Month: March 2024

Cave painting and cinema are both similar and different. Their similarities are superficial: both of them deal with two-dimensional mediums, as one is on a wall, the other is on a screen. Their similarities diverge at the point that cave painting regards temporality as an artifact and cinema regards temporality as an action.

Defining temporality as an artifact, as seen in the article, means that it is something that is stagnant due to the fact that it exists in the here and now. It is something that can be manipulated and played with. The different layers of the cave paintings, almost seemingly vandalizing and ruining itself, actually create an interactive and living element. A light source is a tool in which to manipulate context and imagery, similar to how the sun in the day at different times recontextualizes the Earth’s environment.

Meanwhile, cinema is a strictly linear process. Of course, there are films that toy with time, such as many of the films by the director Christopher Nolan, but these lack the interactive element and serve more as a intellectual experiment rather than something tangible. It is something that happens, an action, and the time that you started the film is different than the time that you ended it. It was an ongoing process that is now ceased.

Link to my video

I noticed that this project was similar to the contraption that is a Rube Goldberg machine, just a rudimentary version of it. A Rube Goldberg machine is an overly complex contraption that does something simple with one too many steps involved. This project is the same.

One of the challenges I had with this project is the discreteness of the physics engine in Unity. Unity’s physics engine was giving me a hard time, as every time I duplicated an object in place and moved the duplicate, the parameters of the original object would somehow change and it would affect the entire process’s outcome and output. Something that was reliably working several minutes ago with a constant output was now broken. For example, a part of my contraption would launch an apple into the air. When I duplicated the launcher and moved the duplicate to another place, it changed the original’s ability to launch the apple into the same place; it was now slightly off, and therefore ruined the entire contraption. This was a main stress point for me.

Other than that, creating things in Unity is pretty straightforward and not difficult at all. It’s an intuitive piece of software.

I also sought to implement scales and such for the implementation of weighted balances. The apple that is launched in the beginning uses a Unity hinge joint to accomplish rotation about an axis. This was not covered in class, but I thought that its flexibility would allow me to make interesting movement.