Interactive music visuals for Max Cooper's Emergence AV collaborations project.

Concept

Forms in motion, interact spontaneously, knitting emergent interconnections.

A continuous reflexive process — coheres through ascending scales of complexity; recurs through cycles of entropy and order.

Moving through scales, evoking natural forms:

From primordial matter, forms; ovum, animal...

Through self; community...

Towards interconnection; cohesion...

Tech

The visuals are an emergent physical system of interacting particles.

Complex organic forms emerge spontaneously, from simple interactions at the individual scale — in a fluid-like advection, particles recursively affect and affected by the field of motion.

At the core of this effect, each particle leaves a trace of its velocity in the velocity field, which in turn affects the velocity of particles passing through that field. This simple interaction at the individual scale gives rise to the complex organic forms at the collective scale, without explicit control or guidance.

The idea came while reading about advection in Lagrangian fluid dynamics, in the excellent series of articles Fluid Simulation for Video Games, by Dr. Michael J. Gourlay for Intel — this is kind of a simpler advection, showing some fluid-like properties.

Stochastic noise also drives the process — to set it in motion, and to shape it through scales and forms with more control (increasing, cycling wavelengths of noise).

Noise is used here as a way to guide and direct the general motion of the particles, for animation.

An optical flow process is performed on the camera, so the motion of the particles is influenced by people moving naturally in front of their camera. I like this kind of natural interaction (similarly using the microphone), crossing the barrier between you and the experience.

Check out Thomas DieWald and Adam Ferris for some nice examples of this technique.

Made by

Eoghan O'Keeffe ~ Interactive visuals.

Joe Murréll ~ Video editing.

Max Cooper ~ Music, Emergence project.

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