That special time.

Robot Drum Circle!

I was worried about my form + image project all week, and in the end, I couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to do. It was supposed to be a virtual drum circle that recorded the beats you made and then replayed them. Instead, what I ended up with was something that played one of 51 sounds when you pressed a key on the keyboard, and randomly cluttered the screen with pixellated animations when it did. I was pretty frustrated with the fact that I couldn't establish more depth, but I suppose that every project has a component that is not fully realized upon launch, and the end result is more of a function of your technical ability.

It also frustrated me that I couldn't spend more time thinking about the artistic elements of this piece, considering and reconsidering how to organize it visually, since I was impaired by my ability to use AS3 to code. I guess it's a learning process. I feel like our Hunters and Gatherers presenter this week presents a good means of thinking about it. He said that he's always frustrated when he can't figure out how to make code work, and that he dreams about the project, and then wakes up and seems to know how to do it. He also said that as a musician he feels that a programmable computer is like the ultimate, adaptable instrument, something that can be anything you can tell it how to do. In that way, I feel like AS3 is an extremely complicated (and possibly beautiful) instrument that I am totally inept at playing/using, and it keeps me up late at night, trying to figure out why I can't dream up a better solution to the problems I'm having.

In other news, I'm totally psyched about our group project, and I'll be acting as leader of the engine team. I'm working with four other people. We're responsible for taking the concept and the assets and making a real object out of them--implementation is the goal. I think the biggest challenge will be communicating with the other groups about what we can/cannot accomplish in the time. I'm happy to work with my team and try to get us all thinking about motion-sensing and face recognition, but figuring out to what degree we'll be able to do that, and then figuring out how we can use our knowledge to stretch what we accomplish will be the tricky part.

Time to prepare for my case study presentation!