Flux

Tim Rumpf

2021

TBAG Final Project - Flux

Project Outline

This project is inspired by the phenomena of ferrofluids and is all about tension, about how borders give shape and how breaking through those borders enables to form new shapes or merge with others. Audio reactive visuals can either simply be enjoyed or interactively be manipulated.

Link to Browser Version

For some reason keyframes are ignored in Firefox, but runs in Chrome and Edge.

Link to Video

The visuals are based on a Shader by Will Kirkby.

Technical Choices

Sound

For this project I wanted to generate the whole track with a completely new tool. I chose Ableton Live for that. Prior to this project I sometimes used recordings from other people or sounds I recorded myself in my work, but in a very basic way and never musically. So this time I chose to not get lost in recording or seeking other recordings but rather just learn how to generate a whole track with just one MIDI device and a DAW.

Graphics

Right when we were told that we are going to learn how to programm shaders, I decided that this project was going to be all about learning just that. My experience with shader programming was nonexistent to that point, so I started out by learning how to port different shaders from shadertoy.com into a p5 sketch.
In the end I took one of these examples and tried to make it my own by disecting the differnt parts and adding other things to it.

Artistic Intention

I planned on generating a dark and a bit unfriendly feeling environment. For that I wanted to have some intense cineastic music along with graphics that build up and intensify over the period of the track. From my initial moodboard I choose the topic of magnetism and especially the phenomena of ferrofluids, which form spikey unfriendly shapes based on surface tension and extrinsic forces.

Learnings and Reflections

I learned a lot in the making of this project. I really love to have finally gotten my hands on music production. I feel like that is really a great addition to the ways I can artistically express myself and also another calming thing to do and get lost in. In this project however I really struggled to find the time to do this deep dive but eventually it worked out and I had my moments of being in kind of a flow state. It was ore of experimenting and less based on applying theories.

On the graphical side of things, I felt a bit like cheating because I heavily based on another shader, but then I also spend more then the required time on this project and in the long run I really think I can do a lot more of writing shaders on my own and combining shaders from different sources. I already applied my gained knowledge in the final project for Creative Coding I, to be fair.