This week’s blog post is written by me, Dennis Didi, student in the Fontys Lifestyle Minor and member of the Studio Feel group. Studio Feel is creating the Pillar of Context installation, as explained in our previous post. I will give an update on how things are going in week 4 and especially on my part in the game: programming the visualisation in Adobe Flash authoring tool with Actionscript 3.
The Pillar of Context is about visualising different subjects in such a way that viewers will have a hard time understanding what they see and hear. Trying to bridge the gap between one subject and the other, trying to bring them into relation but not really understanding why. It’s just something we humans do! Well, for this to work we had to think about techniques we could use. So for the technique to qualify, it had to offer versatility, a wide array of realtime programming possibilities and a rendering engine. The technique also had to be capable of supporting interactivity. And last but not least, it had to be a technique we already master. So we did a little 1 + 1, and Actionscript 3 was the sum.
From then on we thought about ways to randomly visualise the subjects (as symbols, soundbites and realtime quotes) and about the use of subtle interaction. That meant that we had to write at least four functions for the main program:
- a random symbol function
- a symbol supporting soundbite function
- a symbol supporting realtime quote function
- an interactivity function
