Most photographers seem to want the most minimal of sites, a white or dark grey page with their work in the middle. I felt it was more appropriate to give it just a little bit more color and give visitors a good impression of Rachel’s work as soon as they open the page, something few photographer’s sites do. WIth that in mind, her portfolio is on the front page with large images linking to sets of images.

www.rachelverhaaren.com

Some nice javascript touches are built with jQuery and the site is powered by Wordpress.

I used an old Processing sketch which visualized an audio stream. The typography isn’t quite what I usually do, but it seemed appropriate for the event. It probably isn’t that unusual anyway.

I’ve decided to design a set of coasters and have them laser cut from wood. The coasters will be circular, with designs partially cut into the surface and then primed.

I’ll post the finished pieces and a link to the shop when they’re done. They’ll come in a set of four and there will be a handful of sets available if you’re interested in them. For now, here are the designs I’m planning. They were drawn in Illustrator. Nothing generative this time. Click on the images to see them larger.

With two feet of snow on the roads, the city belonged to pedestrians. The scene was fairly apocalyptic, but at the same time people were walking around in the snow and everyone seemed a little friendlier than usual. Not to mention crime has dropped to almost nothing.

At sunset after the storm, the houses were cast in the most beautiful warm light. Here is also a car under a pile of snow.

When the snow first started it melted. The snow then stuck onto the wet trees. It made a great winter wonderland scene and took a few trees down.

Rachel Verhaaren wading through the snow.

These people have a mattress. I hope they used it as a sled.

And the streets of Mt. Vernon, still not plowed after the storm. The snow had a strange effect on the landscape. It covered all of the familiar features and made most spaces unrecognizable. It’s impossible to distinguish between features such as sidewalks and roads. People have reshaped the landscape, cutting paths through the snow. It’s interesting to see how trails of footprints interact and eventually form into packed trails through the wasteland.

The ring in the design was created in processing. My original design was a little bit more intricate and had four colors, but I think it still looks pretty good. If you want a free shirt, just come to mica and join our department.

Starting to work with Pure Data is a little intimidating. Objects added to the stage are blank and you have to type into them what object the should be. Until you understand what the basic objects are and how they interact trying to get anything working isn’t easy. For at least a good while I’ve been opening up Pure Data every few months only to put it away again after beating my head against it for a while.

For my recent flash game, Pulsus, I decided to create the sound using Pure Data to force myself to learn the program. I managed to cobble together a basic understanding and build a few synthesizers and sound generators.

I used this first patch to create most of the sound effects in the game. For a number of oscillators the pitch and envelope can be changed. The pitches can create harmonics, harmonies, or dissonant chords. The envelope, the volume over the course of the sound, creates pulsing tones, short beats, and any other type of tone. I also added an amplitude modulator and a global envelope to add some more control.

In my next experiment I created a simple mono synthesizer. Key inputs, from my computer keyboard, are mapped into midi notes. When a key is pressed the frequency slides to that note if another note is still playing. Key presses trigger the envelope generator which reads data from an array (top right). The synth also has frequency and amplitude modulators and reads the waveform from a table to include harmonics.

Next I build a polyphonic synthesizer which has a separate oscillator for every note in the scale.

Here are the pure data files for these patches in case they might be useful to anyone, but again they are not super efficient, organized, or annotated.

• tone generator
• monosynth
• polysynth
• polysynth tone (an abstract for the polysynth)

These are my first moderately successful explorations with Pure Data. Some things, I realize, are not done as efficiently as possible, but I’m working things out in the next iteration. My next frustration is to find a way to control the instruments I build. I need a midi sequencer with which I can construct songs that could then send the midi info to Pure Data. I tried using a garage band plugin to output midi info from garage band but It came out pretty garbled in PD, I could be doing something wrong though. Any thoughts on how I should go about this?

First go play it! Then come back here if you’d like to know a little more about how the game was created.

I’m not one to preface my work, but I would like to mention that I am not a gamer in any respect. This being said, I may not be aware of all the game conventions I should be following, despite a good amount of ‘research’. If you have any tips for this or future games, feedback is always appreciated. You can leave public comments here or send me feedback through the Pulsus contact form.

