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Artwork presentation

Despertar

Artist: Romina Troncoso
Year 2021
Semester First semester
Fecha July 1, 2021

Before I used to reflect, simply from my position as an observer, on the influence exerted by the media (in all its forms of manifestation), but now I can understand with another perspective about it, and as Mcluhan said “the meaning or message is not the machine but what is done with it”, let’s say that it is not the ‘media’ that are responsible for indoctrinating, the medium would be precisely as he describes. The medium is the message, the message through which they manage to manipulate the recipient, configure their consciousness and experiences, through different strategies. This is where I want to go, because under this manipulation we cannot fully understand the function that the medium fulfills. I also think that it has to do with the influence we receive as children, where they are responsible for anesthetizing our mind, our intuition. They ensure that our perception decreases, so it is easier to dominate through subtle forms and means, this takes me back to the phrase that I resonate with from the aforementioned text “The docile and subliminal acceptance of the impact of the media has turned them into prisons without walls for their human users”, that anesthesia makes us docile to accept without hesitation what we receive through said media.

Valery and his following observation come to mind: “We will know how to transport and reconstitute in any place the system of sensations - or more precisely of stimulations - that an object or event provides in any place”, by interweaving both texts I can observe the mention that Valery makes, and draw my conclusion, the transport he refers to is the medium. Then he makes an almost warning, it should be noted that the text in which he mentions was published in 1928, about the ‘sources’ where the message will be transported, in the following way “Just as water, gas or electric current come from afar to our homes to meet our needs with almost zero effort, so we will feed on visual or auditory images that are born and disappear at the slightest gesture, almost a sign.”

Beyond this personal reflection, I find it amazing what can be created if the media is stimulated and manipulated for an artistic purpose, using, in this case, computers as a medium. That’s why I’m going to rely on electronic imaging pioneers like Ben F. Laposky, who in the early 1950s managed to create the first images generated by an electronic machine, and “manipulated electronic transmissions through the fluorescent surface of an oscilloscope’s cathode ray tube (similar to a television tube) and then recorded the abstract patterns using high-speed film, color filters, and special camera lenses.” Charles Csuri, another pioneering artist in graphics, animation and digital art. Finally, who I also wanted to mention is John Whitney, another great pioneer of computer animation. I was very struck by the fact that he managed to use analog computers which were built from military instruments from the Second World War. Based on these pioneers I began my work, inspired by their great experience in computer animation. So I experimented and generated a game of abstract shapes, and by applying the p5.js tools I was able to create a certain interactive atmosphere. Finally, I will briefly tell you how I developed my sketch. First of all, I started by declaring some variables, followed by the setup() function where the size of the canvas is 512 pixels wide and 512 pixels high, and continues the draw() function, where we can find the background color, background() to which I established a black tone for the representation window, and with the map() function, the sineValue variable is converted from the range -1 to 1 to values from 0 to 255. This new value is used to define the color of the At the bottom of the canvas, there are also the primitive figures, which I worked on in layers, push() pop(), to generate an ordered space, and also so that the transformations that follow do not harm the previous objects. Add the functions strokeWeight() to set the outline color and fill() to set the fill color, and in most cases no fill noFill(). Those responsible for producing iterations are the repetitive structures for(), and I nested the conditional structures if() else if(), and also the logical operators, to determine which line of code has to be executed, as long as the previously established condition is met. And to create a more dynamic interaction, I added to my sketch the variables mouseX, mouseY, mouseIsPressed and transformations like translate() and rotate(). And as you can see, in most development you will find the sin() and cos() functions.

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