PROJECT #05 OPTICAL ILLUSION

FOUR SUNS

Move mouse around play with the pattern. Click to switch patterns.
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Description

Brief: Design and code an animating optical illusion and consider its deployment.

Concept: Four Suns is a sketch inspired by our ever changing universe, marking how it changes even if we do not do anything. The four suns mimic the dance of the universe, and of us as elements in that universe, as we interact with one another, and how in some cases we resonate and align.

The aesthetics are also inspired by the Spirograph stencils I played with as a child. I loved how the spirograph created perfect circles without actually drawing a perfect circle. In this sketch too, circles emerge out of the positioning and rotation of ellipses and squares.

Another, slightly more unintentional, but interesting angle that emerged was when the four suns are almost aligned, it makes it look like the illustration is blurry and out of focus

Deployment: I love performance, dance and choreography. While making this, I imagined this pattern being projected on the floor of four dancers in a large auditorium.

Process

The process of creating this assignment was a lot of fun. It was more playful, letting my intuition and ideas spotaneously guide me. Here are a couple of videos of this sketch while it was being fine-tuned.

I started with exploring the rotate() method as I found it unpredictable and tricky to manipulate in previous projects.

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I then added three more sets of the same to see how they interact.

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It was interesting to see how the sketch was lagging (video below), and when I commented or removed all the console.log statements it was better.

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I also tried to make the code as modular as possible, borrowing from the previous class.