Recently, thanks to a class with Jason Corace, I’ve become interested in games as interactive systems. In the same class I developed a card game and created Pulsus for my final project.

The Game

The game, Pulsus, is a puzzle game about particle systems. Players have to place objects to direct particles from emitters into goals. While it is a puzzle game, it is also about exploring a dynamic system.

In the game, players solve puzzles by placing objects onto the stage which effect the way the particles move. In each level the particles must be moved from particle emitters into goal points. Different colored goals accept only particles of that color. Particles must hit the goal quickly enough to fill it up, but once it is complete is will remain filled. The colored force objects will attract their own color while repelling others. Grey objects interact with all particles in the same way.

Development

Designing the game, I went through many aesthetic possibilities and through many nuances of the gameplay and the interaction of the game’s components. The general trend, while developing the game, was to simplify the system as much as possible. Initially I planned on a number of different objects that could be used to manipulate the system, but it was evident in early user tests that there was enough that could be done with only the most basic objects.

In this collection of objects I explored many styles to try and construct a cohesive look for the game and interface elements, including some objects which were ultimately taken out of the game.

The various menus and screens were story-boarded and designed. Somewhat atypically, the game was designed and built simultaneously. The function of most elements evolved with testing through various iterations of the game and the visuals had to reflect the function.

The Sound

All of the sounds within the game were created in Pure Data with a few simple synthesizers I created. For most of the sound effects I used a patch with which I could control the envelope different harmonics and overtones of a basic pitch. For the background tones I used a polytonal synthesizer (pictured above). On the left side, keyboard inputs are mapped to a set of midi notes. Each note is passed into a sub-patch which generates the tone. In the middle are controls for the octave, pitch shift, and amplification. On the right (click on the image to enlarge) are graphs of the output, envelope, and waveform.

Some Early Prototypes

My first prototype was a simple set of paper icons. I played the computer. This was a simple test to see if the functions of the game were understandable and if basic puzzles could be solved.

This early prototype included the basic particle system upon which the game is based as well as the basic game elements, goals, emitters, and forces.

As usual, the script is built in Processing. Particles are generated by clicking on the screen and then they spread out pushing each other away. A slight perlin noise field gives the strands a more interesting motion and texture. Each frame is drawn successively on the screen, tracing the particles motion, without clearing the background. Each particle is rendered as a filled ellipse with a lighter transparent outline, creating a slightly 3d feel as the outlines get denser toward the edges.

To render the images with a higher resolution I created a global scale variable. The width and height of the applet are multiplied by this variable and then the scale function is called with that variable at the beginning of the draw loop. This lets me switch quickly between a manageable size to see what’s going on and the high res version. On my mac, entering expose fits the oversize window onto my screen. It’s far from a perfect system but it works. Exporting vectors is a much better rout, but this application is to complex for that to be feasible.

Now pictures. Click to see them bigger.

WikiWeb, a piece I created about a year ago is part of an exhibition of interactive work, Sight Sound Interaction (SSI4). The show is curated annually by Jason Slaon and is in the Rosenberg gallery on the second floor of the Brown Center. The project itself is an interactive map of Wikipedia. Pages on the site are represented by small points and links are are drawn as lines connecting pages. Any point can be expanded to show all the pages it links to. You can interact with a working version of the project on the project site or swing by the exhibition to see it and some other works.

The Juried Undergrad Exhibition is another annual show which features a wide range of work from students at MICA. This year I submitted a print from my ribbons piece. It’s exciting to see my work printed on a larger scale, about 36″x24″. To get the image for the print I added a bit of code to save the drawing as vector objects which can then be redrawn and exported as a PDF. The exhibition is in the Meyerhoff and Decker galleries on the first floor of the Fox building.

My department at MICA recently changed it’s name from Interactive Media to Interaction Design & Art (IxDA). Interactive media was perhaps an appropriately ambiguous name considering the work coming out of the department, but the new name is hopefully more self-explanatory.

To advertise the new name there is a t-shirt design competition, and then free shirts for all the majors. I’ve been working on some designs, mostly just typographic logos. This one looked half decent and I combined it with something I was working on in Processing. Here are a couple sketches.