An exercise in the nature of matter – computing style.
March 2006
As an art exercise, we were asked to present matter through a computer. The catch was to add depth to it in some way, through texture, sound, or some other means.
Computing media flattens traditional print and images in order to represent it in the language of computing: 1’s and 0’s. The notion of size is completely reworked as images can be scaled at will. Texture and depth are relative.
I approached the problem in a simple sense. A folded sheet of paper begins as a flat plane. Vertexes are added and the plane is folded. In OpenGL, a polygon is drawn via a set of points. It can begin as a flat shape with the drawing in order, the edges drawn from Point A to Point B, and so on. If the the edges are concave, then the shape will be flat. If a point is “out of order” or convex, then the polygon is “folded” in a sense and, to me, can add a sense of depth.
I built a small OpenGL program to visualize this. Mouse coordinates, set by left clicking on the screen, are used as points in one polygon. The points can be chosen at will and the polygon folded. Color or grayscale luminescence is chosen at random and the gradient handled by GL. The list of points is a ring buffer and eventually, the first point is overwritten as the user continues to add points.
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Source Code:
- origami_matter.cpp
- cross_platform.h – compiler defs to allow OpenGL/freeGlut compilation on Windows, OSX, and Linux
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Here is a video of the program in action.
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Pictures
