I’ve been doing some sketches dealing with gradual color progression. All these sketches have bars of color that gradually increase in length, wrapping if they meet the edge of the drawing space. Once the bars reach a set length, the next bar will start at the original length and start the progression again. The colors begin as pure Red every time and vary in the progressions by a random variation in one of its Red, Green or Blue values. In the second set I also inverted the color in addition to the gradual progression in attempt to emphasize the bars more. It’s a very simple sketch with a surprising number of variables. The next thing I will likely do is look more closely at rules such as start color, minimum and maximum bar length, amount of color variation etc. I will probably generate some matrices to see which rules produce the best results and then look at some non-static rule sets.

What’s in a name? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot. More specifically, what’s in my name? Not much to be honest. Jason Smith must be among the most common names in the United States. I have been confused more than once by seeing my name on samples for things like business cards or credit cards. John Doe. Insert name here. Generic. That’s me. It’s not that I dislike my name, but as I’ve worked to establish an identity for myself and my work I’ve often wondered if it’s up to snuff. It’s not a name I envision sitting alongside Bjarke Ingels, Werner Herzog or Witold Rybczynski. Not that I have any ambition to become famous, but still it’s better to be somebody than nobody.

It’s all about branding when it comes down to it. When I was preparing to launch this website, I spent days wondering what name to use. There are different schools of thought. Do you use your real name and try to build your online identity around that? Or do you come up with a zoomy esoteric name to represent you? In my case I felt that this wasn’t much of a choice. I threw a lot of names around at the time. Most of them felt either too vague or too specific. This was particularly difficult because at the time I had no idea where I was going to land career wise. So I was apprehensive about committing to, say, an architecture themed name in case I ended up not working in architecture.

As for the domain, I imagine it goes without saying that jasonsmith.com was not available. I ultimately settled on jasonsmitharch.com, though not with any great conviction. I decided that it was nonspecific enough that I could go in any direction I needed with my site down the road. I threw together what was intended to be a temporary title banner with the name “JSarch” on it, which as of writing this is still the only title banner I’ve made. It’s a pretty terrible name, but I’m still waiting for inspiration to strike and give me a “real” name I can use. I have essentially just differed the decision for now. But I know quite well the way temporary measures can linger into permanence.

Since I am still shopping around for a Digital SLR camera, I decided to take my current camera, an iPhone 4S, and put it through it’s paces. While I do have another decent point and shoot camera, I hadn’t really tested the limits of the new iPhone camera. I have, however, heard a lot of good things about it, so I decided to put it to the test. Myself and a couple friends went to the town square in Collierville, Tennessee on a beautiful Saturday this past weekend. There are some nice old buildings as well as some rusty old trains there.

Overall I was very pleased. The only real complaint I had with the experience was the need to switch back and forth between 2 different camera apps depending on my needs. The default app is pretty good, and unlike my other camera app, shoots movies and takes HDR photos. The HDR capabilities were the one thing that kept bringing me back to it. However, my other camera app, Camera+, was definitely the clear winner between the two. The most important feature being the ability to focus on one part the shot while exposing for another. This is handled with a really great use of multi-touch. I would go as far as saying that the experience of adjusting the focus with one thumb while tweaking the exposure with the other thumb directly on the image is superior to the experience of using an SLR…if it weren’t for the fact that this involves covering most of the screen with your thumbs.

I’ve selected 30 photographs to upload to a flickr set. I’ve been trying to limit the number of photos I put in a set, forcing myself to act as curator as well as photographer. In doing so I am focusing on my best (or at least favorite) images as well as cutting down on redundancy. Hopefully this results in the sets being more enjoyable for the friends and relatives I force to look at them. I have also made a bit more progress in sifting through my old photos. The result being that I now have a set of images from my studio trip to Mexico as well.

Another month long hiatus from writing, but this time with a slightly better reason. I have accepted a full time architectural design position with a local firm called PKM Architects. Therfore much of my time of late is taken up by proprietary design work. This leaves both little time and limited content for a blog. I am none the less excited, both for my employment and for the future of my website. As I stated when I set up this website, my goals were two-fold. One was to establish an online portfolio and a presence for my work online. The second was to create an outlet for my own explorations and intrests. I now feel that I can finally shift the emphasis from the former goal to the latter, which is by far the more interesting of the two.

When taking stock of my so called “other intrests”, I still find photography towards the top of the list. Unfortunately it is not one that I have pursued very seriously as of late. That is something that I intend to change very soon, cheifly with a long overdue upgrade of equipment. While the 8mp camera on my iPhone is indeed pretty impressive, I really need a digital SLR to replace my old film camera. This will actually be pretty critical going forward as I no longer have access to a dark room (also it is the year 2012).

With this incoming multitude of new images, I will need a good way to share them here. WordPress does have a built in gallery feature, and it doesn’t look too bad. However, like most things wordpress, it is pretty inflexible. So, in another experiment with a free media service, I have set up a flickr account. I’ll admit that I had hoped to avoid having content scattered across half a dozen different websites, but the more I see what people are doing with these sites, the more I see why they do it. So to get started, I am going through some of my recent photographs and uploading some that catch my eye. My first two sets are from my trips to London and Barcelona as part of a research studio with Cecil Balmond and Roland Snooks: London 2010, Barcelona 2010

I do have one excuse as to why I have been neglecting this blog as of late. For the last month I have been working on a competition with my friend and colleague Dale Suttle. We submitted our entry on Monday and as the deadline has now passed I wanted to share some details about our entry. The competition called for a contemporary reinterpretation of a folly to be built in Socrates Sculpture Park . The main purpose of a folly is to orient and focus one’s attention on important views and paths through a park or garden. Being along the river in Queens, the primary view in Socrates Park is across to the island of Manhattan. The inspiration for our folly came from this distinctive city skyline.

