get it from a static data file on a government site? How much data do you have access to? How was this data initially collected, and by whom, for what purpose? What are potential problems with the data?
3. REFERENCES, of other projects that have inspired you. Look back at the lectures, do some web searching to find artworks that deal with some of the ideas you’re interested in. Check blogs like infoaesthetics.com and visualcomplexity.com. I would like you to look for inspiration/references both for content/ideas and for visual aesthetics.
4. WORKPLAN an outline of how you’ll proceed, with due dates for yourself. For example, if you know you have a part of the program that takes in data and processes it, you might want to finish that first, before you start writing your class to display data. Or if you plan to manipulate data in processing and then use those datapoints to create an real-life object (a sculpture or a map) or interaction (a dance), then you need to be done with the processing part of the project early on, so you have plenty of time to work on your object. The goal of this exercise is to avoid you starting to write that critical object class or creating your object the night before it’s due! Think strategically about the project requirements and be sure that your plan is realistic!

Code Examples are here. Lecture slides are here.

For more on maps and mapping:

For homework, following example code in xmldemo.pde, use the flickr api’s photo.search method to get information on photos posted in a certain group, or taken at a certain location. You can use a place_id, a group_id, a tag keyword, or a WOEID as a parameter in your function call. You will need to have a flickr account, and get an API key in order to use the API.

You can get a group ID using this handy tool.

Flickr has a places_id function that will return place_ids when given a place name (you can use the explorer interface to search for a particular place_id by typing the place name in the box, for example “Bennington” and then look in the xml that the explorer returns for the place id you want. For Bennington, the explore returns several, but the id I am looking for is “g4IJssKbAppRLV1U”, which I can now use as a parameter when I call photo.search in my Processing program).

You can also use WOEIDs (also known as Where On Earth IDs) to specify a place. Here’s a tool that helps you find them.

What to do with the photos when you get them? The sample program takes only the first photo and displays it. But you could save information on all the photos in an array, and display all the photos. You could get average pixel color information from all the photos and use it somehow in your program– for example, to display a generic “photo” created from all the pixel data of all the photos . If you searched for photos by tag or group, you could save and store  the photos’s unique IDs, and then make another call to flickr to get the location (lat and long) where the photo was taken, by making a second call to the api, using the photos.geo.getLocation function. There are endless possibilities! Look around the API and see what you can think of. It’s OK if you run into problems, we’ll troubleshoot and go over the process in class on Wednesday (the plan day, we’ll start at 9). Feel free to email me with problems. I will be around on Sunday for extra help, and available all day next Wednesday for meetings.

Code from today’s class is here.

Midterm is open-book (but not open-internet). You’ll need to write a program that includes an object class, a data file that’s loaded in and used in the processing of creating objects, and an array to hold the the objects. You should be able to draw objects to the screen.