more inspiration from Rohtko

I have dropped the using bitmapData because although the effect it gives is good, it ends up obliterating itself in a a short amount of time and turns the whole screen black including the cursor. Since what I am aiming for is a gentle and slow transformation of the image triggered by movement, I am now using the blur and glow filters together and changing the color using a timer. This has meant learning about arrays, filters and timers in AS3. It is going well and working! Since I have now reached the point of getting a functioning application, the time has come to concentrate and think more about the conceptual experience. For this I went back to the source; Mark Rothko and have been reading about what he wanted to achieve in his work and the intended  relationship between the painting and the viewer I propose to take some of his ideas and apply them to this installation.
see below for some of the ideas I am most interested in.

'And I think one of the things that makes this extraordinary quality of Rothko’s canvases is that they are almost like blank cinema screens. You almost have the sense you, as the viewer, now begin to project onto the canvas.  So there is a space for response.  It’s also very much about duration.  It is how long can you look? ' 

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateshots/episode.jsp?item=16698

transcript of curator’s video commentary on Rothko exhibiton

'In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors. Gradually, as the eye adjusts to the space's greyish lighting - itself a kind of masterwork - the colours seep up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried. The violence of these images is hardly tolerable - as Rilke has it: "Beauty's nothing / but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear." Here we are in the presence not of religion, but of something at once primordial and all too contemporary.'

On a notecard from the 1950s, Rothko had written, in his usual clotted style that yet makes his meaning entirely clear:

"When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer and terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination.On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity."

John Banville writes a personal appreciation of Rothko after a visit to Tate Modern's Rothko Room.

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue7/rothko.htm

It is also true that the process of building the application has turned up some ideas of its own. Each iteration determines the next step to be taken, it is very much a case of trial and error. I see this process as being at the core of the creative process. I am most successful when I allow ideas to live as 'trials'. ie if I do this will it achieve what I want or not? only by acting out this kind of approach are questions answered. It is a inquiry. In some repsects all the iterations that will lead to final outcome are as much a part of the installation. In other words I do not have success with making a plan/design and then building it.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko's paintings have been described as total immersion. I became dissatisfied with making a simple drawing application, it seemed once mastered to be rather shallow in its meaning. I have spent some time looking at ways of adding more dimensions to this project and to try some free form thinking. One conclusion was that something unexpected should happen during the interaction between the person playing with the installation and the installations itself. In the first instance, I revisted work by artist Camille Utterback, the way that she uses subverts the process of drawing by doing things that are counter intuitive such as having lines move away from the point of drawing and older lines gently migrating to a predetermined position were to some an extent an inspiration for me to explore the possiblitlies further.
I also thought it might be interesting to have the canvas be the focus of the interaction so that depending on what the person does it would change what happened on the screen before them, to this end I am developing an application which is based on the paintings of Mark Rothko. The idea is that a persons movements in front of the 'canvas' will trigger the images to change and morph into new configurations which is something that Rothko's paintings do on prolonged viewing. I want to end up with an immesive and evocative enviroment which is controlled and changed by the users. This is not to imply that it wont be surprising and hopefully delight. I also want to include a kind of sound scape that can envelop the space and may use a mixture of ambient sounds perhaps alongside some words from Rothko himself.
The demo below are the first steps. There is no cursor that you can see but if you make movements some things will begin to happen.

filters

Here is what I have been working on, this is the result of a lot of experimentation with filters used through bitmap data objects. The drawing object itself is a movie clip which has filters applied to it.

changing stroke of drawing

I kind of gave up with the color picker component for the time being and decided to work on a more simple change; to change the line style and filter which is activated by a 'hot' movieclip.
I went back to the work done by Dan Zen, because he has an example of a static button that is changed by touching it. see the link below for a demonstration, I have not included the video here because I already posted it on an earlier entry.
http://ostrichflash.wordpress.com/video/
Through Dan Zen's work, I gained 'proof of concept', but I was fairly sure that instead of using his classes which replace usual mouse events such as mouseOver, mouseOut etc, I can use hitTest, since I no longer have a 'mouse'. My reasoning here is that since I am only starting to learn AS3 it is easier to use a function that I am already familiar with and the code is basically the same for AS2 and AS3.
As I mentioned before, I have attached the drawing api (graphics.lineTo and moveTo) to a movie clip called myDrawing.
I therefore built another movie clip called myButton and did a hitTest between the two. Since I want the hitTest to remain 'true' I did not include an 'else' statement. I then made another movie clip called redDrawing and assigned a different filter and line style to it. The function that calls the hitTest then attaches the child of redDrawing if the hitTest is true.

Also just a quick note to say that I put a round white circle on the cursor to make it easier to see where it is, it will be removed in the final application

The code follows:

myDrawing.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, changeStroke);
function changeStroke(e:Event):void{
    if (myDrawing.hitTestObject(myButton)){
        trace("hit");
        var redDrawing:MovieClip = new MovieClip();

        redDrawing.graphics.lineStyle(30, 0xff6347, 50);
        redDrawing.graphics.moveTo(myFairy.x+2, myFairy.y+2);
            redDrawing.graphics.lineTo(myFairy.x, myFairy.y);
            var dropShadow:DropShadowFilter = new DropShadowFilter();
dropShadow.color = 0x000000;
dropShadow.blurX = 10;
dropShadow.blurY = 10;
dropShadow.angle = 0;
dropShadow.alpha = 0.5;
dropShadow.distance = 10;
var filtersArray:Array = new Array(dropShadow);
redDrawing.filters = filtersArray;
addChild(redDrawing);

And here is the result:



As you can see the hitTest works, but there are a few problems still to resolve. Firstly it seems like the myDrawing movie clip is still there even though it is barely visible. Secondly and more frighteningly it is now clear that the movie clip that holds the api is creating a new api every time it enters a frame, so that the drawing is contained only within the movie clip. Since I need the drawing to be a continuous line this will not suffice. I am going to look back thru my previous api files and see what i can come up with. I am however happy with the strange effects that are produced with this current method, and am wondering if there is a way of increasing and decreasing the size of the blobs as the go away or get nearer to the center of the drawing environment so that they will become like 3d objects. Given that there is now a z co-ordinate available in flash it might be worth a little time experimenting....