The folly places itself within the pattern of the distant buildings, revealing a direct formal relationship to the skyline. Here the folly appears to be a fractal of the city, a repeated sawtooth pattern overlapping and collapsing in on itself. However, the relationship to the city skyline is not only formal, but systemic as well. The folly was developed using a similar logic to the growth of the city. It is an organic growth within a rigid grid. The patterns of solid and void are an emergent result of this simple organic growth, just as the pattern of the skyline is not explicitly designed, but emerged from the organic way in which the city grew.

The pieces that are placed in the grid are something that I have been interested in for some time. They are pentaminos, similar to the tetraminos seen in the game Tetris, except that they are made up of five congruent blocks instead of four. In fact, Pentaminoes come from an ancient puzzle game which was actually the inspiration for the game Tetris. The challenge of the pentamio puzzle comes from the pentamio’s resistance to being organized into uniform patterns. It is this quality that we use to generate a pattern of solids and voids which reflect those of the city. While doing some research for this project, I was surprised to learn that I am far from the first to connect the pentamino puzzle with patterns of cities. During World War II, a pilot from New Zealand looked down at the old European cities from his plane and was inspired to create his own puzzle game which he called ‘Cathedral’. His game involves placing pentamino and tetramino shaped ‘buildings’ onto a grid to build a city. It is still in production today and is considered a classic. Hopefully our folly will be viewed in a similar light by the competition judges and Dale and I will get the opportunity to explore the pentamio as a building material as well.

I decided to look into using processing.js to embed processing sketches on my website. It’s actually pretty straight forward. In fact someone was nice enough put together a wordpress implementation of processing.js, so all I had to do to include sketches in my posts was install a plugin. I’ve tried a bunch of different sketches and most of them work. A couple, however, didn’t and I’m not sure why as I haven’t tried anything that needs anything but the default processing libraries. Also the wordpress plugin is using an older version of processing.js and I don’t know if the person that made it has any intention of updating it so it may just be a temporary solution.

I generated a video of the 2D branching script I posted the other day. Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped it would be. Apparently all of iGeo’s computations are done separately from the main runtime in processing, so it wont let make active references from within the iGeo methods. This means that doing something like adding a new frame to a video every time the agents update is impossible because as far as processing is concerned everything inside iGeo isn’t actually ever changing. So I had to add the frames to the movie once every processing cycle. In this case it isn’t that big of a problem because my computer has no trouble doing all the calculations for the 2D branching in real time and I was able to generate a video of what I see in my processing window in real time.

However when I tried to generate a video from a 3D version of the branching script I made this became a big problem. My computer couldn’t calculate all the agent interactions 30 times a second for the video and started to lag behind. This is pretty standard for large multi-agent code, and is actually the primary reason I usually generate videos from processing. The script is to slow to show off in real time so I compile the results into a video that will play back in real time. But this time my workaround of adding a frame to the video each time there is a new frame displayed in processing doesn’t work. It just duplicates exactly what I see in the window.

I have a couple more things I want to try to see if I can get it to do what I want, but I’m not terribly familiar with static objects in javascript. It may not even be possible and I may have to rewrite the whole thing to do the agent calculations inside the processing runtime rather than inside a static iGeo instance. If that’s the case then I probably wont be using iGeo’s agent class again. As I said before it’s little more than a minor convenience and not being able to interact with active functions and variables from processing or from other plugins is a huge downside.

I was going through some of the tutorials for iGeo today and I ended up spending some time messing around with the built in agent class. It’s not really much more than a minor convenience but it is nice to have the framework already in place. One of the examples was a simple branching script that removes overlapping lines. I carried it on a bit further myself in attempt to make something more interesting. I added in some variation based on the generation of the branches so that the angles become more extreme as it progresses, as well as adding some additional rules about when the new branches occur so the lines don’t fill in the gaps too much. I also made the color vary with the generation so the ultimate effect is a transition from a ridged cold grid to an energetic chaos. Its pretty fun to watch it grow, I’ll probably compile a video later and post it so you can see it in action.

A few students have recently been using the Cornell Scripting Group to ask questions about Grasshopper, the parametric modeling plugin for Rhino. The group was setup for students to be able to ask scripting questions and get answers from graduates, myself and 3 others, who have experience writing code. The problem here is that I don’t actually have any experience with grasshopper. To remedy this I’ve spent some time watching tutorials and reading The Grasshopper Primer. Grasshopper is pretty different than most of the scripting tools I use in that you don’t actually write code. Instead you use a visual programming language similar to vvvv and Generative Components.

Having used Generative Components before, one of the first things I did was attempt to recreate one of the models I made with it in Grasshopper. Everything went fine until I wanted to take the spiral that I had made and parametrically array it so I could adjust the number of spirals on the fly. Unfortunately there was no array command and none of my attempts to use the built in functions to do it failed. It seems the only way to duplicate objects is to have a separate function for each copy you want to make. This means hard coding the number of duplications in, which is pretty disappointing for a piece of parametric software. Of course grasshopper is still in beta so I guess there is still hope for a set of array functions in a future update.

Overall though it is a very polished piece of software that has had a lot of work put into it to make it very easy to generate lots of code very quickly. Oh and another nice feature? Slider animations!