Sapiens
Experience History through Illustration
Description
Our species has evolved from being not the most dominant animals to being the most significant minds on the planet, and is reaching to give birth to its own new species – Artificial Intelligence! This Exquisite corpse narrates the story of our journey, and perhaps the destination.
Design Process, Reflections and Observations
Design Process:
This Exquisite Corpse, an ensemble of three personalities, is curated along with my two Peers: Haoshu Yang, and Yumeng(momo) Yang.
Below are the three independent characters and their personalities:
They are amalgamation of past and present, history and speculation. They are a reflection of their journey.
• Living through their most primal and animalistic nature, that is always instinctive hence erratic;
overcoming the inadequacies and growing (Inspiration: Haoshu’s Monster)
• Acknowledging one’s place in this Universe; embodying change, evolving to survive, and struggling
to do so, but still growing; (Inspiration: Momo’s Little Prince)
• Growing and enlightening, learning from the past, reaching new heights, and along with it, new challenges;
Struggling to keep one’s dominance while battling with internal crisis (Inspiration: Nishra’s Anonymous)
Does this only apply to Sapiens, or to almost every Situation? Isn’t life itself all about evolution? -
Physical or Psychological; Macro or Micro?
Reflections and Observations
It was an introspective phase while curating this Exquisite Corpse.
Nothing is binary, black or white, right or wrong; it’s all grey, it’s all intersecting,
it’s all overlapping. The experiences one has can be interpreted in different ways and from different perspectives,
and they can still be relevant.
My focus was to curate a personality and maybe more, and not just a visual representation.
It is after all Critical Computation, and Critical Thinking takes priority. This led to the concept of
an entity that encompasses time in itself while reflecting an individual as well as their journey.
An individual can be both, raw and primal in nature as well as struggling with the various psychological dilemmas;
same can be true for their overall journey through time. Hence, it is all about growing and evolving from what was to
what is and what can be!
The first decision made was to curate the sketch from scratch in P5.js, and not by loading pre-sketched images.
Since the story talks about humans’ most innate characteristics, it felt necessary to keep the forms tangible.
Basic applications of custom shapes (beginShape() and endShape()) is majorly used to draw the Silhouettes.
The bottom part of the figure could be straightforwardly symbolically represented as an animal. However,
the application of the concept of Evolution, existential crisis, and psychological crisis was a challenge.
Eventually, after trying out few animations for the body, the simplistic approach was uncertainty – of form,
of place, of definition. drawingContext with Shadow method, accompanied by random() application gave the results of uncertainty.
The movement and chaos in the head were quite tangible, hence with some trials and errors regarding the coordinates,
using randomness in custom shape functions, offered the results imagined.
frameRate() was modified for smoother animation as opposed to the speedy chaos.
The blurring of the Background created the unexpected after-impression of the head scribble, which was a plus for the concept.
It was crucial to express the dual nature of the figure – micro and macro, individual personality and his journey;
hence the distinction of the three parts, the three phases, not just in Code, but also in the viewer’s mind was essential.
Manipulations with time was tried to no avail for making the three parts appear one after another. setTimeout(), millis(),
frameCount(), etc., were explored. Eventually, the option of Viewer’s participation seemed more apt, createButton(),
along with mousePressed() created the toggle buttons.
This Project has been an amalgamated experience of simplicity and complexity, familiar functions and new explorations,
and new applications of the same.