UC Berkeley Main Campus
Department of Art Practice, Center for New Media, Fall 2007
We build a theme park or imaginary machine with the full range of Maya modeling techniques, animated by expressions and keyframes, and using three devices, an active one, a medial one, and a passive one.
The Machine as an system for the transfer of energy: Several world views include the notion of cause and effect: All events are not singular, rather one event has myriad effects on other events, which in turn are the cause for new events.
In animation, we mine viewer experiences of cause and effect to describe non-visual properties of objects, such as energy, resistance, friction, weight, and gravity. For an energy to The idea of cause and effect is clarified by a breakdown of objects into Active, Medial, and Passive (AMP) objects. Active objects are causes, medial objects pass energy from the cause object to the effect object, and passive objects receive the effects of the neregy of the cause. The AMP approach contains three questions:
Active: Which is the initiator of an action?
Medial: Who is moving the energy of the initial action to its destination?
Passive: Who is suffering (passi (lat.) = to suffer) the ultimate consequences of the action?
In an election, for example:
First Organ Active: Private or Public Campaign Funding
Second Organ Medial: The Voting Majority
Third Organ Passive: The Nation State
First Organ Active: Water or
Wind blowing
Second Organ Medial: mechanical wheels, belt, and hammer
Third Organ Passive: Table
This analysis provides a functional
deconstruction of a system. The question to pay attention to is where
the boundaries are between the deconstructed components. These boundaries
are the starting point for the design of a simulation of a system. Once
we establish the functional components, we can simulate the flow of energy
among them in terms of what component has which effect on what other component.
To implement these relations in the simulation, we can write expressions.
Expressions are mathematical functions, which describe the computational
relation between one component and another. They are tied to the properties
of objects such as translation, rotation and scale.
Newton's Original Principia Mathematica Text >
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Bookpages/Newton6.gif
History and Overview of Newtons Discoveries >
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Newton.html
Famous Curves > http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Curves/Curves.htm
Rube Goldberg Machines
> http://www.rube-goldberg.com/html/gallery.htm
