I worked as an Android Developer at my last job for two years. During that job, my favorite part of it was debugging and tracing through code that I did not personally write. It was voyeuristic and enlightening, reading someone's computational diary and learning about another person. However, you could not see that through the final product. That is what makes computation fascinating to me because there are so many different ways to tackle a specific problem. I am very interested in projects that can visualize or depict an individual's problem solving thought process through their interaction with an external device. Games come to mind. Boardgames or puzzle games that require the player to solve a specific problem really show a side of human creativity and behavior that I find fascinating.
With that being said, the hardest part of this assignment was not solving the problem, but figuring out what WAS the problem. I didn't really want to completely remake a known piece of art. Nor did I want to create something that looks dumb. So I did a bit of both.
I love watching movies and I love playing video games. Vertigo's movie poster is pretty famous for its design seeing as how I had a poster of it hanging in my room before I even watched the movie (it was ok). I decided I would try to recreate that poster, but with a twist by replacing the silhouettes of the man and woman with some Tetris pieces.
I attempted to recreate the spiral in the Vertigo poster and completely failed. There was no way I was going to spend my time recreating it manually since I knew it could be done with some kind of algorithm. But good luck staring and analyzing that spiral without getting any migraines. I decided to go for something much simpler. I ended up with this:
To be honest, I thought this looked really stupid. The repeated circles did not give me the headaches I wanted, and the Tetris block looked completely out of place. The upside was that the circles and the iris ended up looking a bit like H.A.L.
In order to add to the disorientating nature that the original Vertigo poster had, I played around with how I was creating the circles in my loop. I was surprised to see that such minor changes, like incrementing the position of a coordinate, could cause such a cool looking effect. I also lowered the opacity for most of my fills, which made the portrait a bit more glowy. This is the end product:
The web editor is pretty easy to use. I kind of wish it had some sort of capability to automatically autocomplete method names like in an IDE, but having the reference page on another browser tab was good enough. It did crash on me a couple times, and I lost a bit of progress because I didn't save. There should definitely be some sort of auto-save. Overall, it was a fun and fresh experience, and I can't wait to get even deeper into p5.js.