Pharos Designer / Capitol
I’m getting the hang of it. Between referencing the manual and simply messing around in the software I’m slowly building a workflow. I made a quick sync test so the difference between manually placing events and using the presets can be identified:
Since making the above, I rearranged the groups a little so they make a bit more sense for what I’m trying to do, and corrected a couple of errors in the LED configuration (most notably, one of the infill lights on the right was not lighting—it had its maximum intensity set to 0). It’s feeling a bit easier to use now, and I’m starting to dig deeper into how to optimally adjust the parameters in the presets. Rearranging—and adding to—the groups has made it so I can strictly customise the order in which lights are activated in presets such as Wave and Burst, and as such the sweeps look a lot cleaner now. Whether or not that matters in the actual venue remains to be discovered when we can get some footage of the tests.
Over the weekend I put together a new version of the audio, with much tighter synchronisation and a rough progression, from static 16th notes, to a pseudo-random pattern (actually the result of two LFOs out of sync with the main timing), to a straight 4-note “loop” at the end. I think it could potentially do with more layers, or variation in the bass tone/decay, but it’s a good base to start putting the main work together. I’ve created a new timeline in the Designer project where I’ll be extending the test events, gradually building it up piece by piece. As I was creating the new audio, I was reminded of something a friend said after a Sunn O))) show back in 2007; his interpretation of it was that it represented the progression of sunrise -> daytime -> sunset, or something to that effect. With that in mind, I think it’d be interesting to use a similar progression. There’s a definite peak intensity in the audio which could represent afternoon daylight. It’s not so relevant to the hypnotising adjective, and as such, not really something I want to lean on conceptually, but certainly interesting as a rough guide to the intensity and colour temperature.
Collaborative project
I finally started work on something for Pat’s Capitol piece, here’s an initial rough idea:
Taking heavy inspiration from the PC Music / hyper-pop style I got heavily into a few years back:
Once again, Pat has given me great feedback, and suggested I push it in a weirder, less repetitive direction. Of course, I’m no stranger to weird, so I’m pretty keen to get a bit wild with it. For inspiration, I’m revisiting Iglooghost’s album Neo Wax Bloom, which is a masterpiece in complexity:
There’s room to throw in a lot of different sounds; in particular I’ve been thinking about “foley percussion”, combining found sounds with electronic percussion, all combined with bursts of huge synth sounds as per my initial draft. It’s an interesting contrast to my solo projects this semester, which are basically the opposite in style.
Browser-based work
Slight existential crisis with this work, in that I don’t really know if I’ll be able to hit hypnotising without just making non-interactive, optical illusion based work, which I worry won’t feel satisfying in terms of my own internal goals. I’m thinking of a shift towards, or combination with adjectives serene or meditative, particularly applicable to some in-progress works such as Wander or Dungeon, where the experience is something more akin to a zen garden or a jigsaw puzzle. I’m wondering if putting it aside for this semester (and thus back to being a side-project), so I can concentrate on the Capitol piece, and my collaboration, would be viable. I can imagine it would allow me to take on Pat’s other work, which looks really exciting.
edit: Shortly after posting this, I went back to some of the tabs I had open from last week, and explored autostereograms. I think this may be the solution. Some of my initial ideas (e.g. Phase) could be really interesting if adapted to be viewed as autostereograms. Also, I have some ideas about how to create random-dot autostereograms in p5js now that I’ve properly digested the Wikipedia article. Time for some experimentation.