Ah, the last 20% of the retina project took 80% of the time. Fixing this took a few late nights, and staying up late because if I cut corners, all of the previous late nights would be overshadowed by a distracting mistake blown up to a 25-foot wall. Sigh. But the files are now sent in, so I am coming to terms with it being out of my hands.
Despite things being placed by a computer, it wasn’t quite auto-aligning, and I needed to manually line up a lot of things, zooming in and out.
Normally, I use my MIDI Fighter, but the controller was buried somewhere. Instead, I hooked up TouchOSC from my iPad to send OSC commands that can be read by the sketch. I enjoyed using the xy pads to select which part of the screen to show, which reduced cognitive load at 4 am. And now I have a little generic pad I can hook up to different features.
Something that’s been a little clunky is logging what a computed value is, so I added a function that both prints and returns the value. It saves me from the clunky print(s(x, -5, 5)); s(x, -5, 5) situation that has a copy-paste in it.
After that push, I needed a few days away from intense project work to recover. I started tending to my thesis mind map. One thing I did was start pulling together a timeline of some events from the different fields I’m touching on (computing, art/postmodernism, environmentalism) into one timeline. What a trip! Seeing when the US endangered animal protection went into place compared to the history of computer terminals!
It reminded me of when I organized my literature bookshelf by publication date! It put into context the book’s different ideas (Whatever happened in the 1960s? How early Their Eyes Were Watching God was published!)
Since I had a big exhale, and now I am doing an inhale, I have some ideas percolating. My collection of tidbits about the history of color standards keeps growing, so I feel like that could become an interesting tool.
The other big thing going on is I’m going to Shenzhen next month for a Research at Scale residency. I’ve traveled to Europe and Japan, but I’ve never been to China!