Experimental Projects
These are projects I have done that have explored the crossroads of art and technology. Finding the artistic in the technical was my emphasis in graduate school, and these were the projects that helped me understand that intersection a little better.
Urban Hunter
This is a conceptional game that blurs the lines between the virtual and non-virtual worlds to make viewers think about the relationship between players in a multiplayer game. Because the game does not really exist--nor should it in its current form--I present presented it in terms of a Kickstarter page built to promote the creation of Urban Hunter. I then collaborated with faculty and students to put together an exhibition at the end of April 2018 for this game and similar projects.
The Beauty of Rigging
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As an MFA student at the University of Texas at Dallas, I was learning about 3D rigging, so the primary focus of my exploration into art and technology involved the beauty of rigging. Rigging is a very technical field, but I believe it has aesthetic beauty as well. This journey involved three major projects, or milestones, along the way. The first was a short video, then a series of triptychs, and finally an auto-rigging script. Each milestone increased the technical aspects and then searched for the aesthetic value within. Below are examples and a brief description of each milestone.
Ed Hopper
The first milestone on my journey was this video. I had an art professor who told me that rigs are only beautiful when they are broken. I disagreed. So I created this piece to juxtapose the beauty of a broken rig versus the beauty of a functional rig. I leave it up to the viewer to decide which they prefer. After a few minor edits, this video was part of the Fall 2017 student showcase at the Sp/n Gallery at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Ed and Norman
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The second milestone was a set of tripychs. While the Ed Hopper video was warmly received, I realized that it was not what I was looking for. It demonstrated rigging in terms of movement. Riggers don't create movement. Animators do. Riggers create the joints and controls for animators--the potential of movement, not movement itself. These triptychs were created to explore rigging as potential movement.
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For these pieces I used my Ed Hopper model to imitate some famous Norman Rockwell images. I then stripped the model away to reveal the skeleton beneath it all. I also began to incorporate the role of computer science as a part of rigging by including snippets of MEL code in the background. Each piece was then printed on card stock for display purposes. In the printed versions, the last image is more clear and not as muddied up by the MEL code.
Joe's Auto-Rigging Script (JARS)
The final milestone was my MFA Thesis Project. After creating "Ed and Norm," I realized that I still had not gotten to the intrinsic essence of the beauty of rigging. I was using a lot of paraphernalia to represent it, and I believed there had to be beauty in rigging undefiled. While discussing this issue with my mentor, he mentioned that he liked rigging because it is a process of simplification. A model with tens of thousands of vertices is controlled by a set of a couple hundred joints, which are controlled by dozens of controls. I took this process of simplification one step further and wrote a Python script that created those dozens of controls with just a handful of buttons. This video demonstrates how my script worked.
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Conclusion
As I have stripped away more and more of the supporting structures around the aesthetics of rigging, the public reception of my projects has gotten cooler. At this current milestone, I see the real beauty of rigging is very technical, much like an elegant algorithm. In its purest form, this beauty can only truly be appreciated by a relatively small group of people who understand the techniques being employed.
I plan to continue my exploration of art and technology. I'm not sure where the journey will end, but logic would dictate the next step would be delving further into the technical aspects of rigging. One lesson that was emphasized throughout this most recent milestone was that rigging is about solving problems. Riggers solve problems, whether the problem is achieving a certain deformation, or maintaining a technical restraint, or a professor who says rigs are only beautiful when they are broken. Whatever the next milestone is, it will be dependent, at least in part, on the next problem encountered.